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There's been lots of discussion about whether Lib Dems should support state funded schooling via institutions that have a religious guiding philosophy, let's put it that way, since Nick Clegg, self-proclaimed atheist, seemed to offer such schooling support recently (see the links at the bottom for the discussion elsewhere).

Some caveats here. I was brought up in quite a religious family. All my grandparents were "Gospel Hall Brethren"; a small Scottish anti-clerical sect. My family were frequently ex-patriates in Africa. The first school I really remember was in Nairobi. I don't remember it being "faith based" but looking at its website now I see it was scarily so - they even quote "spare the rod and spoil the child" and so on! Though I don't remember having chapel or any other kind of worship.

When we returned to the UK I got a scholarship to a Woodard prep school and thence to a Woodard public school. Nathaniel Woodard was a nineteenth century Church of England clergyman who established a network of relatively low cost boarding schools aimed at educating the sons (and daughters to his credit) of other clergy and professional middle classes. They both had a strong religious tradition. I was in the choir at both. Listen to Carols from Kings and I've done every treble and tenor solo on the entire disc (and I was better at it!).

About the time of my O levels I eschewed religion and became an atheist. Though missing chapel was not an option, it was just one of those social occasions that public schools like to go in for. And I never stopped enjoying the music and ceremony. Ten years and a long story later, I became a Catholic, and nearly joined the religious community at a well known top Catholic public school and monastery. Whilst what some of you may call "indoctrination" was more obvious there - my Anglican school had one priest, this one had nearly a hundred at its disposal - in fact it tended to take a discursive tone. I remain a Catholic, though their recent admissions policy has hardened my attitude towards them a little - still, I suppose that's what forgiveness is all about!

Anyway, back to the point. Nearly all the schooling available in this country before the 20th century was established by religious charities and with a religious ethos. We cannot just write it all off completely. But when we say "religious ethos" we're not talking Madrassas here. And I actually think that you can't really be a "good atheist" unless you've first heard what it is you're objecting to!

However there's one point about the current arrangements I feel I need to defend. People have been saying that one answer is to ensure that even faith schools must have an open admissions policy within their catchment. The catch, if you pardon the pun, is that these institutions do not really have a catchment area in the same sense as other state schools. The churches put in their relatively small amount of funding in order to provide a facility for all their members in a given area.

For example, in Oxford we used to have a joint Anglican-Catholic school. Upon reorganization a few years ago that was closed and the Catholics decided that since there wasn't an alternative in the whole of Oxfordshire they would go it alone. But their calculation of what they could put in is based on serving the needs of all the Catholics in Oxfordshire, or this part of the Archdiocese at least. I don't think you can have it both ways - you cannot insist on them taking all comers locally and serve the needs of all their adherents in a bigger area.

What will be quite interesting is next year the Anglicans, who decided that they could not justify another school on their own in Oxford, will become the lead partners in a new "academy" in the city - replacing a supposedly "failing" secular state school. They have vowed that no faith based selection will be permitted, which begs the question why they want to be the lead partner. But whatever their reasons, they will, like other schools they sponsor, have the ability to appoint people to the governing body. In fact, unlike their existing non-academy schools, they will have more autonomy, and yet it will not be a "faith based school" in the sense others are talking about.

Still. Of course for me the answer is easy. If the state did not actually deliver education using our money, it wouldn't be a problem, would it? No doubt there would again be some religious charities offering low cost or free education (though nothing like there once was owing to the relative impoverishment of the churches since the 19th century) but also people would have a greater choice of education for their children and not be reliant on whatever happened to be there provided by the state. What we need to do is not to provide education itself, but to ensure that people have the financial wherewithal to make those choices.

Anyway, I think the point is that I don't think it's done me any harm. In fact it may have made it easier for me to understand what I was doing when avowing myself an atheist to have a grounding in what I was deciding not to believe in. Chapel services were of course an overt sign of that religiosity, but were in fact social occasions when more fun was had seeing how much you could get away with in terms of whispering, mangling hymns and generally messing about. And if education was a genuine choice and we were not coerced into paying for others' faiths to have a special privilege at public expense, why worry too much?

...but will the politicians listen? Somehow, I doubt it!

