If this is hate speech then what future for pluralism?

In June 2019 the Reverend Dr. Bernard Randall delivered a sermon at Trent College, the private boarding school of which he was then chaplain, in which he sought to voice his concerns regarding the college's plans to develop an "LGBT+ inclusive curriculum". Full details of these events can be found here (and elsewhere), but since the sermon appears to have been the catalyst for, amongst other things, the reporting of Dr. Randall by the school to the anti-terrorism unit of Derbyshire Police it seems as worthy a document as any for judging the state of free speech in general and freedom of religion in particular in British education.

For more than thirty years, Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) has been excoriated for its prohibition of  "promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." Regardless of one's views as to what constitutes an authentic marriage (and many opposite sex and ostensibly Christian partnerships would fall short of the desired standard), I doubt that Section 28 did little actively to promote family life and I fear it may well have further contributed to the diminution of the human dignity of those whose manner of living it condemned. Sadly, the same mindset that inspired the authors of Section 28 now appears to inform the views of the present generation of LGBT activists who are disinclined to entertain the possibility of constructive dissent

At a time when the language of activists (liberal and conservative alike) is characterised by a 'take no prisoners' mentality, it is telling that the words of Dr. Randall (is it not interesting, in a world that tends to dismiss traditional religious teaching as the preserve of the uneducated, that the individual at the centre of the controversy is the holder of a PhD and the headmaster of Trent College is not) can be deemed "inflammatory, divisive and harmful".   

"We should not descend into abuse," declares Dr. Randall, "we should respect the beliefs of others, even where we disagree. Above all, we need to treat each other with respect, not personal attacks – that’s what loving your neighbour as yourself means." And further, "Whichever side of this conflict of ideas you come down on, or even if you are unsure of some of it, the most important thing is to remember that loving your neighbour as yourself does not mean agreeing with everything he or she says; it means that when we have these discussions there is no excuse for personal attacks or abusive language."

It can be enlightening to reflect, as I sometimes remark to my students, on the evolution of the understanding of the term "toleration," particularly as it applies to religious communities. In the late 17th Century it was acknowledged that the transformation of the religious landscape effected by the Reformation could not be reversed and those states with religious minorities would have to find some means of accommodating them (there were, of course, exceptions to this principle, notably the French Huguenots either expelled or forcibly converted by the terms of the Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685). However, such religious toleration was far removed from the freedoms accorded Christians in North America after the Revolution. Membership of the state church was usually a requirement for active involvement in the life of the community and for holding civic office, with "Dissenters" excluded from the public square. The story of toleration in Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries is one of the devlopment of a much more inclusive approach to religious minorities in which political constraints were lifted and their communities encouraged actively to contribute to the life of the wider society. Such a welcome carried with it a readiness to recognise that those who dissented from the prevailing orthodoxy had a right to do so without fear or favour.

I reproduce the text of Dr. Randall's sermon below. It seems to me to be as reasoned (and reasonable) expression of the 'minority' position as one could hope to find in this polarized age. "It is perfectly legitimate to think that marriage should only properly be understood as being a lifelong exclusive union of a man and a woman;" writes Dr. Randall, "indeed, that definition is written into English law. You may perfectly properly believe that, as an ideal, sexual activity belongs only within such marriage, and that therefore any other kind is morally problematic. That is the position of all the major faith groups – though note that it doesn’t apply only to same-sex couples. And it is a belief based not only on scripture but on a highly positive view of marriage as the building block of a society where people of all kinds flourish, and on recognising that there are many positive things in life more important than sex, if only we’d let them be. This viewpoint is recognised by many people as extremely liberating. And it’s an ethical position which could also be arrived at independently of any religious text, I think". 

Many may disagree with his views, but pupils at Trent College are entitled not only to hold them but to express them without fear of sanction. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four," insists Winston Smith in George Orwell's 1984. "If that is granted, all else follows." I can't help but wonder if that premise is ever more under threat in the increasingly intolerant West.   

