Here are the voices of DANIEL KEBEDE, FRAN HEATHCOTE, HOLLY TURNER and LEANNE MOHAMAD explaining why they will be taking part in the People’s Assembly No More Austerity demo next weekend
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Bishops against pawns
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KARL MARX famously said that “religion is the opium of the masses,” distracting working-class people from taking revolutionary action.
Over 150 years later there is a glaring anachronism at the heart of British politics which automatically allows unelected bishops to sit in the House of Lords.
Parliament awards 26 seats in the House of Lords to bishops of the Church of England. These bishops vote on legislation, make interventions and lead prayers at the start of each day’s business.
This is an extremely unusual and anti-democratic set-up, which highlights the absurdity of the second chamber, a refuge for failed MPs, inbred aristocrats and third-rate business owners.
The only two sovereign states in the world to award clerics of the established religion votes in their legislatures are Britain and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is a totalitarian theocracy.
The automatic presence of the bishops in the House of Lords is not just a harmless legacy of a medieval constitution but a present example of discrimination, religious privilege and undemocratic politics. It’s another example of how out of touch Parliament is to working-class people.
The bishops who sit in the House of Lords — known as the “Lords Spiritual” — date back to the 1300s.
In medieval times society was judged to be divided into three estates: the clergy, the nobility and everyone else.
But today the bishops don’t even represent the spread of religious opinion in the country.
Whatever their stated intentions, 26 bishops belonging to the Church of England can hardly provide spiritual insight representing Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Rastafarians and others.
It also adds to the inequality of the Lords with regards to Britain, as this small group also excludes the nations of Scotland (After 1689, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland did not have traditional bishops and did not send them to the Lords) and Wales (the church in Wales was disestablished in 1920).
The presence of the Church of England in the House of Lords entrenches a privileged position for one particular branch of one religion — the Church of England — which is often referred to as “the Tory Party at prayer.”
This cannot be justified in today’s society, which is not only multifaith but increasingly non-religious (the non-religious now comprise 52 per cent of the adult population, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey 2018, while a staggering 88 per cent are non-Anglican).
It is at odds with the aspiration for a more legitimate and representative second chamber and with affirmation of a plural society.
The public overwhelmingly agrees that bishops should not automatically be granted a right to sit in the House of Lords.
A survey conducted by YouGov for the Times found that 62 percent of British adults believe that no religious leaders should have “an automatic right to seats” in Parliament.
Only 8 per cent of people said the bishops should retain their seats while 12 per cent said leaders from other faiths should be added to sit alongside bishops as Lords Spiritual. The remaining 18 per cent said they did not know.
More generally, 65 per cent think that political figures should keep their religious beliefs cordoned off from their decision-making, with just 14 per cent saying the opposite.
The Bishops’ Bench in the House of Lords continues to this day to block progressive legislation and reform, not least in the realm of equality law where the church has used its privileged position to secure exemptions and concessions as well as obstructing equality outside its own constituency, for example, in its opposition to civil partnerships and same-sex marriage.
It even attempted to exempt itself from the Human Rights Act. In the last 11 years bishops have voted with the Tory government 75 per cent of the time.
ICM research in 2010 revealed that three-quarters of the public and 70 per cent of Christians believe it is wrong for bishops to have reserved places in the House of Lords and when Panelbase asked an online sample of 2,016 adult Britons in 2018 whether clerics, priests and clergy should make laws, the overwhelming majority of respondents (78 per cent) disagreed.
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