Since I wrote my piece on gangs and drugs on Saturday I've seen a steady trickle of hits from Google searches about Rhys Jones and I've kept an eye on the search terms and found I was pretty well alone in voicing the opinion that drugs policy plays the biggest part in the gang gun deaths that stalk some of our estates. So it is with some relief that I find Johann Hari is another voice of sanity in today's Independent:

Johann Hari: Tragic victims of a self-defeating policy:

This is the story of two victims of a war that cannot be won and should not be fought. You have heard of the first: Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old in Liverpool who was shot in the neck as he played on his bike. You have not heard of the second: Andres Sauzo, a 24-year-old Mexican man who had his arms, legs and head chain-sawed from his body, and was found rotting in five bin bags scattered across his home town of Zihyatanejo. They are casualties - either direct or indirect - in a war that kills tens of thousands of people a year, and could end tomorrow, if we chose to.

Rhys and Andres were killed because of a political decision by the US government to wage a global "war on drugs", and demand other governments fall into line. When you criminalise a massive and growing industry – some 5 per cent of the world's entire economic activity – it does not go away. It is handed to armed criminal gangs, who flood the streets with guns to secure a slice of the riches.

Aside from also citing Milton Friedman, he goes on rightly to criticize the British political reaction to the events of the past week. I hope some of them are listening, and can hear over the noise of their knees jerking and their bandwagons' creaking...

The scattered proposals tossed out this week to deal with drug gangs are elaborate evasions of the real issue. Banning gang videos on YouTube is barely even a sticking plaster, while the Cameroonian idea that gangs are the rancid afterbirth squeezed out by single parents simply doesn't match with the facts. Denmark has the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe – but it has virtually no gangs, except among recent immigrant communities, who overwhelmingly consist of stable two-parent families.

No: if we want to stop gang culture, we need to take back the industry that makes gangs rich, and give it once again to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses. Legalizing drugs rips the spine out of gangs. Of course they will try to move into other industries – protection rackets, cigarette smuggling and so on – but these have far lower profit margins. In a legalised economy, the gangs would no longer be the richest kids on the estate, and could barely afford firepower, so the core of their glamour would melt away.

We should be outraged. In my opinion our governments, acting in our name, are knowingly complicit in the suffering and the deaths that all this causes, for little benefit and certainly with no liberal philosophical justification. We should be demanding action now, not only to save future Rhys Joneses, but to save what is estimated at £18bn a year in domestic policing and criminal justice costs alone.

The BBC reports that in the US an ex-defence adviser attacks Bush:

[Richard] Perle says in hindsight he would not have backed invasion

It seems to me that this was one of those neo-cons specially brought in to sell the war against all the evidence. Three days before elections too! That's gratitude for you.

Just 21% of Tory MPs put the environment as their top priority, compared with 75% of Lib Dem MPs and a mere 40% of Labour MPs, says a survey for House magazine highlighted by ConservativeHome.

So what is the Tory top priority? 81% said international security, 38% financial stability and 38% NHS privatisation reform. These are all of course valid political concerns, but putting them in that order proves a remarkable lack of understanding about the threats and opportunities environmental politics throws at us.

It seems to me that the environment, climate change, natural resource availability and consumption and so on, well, these are the major threats to international security facing us this century. And, whilst I would contend that most of our Lib Dem MPs have so far shown little understanding of this, things like the "green tax switch" could be a massive force for economic stability and equity, not just means to an environmental end.

Neither MI5 nor the Royal Navy can control the weather, or help ensure we don't have hundreds of millions of the world's coastal have-nots displaced and looking for a culprit amongst the haves of the world to blame for their plight. The City of London cannot keep us warm when Russia turns off the gas taps, and especially if it's under seven meters of water!

ConservativeHome concludes by suggesting that the new candidates selected for seats under Cameron's leadership will be more attuned to Cameron's priorities. Maybe, but who is selecting them? What priorities do they have? Is not the party membership likely to reflect those they already have representing them? They won't all be selecting flip-flop wearing trustafarian environmentalist milionnaires.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, Dave the chameleon, tories, environmental politics

The consultation on housing in the county was a sham, as the whole process of local, strategic and regional planning for housing has been right the way through.

Good alternative ideas have been unwelcome for two years now! The option to put thousands of homes on the edge of the city is based on seriously flawed interpretations of the City Council’s own research. The others are an unacceptable, usually undemocratic imposition on smaller towns.

What the city council’s Labour group is proposing is in fact an overall increase in Oxford’s population of a nearly a fifth. Because the only way they can see of providing affordable housing is to allow lots of private market development.

What we need is a mechanism for sustainable use and reuse of what we already have – making the market match the need. Most people in the city’s housing needs survey are already based in the city – we just have severe problems affording what they are in. The absolute shortage of housing is only around a quarter of what the city’s planners have extrapolated from their research as a result.

We can expect more villages to become havens for the wealthy and their public services like schools, local shops and buses to wither and die. And acres of soulless developer boxes spreading out into South Oxfordshire no doubt pretending to be “communities”.