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.