Stephen Evans: Right, hello. Good Morning. How are you? Hope you're all well fed - well, suitably
caffeinated for the day ahead. My name is Stephen Evans - I'm the chief executive
of the National Secular society and it's my, my pleasure and my privilege on
behalf of everyone at the NSS to welcome you here today. It's great to see so many
members again but even better to see so many new faces. So, for those of you not
familiar with the work of the NSS, we're an organization that essentially
campaigns for a secular approach to public policy, making a clear separation
between religion and state and equal respect for everyone's human rights - so
no one is either advantaged or disadvantaged on account of their
beliefs. Now we've been challenging religious privilege since 1866 -
founded by a man called Charles Bradlaugh who was a liberal, a radical free thinker,
brilliant lawyer and he was elected as an MP to the Westminster Parliament in
1880. However, because of his well-known atheism he was refused the religious
oath and denied his seat in Parliament. Now he had to go on to contest and win
four subsequent by-elections before finally being allowed to take his seat and
it was his Oath's Act that enabled non-religious MPs to affirm rather than
swear a religious oath and take their rightful place in Parliament. Now since
then, and over the last hundred and fifty or so years, we've been at the forefront
of a number of other social reforms with regard to birth control, reproductive
rights, the liberalisation of Sunday trading laws, the development of the
Equality Act and of course the abolition of the blasphemy law in England and
Wales but, you know, with religious fundamentalism on the rise, I think our
work is as important today as it ever has been and as an organization we
remain absolutely as committed as ever to working for a secular state that's
free and fair for everyone. Now I just wanted to say a quick word
about the theme of today's conference - reclaiming religious freedom - now we
decided on this title for today's conference because it seemed to us that
many of the things we campaign and advocate for are sometimes described or
perceived by some as being an attack on religious freedom and this is kind of
perplexing to us and, and to be honest, really extraordinarily frustrating
because we see secularism as something that underpins the rights and freedoms
of everyone irrespective of what they believe. So perhaps this reaction by some
to our campaigns highlights a serious misunderstanding -
sometimes probably a willful misunderstanding - of the whole concept of
religious freedom and human rights. Now religious freedom belongs to
everyone - the right of individuals to live their, their religious values, to
manifest their religion. It clearly needs to be balanced by other considerations
and competing rights not least the right to freedom from religion and it seems to
us that some people want religious freedom for themselves but without the
fairness and we support freedom and fairness. So today, we're going to try and
unpack this, this tricky but crucial concept of religious freedom and we've
got some of the very best in the business to help guide us through that.
Now before I hand over to Josephine, our vice president who has kindly agreed to host
today's event, I just want to say once more on behalf of all of us at the NSS
it is wonderful to see so many of you here and if you do support the work we
do please do bear in mind that it's all made possible by the support of our
members. So if you're not already a member, please do consider joining us and
together we can put your principles into action. Right. So thank you everyone. I
hope you all enjoy the day and without further ado I'll hand you over to
Josephine to get the ball rolling and introduce our first session.
Thank you.