By Maggie Hall
New schools legislation
On the BBC Radio Four programme Sunday on 12th January (27:24), Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of Humanists UK, and Rabbi Jonathan Romain, of Maidenhead Synagogue, discussed the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which had its second reading in the House of Commons on 10th January. Jonathan focussed on the problems of illegal (usually faith) schools and false claims of home schooling, which is not sufficiently regulated to ensure the health, safety and proper education of pupils and is known to result in harsh regimes of corporal punishment, unsafe premises and children leaving the schools with no good quality education or qualifications.
Andrew agreed with Jonathan on illegal schools and said that he was in favour of the broad proposals of the Bill, but was concerned about the shift towards the possible ending of the 50 per cent cap on the number of pupils selected on religious grounds for faith schools. This is due to the fact that currently there is a requirement that all new schools must be academies, which must apply the 50 per cent cap, and the new Bill proposes to end this requirement. He said that he believed that this is an oversight in the Bill and hoped that Parliamentarians will work to close this loophole. Jonathan agreed and said that the absence of a cap had been shown to result in a lack of diversity and social cohesion and that the loophole in the proposed Bill should be closed.
Grooming gangs and Charlie Hebdo
Other interesting topics discussed elsewhere in the programme included the recent media furore involving Elon Musk’s comments about so-called “grooming gangs” (13:45) and the tenth anniversary of the attack on the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (1:01), a topic also briefly mentioned during a news review later on in the day on BBC One TV’s Sunday Morning Live programme (25:44).
Divine Comedy
BBC Radio Four’s Beyond Belief programme on 7th January explored why religion is such rich territory for comedy. Faith-based comedy is growing in popularity. Why is religion such a good source for jokes? Is God funny? And, is there anywhere with religion that you just don’t go?
Dillon Mapletoft, the writer and creator of hit (Channel Four TV) comedy Everyone Else Burns, explains his fundamentalist Christian upbringing and the influence it had on him writing the coming-of-age sitcom about a Manchester family who are part of a puritanical Christian sect and doomsday cult.
Giles Fraser is joined by Shazia Mirza, comedian and part of a female only Halal comedy tour, Shanny Luft, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and Ashley Blaker, a Jewish comedian and writer once described as “the UK’s only Orthodox comedian” (from the BBC Sounds website).
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