Reform councillor David Fitzgerald is a member of his local authority’s standing advisory council on religious education (SACRE).
He raised the subject of religious education apparently apropos of nothing, in a debate that was supposed to be about DBS safeguarding checks.
He’s much more concerned about Religious Education than background checks on people who want to work with children apparently. With the exception of if the RE lesson is exclusively about Christianity, in which case, all good.
On any “religious education that is not Christian“:
I am totally against it. We are a Christian country and have been for centuries, and we must remain so.
My concern is these children could be brainwashed into other things. I’m concerned about the education in religion for my grandchildren in this Northumberland county of ours.
Aside from the fact that far from every 11-year old in Britain is a devoted Christian in the first place, it seems he’s another one of these curiously scared, unpatriotic, freedom-hating men that believes that British culture and/or the religion of Christianity is so weak and feeble that if a child merely hears about the existence of other religions in other places they will be rendered “unchristian” or otherwise brainwashed – contrary to all available evidence.
In the mean time it seems possible that Mr Fitzgerald may join the long list of Reform resignations or sackings. Four MPs in the surrounding area have written to the council asking that he be removed from SACRE due to some posts he made on social media.
I do not know the nature of the posts, although perhaps one can get a clue from a statement from David Smith, one of the MPs concerned who said that:
Sharing statements like this on social media is taking us away from decent conversations about rebuilding solidarity in our communities and stirring up a kind of knee-jerk hatred that causes real harm.