Text of Dr. Randall's sermon, June 21, 2019

 I have a theory about Brexit. It seems to me that people who voted to leave the European Union voted for largely political reasons – to do with democratic self-determination; and people who voted to remain did so for largely economic reasons – to do with prosperity and jobs.

Of course I’m simplifying here, and both sides claim to consider both, but it seems to me that which set of ideas, which ideology, takes priority determines which way many people voted.

And while we can easily discuss facts, and try to find the truth behind factual claims, ideals aren’t true or false in the same way.

And so the problem with the often very heated and unpleasant debate ever since the referendum is that people haven’t managed to cope with there being two competing sets of ideals – two ideologies.

Now when ideologies compete, we should not descend into abuse, we should respect the beliefs of others, even where we disagree. Above all, we need to treat each other with respect, not personal attacks – that’s what loving your neighbour as yourself means.

By all means discuss, have a reasoned debate about beliefs, but while it’s OK to try and persuade each other, no one should be told they must accept an ideology. Love the person, even where you profoundly dislike the ideas. Don’t denigrate a person simply for having opinions and beliefs which you don’t share.

There has been another set of competing ideals in the news recently. You may have heard of the protests outside a Birmingham primary school over the teachings of an LGBT-friendly ‘No Outsiders’ programme.

In a mostly Muslim community, this has been sensitive, because many parents feel that their children are being pushed to accept ideas which run counter to Islamic moral values.

And in our own school community, I have been asked about a similar thing – and the question was put to me in a very particular way – ‘How come we are told we have to accept all this LGBT stuff in a Christian school?’ I thought that was a very intelligent and thoughtful way of asking about the conflict of values, rather than asking which is right, and which is wrong.

So my answer is this: There are some aspects of the Educate and Celebrate programme which are simply factual – there are same-sex attracted people in our society, there are people who experience gender dysphoria, and so on.

There are some areas where the two sets of values overlap – no one should be discriminated against simply for who he or she is: That’s a Christian value, based in loving our neighbours as ourselves.

All these things should be accepted straightforwardly by all of us, and it’s right that equalities law reflects that.

But there are areas where the two sets of ideas are in conflict, and in these areas you do not have to accept the ideas and ideologies of LGBT activists. Indeed, since Trent exists ‘to educate boys and girls according to the Protestant and Evangelical principles of the Church of England’, anyone who tells you that you must accept contrary principles is jeopardizing the school’s charitable status, and therefore it’s very existence.

You should no more be told you have to accept LGBT ideology than you should be told you must be in favour of Brexit, or must be Muslim – to both of which I’m sure most of you would quite rightly object.

I am aware that there will be a good few in our community who will have been struggling, if they feel they are being told that they must accept ideas which run counter to their faith – or indeed non-faith – based reasoning about the world.

So I want to say to everyone, but especially to those who have been troubled, that you are not obliged to accept someone else’s ideology. You are perfectly at liberty to hear ideas out, and then think, ‘No, not for me’.

There are several areas where many or most Christians (and, for that matter, people of other faiths, too), will be in disagreement with LGBT activists, and where you must make up your own mind. So it is perfectly legitimate to think that marriage should only properly be understood as being a lifelong exclusive union of a man and a woman; indeed, that definition is written into English law.

You may perfectly properly believe that, as an ideal, sexual activity belongs only within such marriage, and that therefore any other kind is morally problematic. That is the position of all the major faith groups – though note that it doesn’t apply only to same-sex couples.

And it is a belief based not only on scripture but on a highly positive view of marriage as the building block of a society where people of all kinds flourish, and on recognising that there are many positive things in life more important than sex, if only we’d let them be.

This viewpoint is recognised by many people as extremely liberating. And it’s an ethical position which could also be arrived at independently of any religious text, I think.

In other areas you are entitled to think, if it makes more sense to you, that human beings are indeed male and female, that your sex can’t be changed, that although the two sexes have most things in common, there are some real, biologically based differences between them overall. And if you think that, you would be in accord not only with the tradition of most Christians, and other faiths, but much of the biological and psychological sciences too.

