News

Advice UK, a charitable umbrella group supporting community organisations that give free advice to members of the public, has parted company with one of its members after it discovered it offered prayers along with debt advice. Read More »

Trafford Council in Manchester has decided to stick to its plans to remove transport subsidies for pupils whose parents choose to send them to religious schools, despite threats of legal action from the local Catholic Church. Read More »

Amendments to the Education Bill initiated by the NSS were debated this week in the House of Lords. They were designed to reduce the extent to which discrimination is permitted against non-religious teachers by the law against teachers in faith and community schools. Read More »

The National Secular Society has submitted an intervention to the European Court of Human Rights arguing that Britain’s equality laws should be upheld and not compromised by religious exemptions. Read More »

The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames has stirred up huge controversy by offering the first, and so far only, available site for a much-needed new secondary school to the Roman Catholic Church – effectively barring 90% of local children. Read More »

The NSS has written to the Chief Guide asking the organisation to reconsider the promise made by Guides and Brownies. We wrote after hearing that seven year old Maddie Willets couldn’t join the 2nd Crawley Down Brownies in Sussex because she didn’t want to make a promise to God. Read More »

The National Secular Society has written to the Irish Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, urging him — and the Irish Government — to resist calls from theVaticanfor Canon Law to be regarded as a legitimate alternative legal system in Ireland. Read More »

MPs have rejected Nadine Dorries’ bid to change the law on abortion counselling for women by 368 votes to 118. Her amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill were debated in Parliament on September 7. Read More »

New research by the BBC indicates that the law requiring a daily act of collective worship in Britain’s state-maintained schools is widely ignored and not wanted. Amost two-thirds of parents told a survey that their children did not attend such an activity and over two thirds of parents do not support enforcing the law. Read More »

A new COMRES poll, commissioned by the BBC, has found that 64% of parents say that their children do not attend a daily act of collective worship at their school. 60% of those questionned believed the requirement to provide a daily act of collective worship should not be enforced. Read More »

The tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York approaches, and the city prepares to commemorate the event in secular fashion. Read More »

A Catholic priest in theNetherlandshas refused to allow a funeral in his church for a parishioner who opted to die by assisted suicide. Read More »

As anger mounts at the visit of the pope to Germany, local authorities have banned demonstrations in the vicinity of papal events. Read More »

The National Secular Society has warned a Surrey council that it is breaking the law by allowing churchgoers to park free while charging everyone else. Read More »

Nadine Dorries, a Christian MP, has proposed an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill to strip abortion providers of the ability to provide pregnancy counselling to women seeking a termination. Read More »

The NSS’s 2011 Secularist of the Year, Dutch MEP Sophie in ’t Veld, has gone on to win another prize. The International Humanist Award was presented to her in Oslo at the recent conference held there by the International Humanist and Ethical Union, to which the NSS is affiliated. Read More »

The UK Government appears to be very slowly edging towards outlawing discrimination on the grounds of caste. The Home Secretary is reported to be closely following a legal case involving an Indian couple who have become the first people to claim caste discrimination in Britain. Read More »

The NSS has submitted a comprehensive report to the United Nations and the Social Rights Committee of the Council of Europe severely critical of the Irish Government’s subservience to the Catholic Church over many decades on the subject of child abuse. Read More »

For a brief moment last week I was alarmed by a story in the Daily Telegraph headed “Catholic nurses use Equality Act to protect their pro-life beliefs.” Read More »

A deputy in the Guernsey deliberative assembly seems surprised to discover that Catholic schools practice religious discrimination in selecting pupils. Deputy John Gollop has also called for the funding of such schools by the taxpayer to be reviewed. Read More »

Billericay Town Council has voted to keep its meetings secular after a Christian councillor tried to introduce prayers at the start. Read More »

A conservative American religious group has been given leave to intervene in the appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in cases concerning alleged religious discrimination. Read More »

England’s last remaining Roman Catholic adoption agency has been granted an appeal in its long-running legal battle to preserve its religious ethos in the face of sexual orientation laws. Read More »

The Charity Commission has removed seven supposedly religious charities from its register and refused charitable status to 28 more when it discovered they were shams. The police have been informed. Read More »