Sometimes I ask myself

David Cameron recently moved Baroness Warsi from being Conservative Party Chairman to a new role, that of "Minister for Faith and Communities", my question is, do we really need a "Ministry of Faith"?

I guess many people would claim that millions of UK citizens are religious and therefore some kind of reflection of this is needed in Government, but why? Do religious people require different services and laws from non-religious people, do they not use the same Health services, public transport and education system as the rest of us? Unlike properly secular countries, in the UK we already have 26 unelected Bishops in the upper house of our Government, does faith need any more special representation than this..

I fear this new appointment introduces unnecessary dangers of division and inequality among people in that it may further institutionalise the notion of a "faith community" as a demographic grouping defined by a particular religious belief. This idea is inherently troubling and problematic. It assumes that people have common political interests just because they share a religious label: indeed, it encourages these groups to adopt a religious identity for political rather than spiritual reasons, and that is bad both for politics and for religion. And it potentially privileges people who assert a religious identity over those who don't. Even though polls show clearly that half of people in this country aren't religious, there's not going to be a minister for secularism.