You are entitled, if you wish, to look at some of the claims made about gender identity and think that it is incoherent to say that, for example, gender is quite independent of any biological factor, but that a person’s physiology should be changed to match his or her claimed gender; or incoherent to say that gender identity is both a matter of individual determination and social conditioning at the same time, or incoherent to make claims about being non-binary or gender-fluid by both affirming and denying the gender stereotypes which exist in wider society.

And if these claims, which do seem to be made, are incoherent, then they cannot be more than partially true. Yet truth is important as we try to make decisions about the consequences of these ideas.

And you might reasonably notice that some LGBT activists will happily lie about gender identity being a legally protected characteristic (which it isn’t), and from that observation wonder whether there are other areas where their relationship to truth is looser than might be ideal.

But, by way of contrast, no one has the right to tell you that you must lie about these matters, to say things you sincerely believe to be false – that is the tactic of totalitarianism and dictatorship.

On a more positive note, Christians will want to have a discussion about human identity which focuses on the things we all have in common, rather than increasingly long lists of things which might divide.

You might be concerned that if you take the religious view on these matters you will be attacked and accused of homophobia and the like. But remember that religious belief is just as protected in law as sexual orientation, and no one has the right to discriminate against you or be abusive towards you.

Remember too that ‘phobia’ words have a strict sense of extreme or irrational fear or dislike, like arachnophobia, fear of spiders, or triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number thirteen – well, there’s nothing extreme about sharing your view with the Church of England, established by law, and of the majority of the world’s population who belong to these faiths.

Nor is it irrational to hold these views, since they can be based both on secular reasoning and on scriptures – and if, on other grounds, you are sure that the scriptures reflect the mind of God, then they provide the very best reasons possible for anything.

But ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’ have come to be used in a looser sense to mean often simply, ‘You disagree with me and I’m going to refuse to listen to you, and shame you to shut you down’. In other words, they have sometimes come to be terms of abuse, used in a dictionary-definition, bigoted and bullying way. You can safely ignore these uses, although that takes real moral courage, I know.

And you may think that LGBT rights are different somehow, because no one chooses to belong to the varied groups represented by these ideas. To which I would remind you that equalities law does not recognise that distinction – all equalities are in fact equal.

So, all in all, if you are at ease with ‘all this LGBT stuff’, you’re entitled to keep to those ideas; if you are not comfortable with it, for the various especially religious reasons, you should not feel required to change.

Whichever side of this conflict of ideas you come down on, or even if you are unsure of some of it, the most important thing is to remember that loving your neighbour as yourself does not mean agreeing with everything he or she says; it means that when we have these discussions there is no excuse for personal attacks or abusive language.

We should all respect that people on each side of the debate have deep and strongly held convictions. And because, unlike Brexit, this is not a debate which is subject to a vote, it is an ongoing process, so there should be a shared effort to find out what real truth looks like, and to respect that that effort is made honestly and sincerely by all people, even if not everybody comes up with the same answers for now.

The Red Wall Continues to Crumble?

In 1919 the British Labour Party won control of Durham County Council in the heart of the coal-producing Northeast, the first such victory at that level of local government (directly elected county councils have existed since 1888). Following three years of minority control from 1922 to 1925, Labour recovered full control of the county council, a state of affairs that prevailed until May 6, 2021 when the party lost twenty seats and slumped to 37.7 percent of the popular vote. American readers will doubtless be put in mind of the same West Virginia that backed Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 but gave two-thirds of its votes to Donald Trump in 2020. The fortunes of the white working class and the political parties that once championed their interests seem increasingly to have diverged, economically as well as culturally, even if the political beneficiaries of that shift sometimes seem unlikely inheritors of the populist mantle.

