According to
this week's Jewish News, the Lib Dems can't actually do anything about her making
idiotic remarks. Not that the Jewish community expected anything--they dumped her from the frontbench before, then turned round and made her a peer.
While we're travelling in this vein, I'd like to applaud the Independent's education section for its wonderfully naive view. They think that a 25% quota of other pupils will have no effect because parents won't want to use it. Parents are already willing to pretend to beliefs they don't have to attend high-performing faith schools--I don't think they'll have any qualms about using quotas when they don't even have to pretend to agree with the beliefs they don't hold. Jewish schools are among the most successful in the country--our secondaries are regularly in the list of top comprehensives in England at both GCSE and A-Level. If existing faith schools are forced to adopt the quota it WILL be used.
That said, the Indy's regular leader was quite right on some points: faith schools aren't going to go away. Even if we stopped funding them (a political impossibility, especially given all the places where the CofE school is the only one) we'd still have them in the private sector. And from a secular point of view, a state funded religious school is actually preferable to a private one. If the state funds a school it can control what is taught and who teaches it. (This is what I warn American Jews about when they think that the government will solve the yeshiva-tuition crisis. Even if it were constitutional, some people might find the cure worse than the disease.)
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