The Atrium, 22 Whitehall, 19 September 2007 

I’m delighted to be here and to be following – briefly – those who have spoken already. 

Quite a lot of people today are critical of the impact on our society.  People like Richard Dawkins suggest that faith is actually dangerous.  The point of view I want to put to you is different to that.  I want to argue that faith is a great starting point – for politics, for community involvement – and that what we need is not less of it, but more. 

I think the number of people for whom faith is the starting point is on the rise at the moment – those for whom faith is the key to how they think about the world, how they distinguish between right and wrong, how they choose to spend their time and how they relate to other people.  What I want to see is more of those people – for whom faith is the starting point – getting involved in politics, getting involved in the lives of their communities, helping to tackle the problems of their areas – and doing so explicitly from a starting point of faith.

Let me just give a few examples of what I believe the benefits are when that happens.

On Saturday, I shall be speaking at the annual meeting of Traidcraft plc.  Traidcraft was the pioneer of the fair trade movement in Britain – the movement that requires products from the developing world to be purchased from farmers and producers at a fair price, typically above the market price, and also at a stable price, so that producers are protected from market fluctuations. 

Today, every major supermarket stocks fair trade produce, and there is growing evidence of fair trade quite significantly improving incomes in the developing world.  The decision by Sainsbury’s to purchase only fair trade bananas has had a big and positive impact on the economies of a number of Caribbean islands which had previously been struggling. 

Fair trade was started in Britain by Traidcraft, and Traidcraft remains a significant producer, through its participation in Café Direct and its supply of Geobars.  Traidcraft started with Tear Fund, the Christian development charity.  It has been sustained by an army of volunteers willing to sell its products – much of it alongside books on church bookstalls.  If they had depended on the supermarkets, they would never have been able to get started.  And Traidcraft’s latest annual report says that 80% of the volunteers on whom its survival still depends are from the churches.

So fair trade is a very good example of a significant and beneficial social change which has come about because of the churches.  Sometimes people give the impression that the churches don’t make much difference any more.  I beg to differ, and fair trade is a case in point.

When I was a Minister at the Treasury in 1999-2001, and Gordon Brown was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, we heard a lot from the Jubilee 2000 movement.  On one occasion they formed a human chain around the Treasury building.  In another phase they organised people to send in one pound coins sellotaped to the back of postcards to demand that Britain should cancel the debts owed to us by the poorest countries.

We received hundreds of these postcards.  On one occasion, one came in from a Mrs Brown in Scotland.  Somehow, someone in the Treasury postroom managed to work out that this was from Gordon’s mother!  And in due course, thanks to the pressure from that movement, Britain did cancel the debts of the poorest countries.  That was followed by the Make Poverty History campaign, which led to the historic decisions made by the G8 leaders at Gleneagles in 2005 – decisions which will be of immense benefit for low income people in the developing world for decades to come.

Some of the people who organised those campaigns were from the churches, others were not.  But what they told me was that 80% of the people who supported them – the people who sent in the postcards, who formed the human chains, who turned up at the great ‘Make Poverty History’ demonstration in Edinburgh in 2005 – 80% of them were from the churches.  Its striking – at least to me – that that proportion is exactly the same as the proportion of the Traidcraft volunteers who come from the churches.

If you are looking for people who are willing to work for the benefit of others.  People who don’t just want to reduce poverty but are willing themselves actually to work to do so.  People with progressive values and the willingness to make a personal effort to make it happen.  Then it is, in modern Britain, to the churches and to the faith communities that you need to look.  A lot of people will be surprised by that, but its true.

This year we have marked the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by Parliament in 1807.  The MP who led that campaign, William Wilberforce, stood at the head of a vast popular movement for abolition.  Petitions against slavery poured in to Parliament from every part of the country.  It was really the beginning of modern, progressive politics in Britain, a campaign which has been the model for popular and progressive political campaigns ever since, up to and including Make Poverty History. 

It wasn’t just a religious campaign – but overwhelmingly it was from the churches that that campaign drew its support.  I don’t really know, but I have a hunch that – perhaps – 80% of those who signed the petitions and supported that campaign came from the churches.  We need more campaigns around progressive themes like that – and it will, once again, be to people of faith that we need to look.

But I don’t want to give the impression that the impact of faith is only about what is happening in other countries.  I want people of faith to be involved because of their impact within their own communities as well.

I believe one of the most important things this Government has done is to set up the New Deal – the programme to help people who are out of work, especially young people, and especially those who have been out of work for some time.  It was designed from the outset to involve a range of partners working alongside government agencies like Jobcentre Plus.

In the West Midlands, the Church of England diocese of Birmingham tends to pick up the New Deal participants nobody else will touch.  On one occasion, they were asked to find a New Deal placement for a young man who was due in court shortly to be tried for 117 offences of burglary.  He was placed on a project to decorate a church complex in Edgbaston – and he turned out to be a superb painter, a skill he had developed while imprisoned at a young offender’s institution.  He struck up a friendship with the part time church administrator, who was also the husband of the vicar at the church, and when the time came for him to go to court for his trial, the administrator went along to speak up for him and to ask the court that, despite all these dreadful offences, he should be given another chance. 

The court, perhaps rather surprisingly, agreed.  The young man was given another chance.  The painting project was completed and to an extremely high standard.  And the young man has since apparently started up with a couple of others a painting business of their own.

And at the ceremony to mark the conclusion of the work, one of those who turned up was the young man’s mother.  She sought out the church administrator and she said to him; “When you went to court to plead for my son to keep his job, you saved his life”.  And that for me is another powerful example of the kind of positive impact we can expect when people of faith are involved in the lives of their community – worshipping, yes, but also serving the community.  Because they can bring invaluable qualities in their service which it is rare to find elsewhere.

So I think it is right in the public service, where everyone here is engaged, to celebrate Christianity at work, and to want to secure a larger input from it.  I think that is understood more and more widely today within Government.  At the reshuffle in June, Gordon Brown appointed me a vice chair of the Labour Party with specific responsibility for liaison with faith groups, reflecting our recognition of the importance of the input we are getting from the churches, and from individuals and organisations whose starting point is faith.

Actually, I think its just not realistic to argue, as some have done, that faith and politics should not be mixed; or that faith should be kept out of the workplace.  It was King Canute who pointed out, after failing to hold back the tide, that “Only God is all powerful”.  Far better to recognise the importance of faith as a starting point for many, and to celebrate and to welcome the contributions which result.

Christianity is a living faith with the power to change people and therefore to change history.  It has changed history for the better before, and I hope it will do so again in the future – there is every reason in 21st century Britain to be confident that it will.  And I welcome the work and the witness of the Cabinet Office Christian Network in bringing the influence of faith to bear on the department, and so on our country.