 

	Votes in 2021	Wards contested in 2021	Seats won in 2021	Change in seats 2017-2021
Labour	48,146 (37.7%)	63	53	-20
Conservative	34,621 (27.1%)	62	24	+14
Liberal Democrat	15,442 (12.1%)	39	17	+3
Green	3,418 (2.7%)	17	1	+1
Derwent Independent	4,176 (3.3%)	10	5	-2
Northeast Party	2,198 (1.7%)	6	4	+1
Independent	19,692 (15.4%)	41	22	+3

 

As a local resident (born within sound of cathedral bells half a century ago) it has been fascinating to witness the culmination of a process that began with the region’s sweeping endorsement of Brexit in 2016, continued with the loss of three long-time Labour seats in County Durham, including the Sedgefield constituency of former Prime Minister Tony Blair (like me an alumnus of Durham Cathedral’s Chorister School) in 2019, and now has even deprived Labour of power in its ancestral heartland.   

Members of the county council are elected from sixty-three wards, each of which return between one and three councillors. Electors in two-seat and three-seat wards cast as many votes as there are seats allocated, meaning that the party that secures the most votes may not win all the seats. I have attempted to calculate levels of popular support by combining the vote for all candidates from a particular party and dividing this by the number of seats allocated to that ward. Only the Labour Party ran enough candidates to fill every seat on the council, however, and I was obliged to treat “independent” as a generic term, even though the majority of such candidates ran on their individual merits. The vote totals are at best an approximation.

Arguably the most remarkable feature of the local election was the success of the Conservative Party, who secured almost a fifth of the seats and more than a quarter of the popular vote. This is a region in which the decimation of the mining industry in the Thatcherite Eighties has cast a long shadow and Conservatism has struggled to articulate a vision that can appeal to the Geordie heartlands. “Brexit and Boris” seems – thus far – to have altered the rules of the game, though whether the latter will succeed in creating a “Joseph Chamberlain moment” remains to be seen. The local party ran candidates in every ward except Tow Law (where none of the national parties stood) and won pluralities in thirteen wards. Apart from a solitary win in Chester-le-Street, however, all the Conservative councillors were returned for wards in the three parliamentary constituencies in the south and west (Bishop Auckland, Northwest Durham and Sedgefield) that fell to them in 2019. That they took eleven seats directly from Labour is no small achievement, but also reflects the distinctive character of western Weardale, as compared with the eastern ex-colliery communities of Easington and North Durham. Had the party’s share of seats reflected their share of the vote, there would now be thirty-four Conservatives on the county council rather than twenty-four.   

By contrast, the Liberal Democrats adopted a more targeted strategy, contesting only thirty-nine wards. An absence of candidates was particularly noticeable in Easington, where they left nine of the eleven wards uncontested. Their base remains in the City of Durham (home to the university) and the communities around it, where they hold ten seats (over half their caucus). The two seats lost by Labour in the City of Durham constituency in 2021 actually went to an independent candidate and to a Green, who won the most votes in the town of Brandon and is that party’s only representative on the county council. The Liberal Democrats also took two seats from Labour in the town of Aycliffe and one seat in the old steel town of Consett, where they now hold two of Consett’s three seats.

The third component of the anti-Labour bloc is comprised of independents, either affiliated with minor parties or running on their own merits. There were twenty-nine such councillors elected in 2017 and thirty-one in 2021. Independent candidates topped the poll in ten wards in 2021 and won almost a quarter of the seats on the county council, despite winning only a fifth of the popular vote. Nevertheless, the Independents can plausibly argue that they have shown strength across the county, particularly in Easington and North Durham, where neither Conservatives nor Liberal Democrats have much of a foothold.

Finally, of course, there is the Labour Party itself. By no means a spent force, the party continues to dominate in Easington (fifteen of twenty-one seats) and has a narrow majority in North Durham (twelve out of twenty-two seats). The real damage was inflicted in the west of the county where the Conservatives gained ten seats from Labour. That alone would have left Labour with exactly half the seats on the county council, but further losses to the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Independents drove it to its historic defeat. Of course, this is no guarantee that the former opposition can unite behind a common agenda. It will be much easier for Labour to persuade eleven independents to commit to confidence-and-supply than for Conservatives and Liberal Democrats not only to agree upon a common programme, but to persuade three-quarters of the independent councillors to go along with it. It should still make for some interesting council debates.