Kin

Fresh off the back of Robert Jenrick's racist remarks yesterday, failing Internet TV channel, Talk, is now happily promoting Christian Nationalism. Cambridge Analytica's star pupil, Alex Phillips, says we should only have Christian schools and that we are a Christian country. Is she right? Alex is ignoring the fact that those declaring as Christians have been decreasing for years and is now less than 50% of the country as a whole. In fact, the last records of the UK population recording over 50% as a Christian nation was in 2011, when the Census showed it at 59.5%. Alex's assertion that she'd like to remove all schools that are not Christian, would immediately disenfranchise, nearly three quarters of the country's population. There are roughly 8,368 schools that identify as Christian in the UK, and 32,149 schools overall. So that makes Christian faith schools about 26% of the total number. What does Alex suggest we do with the other 74% of all schools? She's just demolished 23,781 schools in this little thought experiment. That's, very roughly, around 7,607,395 pupils suddenly without a school. And only 3,026,090 pupils who meet Alex's rigorous new standards for education in the UK. I want to head something off at the pass before it gets going — there will inevitably be comments beneath this post that assert the UK is being 'taken over' by Islam or other such nonsense. Pipe down! The data does not bear that out. Approx figures for UK faith schools are as follows: Total Schools — 32,149 Christian — 8,368 Judaism — 46 Islam — 34 Sikhism — 13 Hinduism — 7 So you can see from those numbers that Muslim schooling is even below Jewish faith schools, despite having a far larger overall population I hope that stops some of the vitriol, but I recognise that it probably won't. This was not really meant to be a data takedown, but it's ended up that way. You can see my point, though. Christian Nationalism is noisy, it's imported from the US. But it won't ever make a dent in the singularly non-religious UK. No matter how hard Turning Point push with their mouthpieces like Phillips, Nic Tenconi etc. we are not buying what they're selling. Britain is just not the same as the US, so their business models fail and leave us looking at people like Alex Phillips with a sense of pity, rather than wonder. The UK is a beautifully diverse place. Let's keep it that way and don't be persuaded by these snake oil salesfolk that we are still in Medieval, sacred England.