Religion vs Politics

Today's Guardian website reports on a legal dispute between the Liberal Democrat Party and one of its former candidates, David Campanale. He was selected as the party's parliamentary candidate for Sutton and Cheam in 2021, then deselected in 2023. He took the party to court, claiming discrimination against his religious beliefs – and he won.

The issue now is the quantum of damages he should be awarded. Campanale is claiming around £790,000 for what the Guardian summarises as 'compensation for injury to feelings, aggravated damages, past and future earnings, the loss of an MP’s pension, counselling costs and the “loss of a chance”, or “loss of political capital”.' The party takes a different view. It is offering £14,000 for his injured feelings, and nothing for anything else. The actual award may lie somewhere inbetween. The media organisations Evangelical Focus and Premier Christian News (which may be linked) estimate the likely award at around £250,000.

It's public knowledge that Campanale is an evangelical Anglican, and a pro-life campaigner who opposes both abortion and euthanasia. On both issues he is at odds with the party. The Liberal Democrats support a woman's right to choose and support a free vote on the issue of assisted dying. However, they now accept that he was the victim of discrimination because of what he believed.

This raises two issues for me. First, in relation to the award. Are his injured feelings and his lost political opportunity really worth close to a million pounds? And should he, as a Christian, really be seeking what looks like punitive damages against anyone? Does this achieve anything apart from bringing true religion into disrepute?

Second, how far should political decision-making be subject to the influence of strong religious views of any kind? This works both ways. William Wilberforce was a leading 18th century evangelical Anglican. His religious convictions sustained him in a 20-year campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, culminating in the passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807.

Set against that the opposition of the religious right in the House of Lords to what became the Human Rights Act 1998. This landmark legislation makes it possible for UK citizens to enforce their human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights in our domestic courts rather than having to take a case to Strasbourg. The main policy provision is that all UK public authorities must comply with the ECHR rights in everything they do. The conservative evangelicals in the Lords believed (wrongly) that this would require Church of England schools to employ gay teachers, and Church of England ministers to conduct same-sex marriages. With the support of the Conservative Party and a number of Anglican bishops, they defeated the government on an amendment to exempt religious organisations from this human rights legislation.

I know all this because I was there at the time. As part of a small Home Office team, I worked on the Human Rights Act from start to finish. I wrote the policy papers for Cabinet approval which set out the principles on which the legislation was based. And it fell to me to find a way through the mess that the religious right had made of it. I vividly remember taking Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, through a range of options for responding to the defeat. I managed to persuade him to go with the only option that restored the principle of full compliance with the human rights provisions in a way which was considered politically acceptable.

Returning to David Campanale: his evangelical principles were very strong, even at a much earlier stage in his life. He and I were contemporaries at Oxford. I was at Christ Church and he was at University College. We did not have much personal contact. But my friends at University College told me that he would go up to them at the breakfast table in college and ask them whether they knew Jesus as their personal Saviour. I am not mocking this behaviour – it is a serious question, and we must all face it at some point. I just happen to believe that the best sermons are lived rather than preached.