Moral authority

Baroness Warnock, atheist pillar of the liberal establishment, on the need for Christianity in schools and the folly of human rights

Baroness Warnock has had many battles with religion over the course of her long and distinguished career. In 1984, when the Warnock Report recommended allowing in vitro fertilisation and research on embryos, she was attacked by the chief rabbi, Immanuel Jacobowitz. The Times headline, she recalls when we meet at the Royal Society of Arts, was ‘Warnock destroys morality’. ‘I rather treasured that.’ The next year, Enoch Powell, who expressed ‘revulsion and repugnance’ at the report, introduced the Unborn Children (Protection) Bill into parliament to counteract it. I tell Mary Warnock that I remember Roman Catholic priests urging their congregations to write to their MPs in support of the bill. She nods enthusiastically — 86 and still up for a fight.

The title of her new book is Dishonest to God: On Keeping Religion Out of Politics, so you might reasonably expect something ‘pugnacious’ (a word she wishes was not on the dust-jacket blurb). But though she does criticise the Pope — ‘It’s terrifying to have any state, even one as small as the Vatican, governed by religion’ — those who see Warnock as a champion of atheism may be surprised to discover how pro-Christian she is.

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‘I don’t think we ought to forget that the official religion of this country is Christianity,’ she says. ‘It’s going against a cohesive tradition if all religious festivals, whether they’re Hindu or Muslim or whatever they are, are given equal precedence in primary schools. This is really a matter of tradition and culture, and there’s no doubt that ours is fundamentally Christian.

‘So I think Christianity ought to have precedence, actually. Obviously the other faiths are more than entitled to conduct funerals and so on according to their own traditions.