Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate.
Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate. Proposing the motion ‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools’, the Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin said that the child of a friend had been denounced as ‘satanic’ at his Christian school for wearing Ninja-branded pyjamas. Religious schools, she went on, led to ghettoisation and contempt for the host culture. Three Islamic schools in the UK require girls to wear the full veil, and they boast that they ‘oppose the lifestyle of the West’.
Cristina Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald, trumpeted the success of faith schools. A newspaper survey confirmed that two thirds of top primaries had a strong religious element. She begged her opponents to ‘spend more time fixing your schools, not wrecking ours’.
Dr Jonathan Romain, a progressive rabbi from the Maidenhead synagogue, accused faith schools of ‘pulling Jews and Christians out of the rest of society’.
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