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[/audioplayer]If Ed Miliband wins the next election, he’ll be Britain’s first atheist Prime Minister. It is a sign of how social attitudes have changed that Miliband feels comfortable wearing his atheism on his sleeve. He has not received the kind of criticism that Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock did when they professed that they did not believe in God. Atheism doesn’t seem as dangerously counter-cultural as it did in the 1980s. Nick Clegg is also a self-declared atheist. This leaves David Cameron as the only major party leader who believes in God.
But Cameron has never come across as a faith-based politician. He rather self-deprecatingly borrowed Boris Johnson’s line that his faith is ‘like reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes’. He stressed that he was a typical Church of England Christian — not a George W.
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