Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Eric Pickles ‘does God’, but does the government really agree?

Personally, I don’t wear a cross, on the basis that I’m not much of an advertisement for Christianity and I’d risk diminishing the brand. But for Eric Pickles, Communities Secretary, and Nadia Eweida, the former British Airways employee who has just won her appeal about cross-wearing at work at the European Court of Human Rights, it’s a basic freedom.

It’s hard to gainsay the judges’ view that manifesting your faith is a ‘fundamental right’. Any organisation that doesn’t have a problem about Muslim women wearing scarves and Sikh men wearing turbans but which gets uppity about a small cross, really does have a problem with consistency. As Pickles says, the symbol should be ‘discreet’, and as he didn’t say but the judges did, it shouldn’t pose a health and safety issue, which is presumably why they threw out a Christian nurse’s bid similarly to wear a cross at work, but otherwise it’s a no-brainer.

But what a useful man Pickles is. At the same time as the government lawyers were fighting at taxpayers’ expense to oppose Eweida’s appeal, he was preparing to sound off to British Future and Policy Exchange about how the Government does ‘do God’. Traditional freedoms, he maintains, are under threat from the ‘intolerance of aggressive secularism’. Fine, except that some of that intolerance is either sanctioned by government or promoted by it. I’ll get onto that later.

But he’s a sort of lightning conductor, is Pickles. If you’re a Tory voter who feels that the relationship between Westminster and Brussels is lopsided, why, the Communities Secretary feels just the same. If you’re worried about the impact of EU expansion on immigration and housing, well, Pickles is there too. From dustbin collections to saying prayers in council meetings, Pickles can be relied on to express the concern of normal voters, even while the government he’s part of goes on just as it did before.

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