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Mr. Sayeed: There is a write-in section associated with that particular question on the proposed form, which gives the opportunity to amplify one's reply.
May I make one further point? John Rickman, who was the Clerk to the House of Commons at the end of the 18th century, said that the intimate knowledge of any country must form the rational basis of legislation and diplomacy. Does my hon. Friend agree with that?
Mr. Gray: I do. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his point about the Clerk to the House of Commons at the
end of the 18th century who laid out 12 purposes for the census. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) said the 19th century. However, if he checks, he will find that Mr. Rickman lived at the end of the 18th century. He laid out 12 purposes for the census, and, as my hon. Friend said, the first is that the intimate knowledge of any country must form the basis of legislation. That is the case and for 200 years not knowing people's religious faiths has not prevented us from having the intimate knowledge to form a rational basis for legislation and diplomacy. If my hon. Friend is saying that, under the Government of every political persuasion for the past 200 years, we have been a poor Parliament that does not know a rational basis for legislation and diplomacy, he is incorrect.
Mr. Sayeed: This will be my final intervention on my hon. Friend's speech. The point is that more people with faiths other than Christianity live in this country than did in the past. We are increasingly a multi-faith, multicultural society. Some people might not like that, but it is a fact.
Mr. Gray: My hon. Friend is correct. I, for one, welcome that change in our society in comparatively recent years. That, in itself, is not necessarily an argument for increasing the number of questions on the census in the way that the Bill proposes; nor does it support what my hon. Friend said about the first purpose that the Clerk in the 18th century laid out for the census. Indeed, if, in the 18th century, the purpose of the census was to know about the nation, I do not understand why the fact that we are now a multi-faith society is particularly relevant.
Incidentally, I conform to the 70 per cent. of this nation who remain Christian and I am speaking in a Chamber that opens every day with a Christian form of worship. I suspect and hope that we will remain a largely Christian society.
Mr. Leigh: Much cant has been spoken in the debate and there has been a failure of honesty. The truth is that many Christians are nominal, lazy or will not fill in the form. The Muslim community, commendably from its point of view, is much keener and more vibrant and it is growing. Its members will fill out the form. Rightly, they are being pressed to do that by the Muslim community so that it can extend its influence in certain communities.
Mr. Gray: My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I shall come to it shortly.
My first point was that the statistical information that is collected is likely to be inaccurate. I have touched on two ways in which I think that it will be inaccurate, but there are many others that we could discuss. For example, there is an important omission in that it lumps all so-called Christians together and lists other faiths individually. Statistically, that is nonsense and I very much hope that, in Committee, the Government will consider changing that provision. It might be interesting to have information on denominations in the Christian faith around the nation. However, the census is likely to provide statistically unsatisfactory information.
Mr. Peter Bradley: The hon. Gentleman said that he was one of the 70 per cent. of the people of this country who are Christian. From what does he derive that information if it was not census or quasi-census material?
Mr. Gray: I was quoting my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Mr. Ottaway) who provided those figures. They may not be correct, and the information is anecdotal. It is important that the information should remain anecdotal, because there is no need for us in the Chamber to be able to say that 23,748,637 people are Christian and that 2 million are Muslim. There is no need for us to have that information; it is anecdotal. The Church of England does not know the figures for its membership, although the Church of Scotland has slightly better information on its membership because one has to sign up to become a member of that Church. However, many faiths do not know themselves how many members they have, and they do not have to know that. However, the Bill will introduce a new provision that will require the Government to know with precision and down to the last person how many people are members of each religion.
I said that 70 per cent. of the people of this country are Christian. That information is anecdotal and the figure may well be incorrect. The figure may be only 50 or 60 per cent., but that does not matter. The quality of people's faith is what matters, not the number of people who hold it. It is not about quantity, but about quality.
Mr. Fabricant: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Gray: I am trying to make a little progress, so I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not give way now.
The statistical information that the question will produce is likely to be extremely inaccurate, anecdotal and, therefore, not particularly useful even to people on the left wing who love statistics. It does not surprise me that the statistical arguments for the question come from Labour Members, who love to have figures and to know the nitty-gritty details of what people do. Even to them, the statistics are likely to seem rather inaccurate. Certainly Christians, such as myself and others who consider what has been said during the debate, can make sure that the statistics are inaccurate by, in my case, putting myself down as nothing or as a Muslim or a Sikh, simply to undermine the value of the information.
