This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

The astonishing case of Professor Alice Roberts, and her public war with her mother about God and schools, would have gained far more attention than it has, if it were not for the way that the EU row has sucked the breath out of every aspect of life – and please, please, can this soon be over?

Professor Roberts, who is on TV a lot, has just become the new face of Humanists UK, a movement dedicated, as far as I can make out, to spreading the belief that there is no God.

Note that the Professor’s increasingly public commitment to being anti-religious has not prevented her from presenting several prominent programmes on the supposedly impartial BBC. These days it hardly seems worth even questioning that.

But in her first and very successful bid for Humanist publicity, she made a grave mistake. She got the publicity. But it wasn’t good publicity. As anti-religious people so often do, she attacked the fact that large numbers of English state schools have a Christian character. She wanted the state to stop funding Church schools. She accused them of indoctrination. But, funnily enough, it turned out that her own children attended such a Church school.

You’d think, from the way she went on, that her offspring faced being compulsorily harangued about hellfire all day.

But then, Splat! The Professor’s mother, Wendy, herself a teacher, stepped in. She made the very good point that her daughter’s celebrity, granted to her by the almighty BBC, would swing a lot of opinion (as it does), for no other reason than that she is well-known.

Wendy Roberts gently pointed out that her daughter’s complaints were overdone, as most Church schools promote a general Christian atmosphere, rather than drilling doctrine into their pupils.

These schools survive for a simple reason, which it is hard to argue against. The Churches in England pioneered education for the children of the poor. They raised the money, trained the teachers, bought the land and paid for the buildings, decades before the Government ever got involved. Eventually, they handed over their schools to the State, in the 1940s, on condition that they kept their Christian nature.

Who does this harm? Nobody. For reasons we’re not sure of, Church primaries are often the best schools in their neighbourhoods. Many parents pretend to live where they don’t, or pretend to be religious, to get what Professor Alice Roberts has been given without any such fuss. If she really doesn’t like the prayers and the Christian teaching, she can withdraw her children from them. But she doesn’t. I suspect that she is also quite able to pay school fees, if she chooses, and so escape the whole business.

So why is she making a public martyr of herself? Could it be that she is just an annoying zealot?

If so, it is not the fault of her education or her Christian parents. Alice Roberts herself went to a Church of England primary school and was brought up in a Christian home. Her father, an aeronautical engineer, was even a church warden. If children are in such danger of being brainwashed into religious belief, how has Alice Roberts now ended up as the shiny figurehead of an anti-Christian outfit?

The answer is quite simple. We may learn, at home or in school, a little about the selfless faith of love and trust which has sustained and shaped our civilisation and helped to make us free. But as soon as we turn on the TV or the radio, especially the BBC, or go to university, and in many, many state schools as well, we are in the hands of people like Alice Roberts, who think it clever and advanced to belittle the Christian religion, and drive it out of the society it created.

Their indoctrination is ceaseless, relentless and filled with scorn. It is almost impossible to escape. And it is working. I wonder, does Alice Roberts think that the triumph of ‘Humanism’, and the expulsion of Christianity from the schools, will lead to some sort of secular paradise? She is in for a shock. Religion in this country is due for a revival, as material wealth fails. But who will benefit?

The force that is most likely to fill the gap left when the Church dies is Islam – strong, increasingly powerful and present in our midst, confident, quite unafraid of people like her.

If she gets her way, she may live to see her granddaughters attending schools where they have to wear hijabs and chant the Koran. Then, rather too late, she might begin to see the virtues of the Church of England.

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A squalid twist in UKIP's tale

In spite of much badgering from its members, I was never really tempted to join UKIP, which in gentler days I used to view as a Dad’s Army party of lost Thatcherites, led by a man, Nigel Farage, who had come close to calling for the decriminalisation of marijuana.

Well, wasn’t I wise to steer clear? Its current leader, Gerard Batten, is even less attractive than Mr Farage. He already had a certain something about him, but his decision to appoint the dangerous and frightening ‘Tommy Robinson’ as an adviser means that he is deliberately leading UKIP into the squalid badlands of rabble politics.

Mr ‘Robinson’ (the alias is said to be the name of a once-famous Luton football hooligan) is really Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, an unlovable and mysterious figure with an unpleasant record, some of it criminal, and some very unattractive supporters. I have for some time feared that Yaxley-Lennon might be a British Trump, if such a thing could exist, and UKIP seems to be trying to usher him into the fringes of proper politics.

It ought to work the other way. Associating with Yaxley-Lennon ought to mean the end of UKIP. But in our current fevered atmosphere, and with the ever-present danger of serious economic trouble, I am not so sure. Once again I recall warning the complacent Left in this country years ago that they really ought to listen to me, or they would certainly encounter something or somebody nothing like as nice as I am. Well, here it comes.

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Now we have the Trump doctrine. If you’re rich enough, and buy enough of our planes, you can murder your own people to your heart’s content. The Oaf President has told the Saudis that their now undoubted assassination of Jamal Khashoggi does not matter. So there’s an end to all and every pious intervention in any foreign country, for ever more. If the Khashoggi murder, deliberate, state-sponsored, hugely grisly, approved at the highest level, is OK, then pretty much everything is OK. The grim truth is that, while nobody has ever been crude enough to say so out loud before, this is actually an honest statement of the real position of the US and UK governments. And so, they can never again whip up phoney, selective moral outrage to justify whatever war they wish to start. They’ll have to tell us the real reason instead.

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