God-friendly Coalition reflects Thatcher’s vision, says Warsi

Minister for Faith and Communities Sayeeda Warsi said this week that by putting faith back at the “heart of government” the Coalition is following in the ­tradition of Margaret Thatcher.

Former chairman of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi told a conference at the Churchill Archives Centre in the University of Cambridge that “the Coalition is the most pro-faith government in the West” – a claim disputed by Labour’s vice chairman for faith groups, Stephen Timms.

Lady Warsi said previous Conservative governments such as those of Sir Winston Churchill and Baroness Thatcher had considered faith as an essential part of government and Lady Thatcher had regarded “politics as second to Christianity in defining society”.

She added that Churchill and Thatcher would have welcomed the Coalition’s promise to protect the right of town halls to hold prayers and the creation of more faith schools under the Free Schools programme.

“I know that Mrs Thatcher would have approved of devolving power to faith communities. As she once said: ‘I wonder whether the state services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him?’ We see flickers of Churchill’s flame and echoes of Thatcher’s sermons in all we do,” said Lady Warsi. “But this was never inevitable. When we came back into power in 2010, I felt that some of the reverence for religion had disappeared from politics. I found that the last Government didn’t just refuse to ‘do God’ – they didn’t get God either.”

But in response Mr Timms, a practising Christian, said: “Very few people in the Churches will recognise her account. Certainly it is not true to claim that faith is at the heart of policy-making. There is lip service at best.”

He also rejected Lady Warsi’s claim that the Thatcher Government had good relations with faith groups, saying: “Margaret Thatcher’s Government was continuously in conflict with the Churches – perhaps most famously over the ‘Faith in the City’ report, which one of her ministers described as ‘pure Marxist ­theology’. That was the kind of relationship which that Government had with the Churches. By contrast, the last Government’s New Deal programme was a very direct response to the Churches’ report on unemployment and the future of work,” said Mr Timms, adding that the Government is failing to pay attention to the food bank movement.

John Battle, the Catholic former Labour MP who ran the last Government’s interfaith programme, said: “She [Baroness?Warsi] said the last Government didn’t do God – well for 10 years I was working very hard on the interfaith network and did 800 visits, so I must have been a ghost and not alive during those times.”

Mr Battle challenged the claim that the Coalition is the most pro-faith government in the West. “The Muslim groups I meet say it is not their experience. She stated the Government’s position as she sees it, but there was a sense of disconnection.”