Mick Hartley

Nick Cohen on religion and education:

For a Prime Minister whose place in history will be determined by his reaction to 11 September, Tony Blair has a blind spot about religion. He doesn’t understand its power to divide and incite and assumes that all true practitioners are like the Anglo-Catholic priests of middle-class London: upright men who do good works and wish no one ill.

The National Secular Society learned with despair but no surprise that the government could not be deterred in pressing ahead with faith schools by something as trivial as attacks on London by religious fanatics. […]

Now the government wants to reinforce separation with Muslim schools for brown pupils and Christian schools for white ones.

David Trimble told John Humphrys recently that the greatest blunder after partition was to allow Catholic and Protestant schools to survive. He might have added that the mainland is repeating Ulster’s murderous mistake.