I'm very honored to have been invited to say a few words to you today and also to
come to this meal we had some very interesting discussions over lunch am
mainly about education and about the requirement for state schools and indeed
free schools and other schools within the maintained sector to have an active
common worship each day and whether there was any chance of that perhaps not
being the case in future we were also told I was i I didn't realize this I
mean this week obviously we had the sad death of Tony Benn his funeral a couple
of days ago and he was my successor in my constituency represented press
release and I'm Brist he represented Bristol southeast and Bristol East and
Keith um one of the things obviously we were discussing with when we were
talking about Tony Ben's legacy was his attempt to get the law change that he
could renounce his hereditary peerage but I hadn't realized that Charles Brad
law from the NSS had fought an equally important battle when he was first
elected i think was back in the 1880s he said and Tony Benn of course had to
fight a couple of by-elections before he was allowed to stand having and
renounces his reg iteri peerage but I chose I think fought about for
by-elections because he refused to swear thee well he didn't quite refused to
swear the oath when he was elected to Parliament but they he was told that
because he was so obviously renowned as an atheist he wasn't a now too so they
had this sort ridiculous fast where he couldn't be sworn in so he had to stand
down a fighter by-election got reelected again couldn't be sworn in etc etc and
eventually I think after about four by-elections he was allowed to affirm
the oath which i think is something I'm glad there's gonna be efforts to mark
that in Parliament because it's a little bit of our history that seems to have
been forgotten um but in terms of as Jeffrey said I mean today is incredibly
timely because of the legalization of equal marriage in the fact the first
marriages took place this morning and I sort of felt as I was walking through
soho there was a little bit of buzz in the ends and certainly Twitter was
absolutely full of people saying you know as soon as it turned midnight and
the first marriages started happen it's absolutely full of people saying you
know what a moment occasion this was and if anything
crystallized that conflict between religious belief and other human rights
it was the same sex marriage debate over the past year or so that you saw the
likes of Norman Tebbit and it's actually his birthday today so happy birthday
Norman I hope he's been invited to some wedding parties to celebrate but you
know you saw the likes of him saying this is going to force me to marry my
son or something bizarre like that and I sort witted today and Ed Balls was being
accused by someone had been a sleazy atheist and my colleague Johnny Reynolds
was being told that he had sold Britain to Satan and there was somebody else
tweeted that Britain has now been marched towards at the edge of a cliff
of Marxist depravity and somebody else said we've now bent it's the end of this
as a Christian country we've now been taken over by Satanists and blasphemous
so obviously the battle hasn't been totally some people might think that's
quite good thing but I mean so obviously we haven't totally won the battle and I
think the debates did show the extent to which some people's hearts and minds
need to be won over and as key said I'm a shadow foreign minister with in my
portfolio I've got the shadow Human Rights brief and that means that I have
a lot of contact with people from other countries where they're fighting the
battles that we fought for many decades and in fact in in some countries such as
Uganda they're actually going backward so dr. Frank Mugisha is a very very
brave campaigner for gay rights in Uganda he says he's one of only about
ten very openly out people there and he took over as a director of the sexual
minorities of Uganda organization his predecessor david kato was murdered
because a local paper paper had outed him he won a court case because they
were basic saying go and lynch him and he won the court case against them got
damages but was still murdered by homophobes and frank has taken over his
mantel is incredibly brave um Russia as well you sort of see with the the crack
died and people saw the dispatches programme hunted which is about packs
that actually go out and chase gay people on the streets and and torture
them and there's been some couple of murders there as well and what's very
interesting in luxury so that I think Putin I don't think
Putin is a religious man in himself but I think he has used that religious
conservatism and the power of the Orthodox Church in Russia to serve his
own ends and to sort of boost his his own popularity I went out to Russia for
the trial of Pussy Riot and that was a classic case you know they they were
sent to penal colonies on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious
hatred but it was a trumped-up charge because they actually just dared to
stand up to Putin challenged his machismo challenged his authoritarian
ISM and express a different view so religious there has been used as a tool
of state suppression even though I wouldn't say the Putin himself is doing
it through motivated by his own personal faith so there's a huge amount that that
needs to be done in winning those arguments one of the things that's
particularly worrying is the extent to which American influence is creeping
into Africa and I've heard American evangelists say that they've lost the
battle in America it's a godless country but let's go to Africa and when you talk
to people like the gandan so I was at Commonwealth conference last summer and
had to speak about the Commonwealth charter which is meant to be about
everybody signing up to the same values the same shared human rights and when
you got to the bit about gay rights obviously there was then this sort of
liquor but you know this doesn't fit with our religious beliefs and that same
old debate but one of the things that were said to me is you bought religion
to our country we were okay with you know we were told by you that
homosexuality was wrong and now you're coming back like the colonial masters
and telling us that actually we've got to drop that bit of the Bible and just
listen to the bits of the Bible that you want us to believe in and it's and
you've got American evangelists going insane oh no stick to what it says in
the Bible so there's there's a really interesting debates we had but quite
frightening in terms of the impact it's having on people's lives the dangerous
situations is putting people in because of that increased really just focus in
those countries I think I probably said enough and we ought to get on to the
awards but i think this the battle for as we saw during the same-sex marriage
debate there was the debate was very much about people's freedom to be
religious and not about the freedom to not have any religious belief at all and
this was something we were talking about oh
for lunch and I think we need to come up with a sort of firmer agenda as to what
we mean by a secular society because I think at the moment it's the dialogue is
so much about respecting faiths so whenever there's community consultation
its faith groups that brought in to make sure that you're not offending the
position or offending the seats you're not offend in the Jewish community it's
very rare for anyone who's of no faith at all to be brought in into that
dialogue as an MP i frequently have to go to mosques i go to temples I go to a
lot of religious church services and I go along with it because I'm very polite
so I cover my head if I'm in a good warrior and the religious books are
brought out because that's what you do to respect their religion but at the
same time as an MP if I was to say actually I'm not comfortable with in
going along to something that's a religious service I probably totally
pilloried for not showing respect to them but you could argue well where's
the respect for the fact that I don't yeah I feel a bit of a fraud taking part
in some of those ceremonies and i would actually think that sometimes that some
respect should be given to my atheism or just to my desire not to play along with
things i don't believe in and i think a JK
and I don't think education is absolutely key and as we were saying
over lunch that at the very least let kids just be kids and not have religion
forced upon them let them make up their own mind and not have this like to come
and worship let them develop themselves and not have religion getting in the way
of things like sex and relationship education all those sort of things that
are so important to teaching kids so anyway I'm sure spoken for enough
already so over to the prizes