High court ruling has set in motion a process which could increase the pressure for disestablishment of Church of England
David Hockney may disagree, given the place's importance as a pioneering New World tobacco trade port, but the quiet and pleasing north Devon town of Bideford seems to have played only a modest role thus far in the long march of English freedom. Yet following high court judgment in the dispute between Clive Bone, a former Liberal Democrat councillor, and the local town council, Bideford's moment in history may have arrived.
In court on Friday, Mr Justice Ouseley ruled that the saying of prayers during Bideford council meetings was unlawful. Though the judge was at pains to stress the narrowness of the legal point on which he ruled, the case was being widely watched. The communities secretary Eric Pickles was quick to condemn the judgment. Diametrically opposed responses from the National Secular Society, which supported Mr Bone's complaint, and the Christian Institute, which underwrote Bideford's costs, were nevertheless both agreed that something of more general importance was at stake. Though the verdict is now being appealed, it is not impossible that Mr Bone's beef against Bideford may have set in motion a process which could increase the pressure for the disestablishment of the Church of England.
Mr Bone's complaint was that prayers should not take place as part of a formal local council meeting. He accepted that prayers could be said in a council chamber before a meeting formally began, provided that councillors were not officially summoned to attend them. The high court duly ruled in Mr Bone's favour, but on only one of the three grounds on which he brought his action. It rejected his claims that his human rights were infringed or that he was being discriminated against. But it accepted that an agenda item for prayers was not lawful under local government legislation.
This is an important ruling, which will not apply to Bideford alone, assuming the higher courts agree. A state religion should play no formal role in local government, though local councils can maintain a right to worship outside the formal processes if they wish to. Other law-making bodies manage this well. The Welsh assembly has no routine prayers. The Scottish parliament's weekly "time for reflection" outside the formal agenda, sometimes but not necessarily faith-based, is a useful alternative. The big anomaly is Westminster, where Christian prayers are still a formal part of parliamentary business. The 1689 bill of rights protects parliament from the courts. But how long can Westminster's established Anglicanism survive amid the other constitutional upheavals beating through modern Britain? Mr Bone of Bideford may have started something big.