There is absolutely no doubt...

I am still working flat out.

As every evening for the last two weeks I have taken a stack of work home with me and expect to finish about 1am tonight (with several breaks planned in - this being one of them).

A measure of my desperation is that I actually sent my incompetent assistant Pete to see a client on his own this afternoon - so far there doesn’t seem to have been any damage done.

At lunchtime I took a half-hour break to watch Andrew Neil on BBC2.

His guest today was senior television presenter Joan Bakewell. One of the items they talked about was the religious objections some doctors have to performing abortions. During this discussion Joan Bakewell airily said “as a secular country we expect…”

I have noticed in the last couple of years, particularly in regard to the Muslim “issue”, many commentators, politicians, journalists etc have been making similar remarks (“as a secular country” “as a secular nation” “we are a secular society” etc).

These statements trouble me because they are wrong. England is one of the few countries / nations / kingdoms in the world that has defined itself officially as a Christian country. There is absolutely no doubt about the official status of the Anglican church - the Church of England is the English state religion.

You might argue (and many people do) that this should be otherwise, but it is a simple and undeniable fact that the Church of England is the Established Church (and to change this you would have to comprehensively change the way society is structured - not an easy task).

Just a cursory look at the interdependence of Church and State tells you how complex the situation is. The Head of State is simultaneously the Head of the Church; the smallest unit of local government is the Anglican parish; the House of Commons cannot proceed each day until Anglican prayers have been said; Anglican bishops sit in the legislature; Anglican rituals are integrated into all national ceremonies, state schools are supposed to begin each day with an act of Christian observance etc. Leaving aside the issue of confessional belief, there is no doubt that the majority of the population in England would, if asked, opt for the category “cultural Anglican”.

So why are the “we are all secularists now” statements getting through unchallenged?

Has the media become lazy about checking facts? Have non-English people so permeated the political and media elites that there is now widespread ignorance about the religious status of the English nation? Is there a “hidden agenda” at work to talk down the Anglican church?

PS I liked the way Andrew Neil revealed Joan Bakewell’s hypocrisy over private education. When asked where she had educated her own children she told a half-truth by saying she had sent her daughters to a state school. When pressed by Andrew Neil she then admitted she had sent her son to a private school (you could see her hesitate, as if wondering whether she would get away with a lie, before deciding to tell the whole truth - I thought about Andrew Neil's mastery the rest of the afternoon).