Warsi - what is she good for?

An interesting piece in the Telegraph from Tory chairman Baroness Warsi recently which has prompted some fairly vociferous comment from the British Humanist Association. It's here if you particularly care. What bothers me most about this is not her florid and I'm sure quite admirable sentiments on inter-faith communication. No worries there. Remembering though that she is a Cabinet minister, and while in opposition held the post of Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action, she should really know better than to exclude people without faith quite so completely. A cohesive society should surely, after all, include everybody.

Thing is, she does know better, but she's got form in this area. She's not forgetting us, she's basically leaving us out deliberately because we're apparently not worthy of consideration. Consider her comments at the Conservative conference in 2009 when she called secular people 'intolerant and illiberal', or her speech to Church of England bishops in Oxford in 2010, in which she claimed that a “vocabulary of secularist intolerance” exists. She also said that, “those who are religiously observant are more likely to volunteer and give than their non-believing or non-practicing counterparts.” This is, of course, bunkum, by why let an irritating thing like the facts get in the way of telling your audience what they want to hear?

A person in such a position of authority, and part of an elected government, albeit one elected by a minority, should not be so quick to not only alienate but actively dismiss a significant percentage of the electorate. She would certainly do well to remember that the Big Society her party's PM is so keen on looks quite a lot smaller if you strip people out of it who have no religion. She's evidently only worrying about what religious people of one stripe are saying to those of another. Though she may perhaps wish it were otherwise, we atheists are still at least allowed to vote. I hope she thinks about that before she demeans us again so readily in future.