From the editor’s desk

A battle that needs blunt words

The Government has found itself with a scrap on its hands it clearly never bargained for, as the Catholic Church flexes its political muscles to thwart a plan rightly seen as an attack on the very principle of Catholic schools. The Archbishop of Birmingham, Vincent Nichols, has written to every head teacher pointing out the importance of contacting local MPs to show how widespread is the consternation in the Catholic community at proposals to alter the admissions criteria for pupils in their schools. Once they get the point, most parents will agree that the Government's clumsy attempts to deal with a quite different problem - the claim from some Muslims for a few faith schools of their own - has the potential to undermine the basis of Catholic education altogether.

The Muslim claim to their own schools has already been conceded in principle, but the Government faces strong criticism that, instead of advancing the multicultural integration it wants, it risks setting up state-funded pockets of Muslim separation and isolation, even fundamentalism. That is a reasonable anxiety. The Government's first response was to insist that 25 per cent of places in all new faith schools should go to children from outside the faith community concerned. This half-baked notion - there is manifestly no demand from non-Muslim parents for places in these hypothetical Muslim state schools - is so unworkable that it raises the suspicion that the real intention was to make such schools so unattractive to the Muslim community that they would lose interest in the idea.

But its one gigantic flaw was that it was incompatible with the basis on which more than 2,000 existing Catholic schools had long been operating. They fill their places first with Catholic pupils, then with non-Catholics - although even this sensible provision was suspended in recent memory to prevent Catholic schools "poaching" pupils from the non-denominational schools next door. In fact, on average, the non-Catholic presence in Catholic schools is higher than the Government's 25 per cent. But the priority for Catholics in the schools' admissions policy is all-important, as it sets the tone for all that follows.

The Church of England's pledge to offer 25 per cent of places in its new schools to pupils of other faiths or none, which pre-empted the Government's move, proved unhelpful to the Catholic Church. It is now having to fight this battle without its usual Anglican ally - not alone, but with necessarily less weighty support from Jewish and Muslim interests.

But the tone of the debate about multiculturalism in British society is changing, and even Government ministers are realising the advantage of plain and forthright speaking over euphemistic whispering in connection, say, with the veiling of Muslim women.

The attempt by aggressive secularists to drive religion out of the public square - Catholics, Muslims, all of them - has become overt. They can only be answered in the same currency, a combination of blunt speaking, mass lobbying and political leverage.

It has been said that Labour owes it origins more to Methodism than to Marxism. The moment has come when it needs reminding there is a third M in its history, Cardinal Manning. The "dockers' cardinal", whose thinking on social justice was closely followed in Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, created a tradition of Catholic support for the Labour movement throughout the industrial heartlands of Britain. Many a marginal seat still turns on it. That is what Labour is now risking.