by Lois McLatchie, spiked
Britain’s largest faith group has been under legal attack for far too long.
Every incoming British prime minister in recent years has inherited similar challenges: economic stagnation, high immigration, a struggling NHS and an increasingly volatile international scene. But Andy Burnham will also inherit a less familiar problem – namely, the British state’s growing intolerance of ordinary Christian life.
The new PM takes office at a moment when Christians are increasingly finding themselves on the wrong side of existing or proposed laws that threaten the public expression of their beliefs. Just this month, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) issued new guidance on its version of the ‘buffer zone’ laws. Having been rolled out across the UK on the back of the Public Order Act 2023, buffer-zone laws prohibit anti-abortion ‘protests’ within certain perimeters around clinics and hospitals that provide abortion services.
The PSNI suggests that under these rules, Christian visitors or hospital chaplains could actually be committing a crime by carrying a Bible through a public area of a hospital or praying with patients on request, if it is perceived to ‘influence’ an onlooker about a decision to have an abortion. There are no exemptions for clergy. Even where a patient explicitly requests prayer, officers are instructed to consider whether someone else accessing abortion services nearby could reasonably be ‘influenced or distressed’.