Let us suppose for one second that, in Committee, the questionnaire or another part of the Bill is changed in such a way that the information would be 100 per cent. valid, although I cannot imagine how that would be done. Let us suppose, however, that after the 2001 census we know precisely how many people are Sikh, how many are Muslim, how many are members of the Wee Frees and how many are Roman Catholic. Now we move on to the second question, which is much more important: why should the state know that and what use will it make of the information?
The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who cares so much about religion in Slough that she is no longer in her place, made the point that Sikhs in Slough might be arrested unreasonably for carrying the ceremonial weapon that is required by their religion. I would hope that the Slough police are intelligent enough not to make such arrests, and if they are not, no amount of statistical production will make them more intelligent.
Moreover, as a Scot, I was wearing my kilt and skean-dhu in the Tate gallery and was questioned by a policeman about the knife down my sock, so I explained
it sensibly to him. Finding out how many Sikhs there are to avoid their being arrested because of their ceremonial sword is about as sensible as finding out how many Scotsmen wearing kilts there are in London who might be arrested for wearing their skean-dhu. There is no sense in it at all. There is certainly no sense in a huge Government exercise such as this one to get round that particular difficulty concerning Sikhs.My next point brings us to what some people believe to be the central purpose of finding out differences in religion, and that would be to allow the Government to allocate resources on the basis not of ethnicity, as they do at the moment, but of religion. The standard spending assessment has an ethnicity section, although I am not sure why. If a local authority has a high proportion of ethnic minorities, it will receive more money than those authorities that do not. That is a long-established principle of the division of the annual local government settlement. We have great debates about how important ethnicity is, and whether it is important if a local authority has more black or more Asians. All that is discussed in the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions every year when it is divvying up the SSA.
I have heard nobody in this debate suggest that the ethnicity section of the SSA may be changed because of religion. Nobody is saying that if many Asians turn out to be Christians rather than Muslims, the SSA should be changed to take account of their religion. Anyone who suggested that would be wrong. I can think of no reason at all for saying that someone's religious faith should lead to a change in the Government's allocation of resources.
Education has been mentioned, and the provision of education with special denominational interests may be a reason for acquiring that detailed information. However, Church of England and Roman Catholic schools make up by far the largest category of such education, and denomination is the one piece of information that the census would not provide. It would not tell us how many Roman Catholics, members of the Church of Scotland or Methodists there were, so it would not help.
My school, Glasgow high school, had a good ethnic mix, and we made provision for kosher lunches and the rabbi came in to take special services while my father, who was a minister, took the services on behalf of the Church of Scotland. That happened not because we knew the general statistics but because the pupils at my school were roughly 50 per cent. Jewish and 50 per cent. Church of Scotland, and it was a perfectly sensible thing to do.
Glasgow corporation played a large part in respect of the costs of education and took account of those percentages in providing school dinners. I am glad that it did, and a number of my Jewish friends greatly enjoyed that particularly outstanding feature of Glasgow high school. However, knowing how many Jewish people there were in Glasgow would not have affected the way in which kosher lunches were provided at Glasgow high school. That knowledge would not have provided added useful information to Glasgow corporation, which, by counting heads, knew perfectly well how to work out the provision of kosher lunches at my school.
So far, no Member has come up with a convincing reason why the delivery of Government services or public services in general would be improved by the Government having such information. In the absence of that positive upside, we must return to what I said at the beginning of
these brief remarks: if the Government do not need to know, why should they know? I therefore challenge the Minister. He should not give us a lot of stuff about how many people from ethnic minorities we now have in this country, how many different religions we have, how interesting it would be to have such information or how proud people are to be members of a particular minority religion. We do not need to know any of that. We need to know only one thing: why should the Government have information, except when they need it? If they need this information, we need to know precisely why they need it and precisely by what means they would change the delivery of Government services as a result of having it.Will the SSA system be changed? Will education provision be changed? Will the policing services be changed? How will the Government take account of the information? Which Government services will they change as a result of having it? That is question No. 1. Question No. 2, of course--[Interruption.] It is interesting that the Government Whip, the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr. Bradley), finds that very funny. These are serious matters, although he finds it difficult to take them seriously. Perhaps that says more about him than about the debate. Perhaps he would like to intervene. I will happily give way, but I fear that he may not get to his feet.
The intellectual content of the debate may be above the hon. Gentleman. Perhaps his son, who attends Manchester grammar school, will get to know more about these matters. I hope that Manchester grammar school--one of the finest private schools in England, to which he has chosen to send his son--will take account of the different religions of its pupils. I also hope that he will think twice about laughing during future debates. He looks a little cross.
There are two fundamental problems: what use the Government will make of the information and the fact that it will be dodgy in the first place. The Minister must answer those questions precisely and specifically. What will the Government do with those statistics?
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