The Fourth R

I am going to keep coming back to this one, because I am most concerned that Archbishop Vincent Nichols, who has done sterling work in the past defending Catholic education, including the richly deserved humblings that put paid to the Prime Ministerial ambitions of Alan Johnson and Ed Balls, has not quite made the right choice for his latest cause.

While I am not without sympathy for the English Baccalaureate (and, unlike Michael Gove, I am a supporter of the institutions necessary to deliver it, namely the grammar schools), I have far graver reservations about the calls being made in the Catholic press for RE to be recognised alongside History and Geography for Baccalaureate purposes. In principle, yes. But the rubbish passed by the Bishops' Conferences as RE in this country's Catholic schools would not be permitted, even now, in any other discipline.

We need people in Parliament who will put down an amendment, such as would probably get through with only an angry Tablet and a quietly exultant Catholic Herald noticing, that all RE textbooks, resources and inspectors in State-funded Catholic schools must be approved directly by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Most people probably assume that this is already the case. Would that it were.

If there were still a Labour Party responsive to the communities that sustained it, then that would indeed already be the case. Roll on electoral reform, and decisive public participation in the selection of candidates.