Why is the taxpayer funding this legal fight?
It is astonishing enough that a pupil has been permitted to take Michaela Community School to the High Court over its strict policy on prayer. The school in north-west London – rated outstanding and led by Katharine Birbalsingh – is one of the best in the country and a key factor in its success is that it expects all students to observe the same, rigorous rules.
Michaela had feared that allowing pupils to follow their own prayer rituals during the school day was undermining its ethos and resulting in segregation between religious groups. It was well within its rights to stop this.
Even more extraordinary, however, is that the case brought against Michaela is being funded by the taxpayer through legal aid.
The principle behind legal aid is a good one: to ensure that nobody is denied access to the justice system because they cannot afford the often onerous legal fees. The budget has been restricted in recent years, leading some lawyers to complain that more people are having to go to court without representation in disputes over matters such as housing, employment or debt.
So why, then, is part of this limited budget being allocated to fund a legal battle that many will consider to be motivated by politics and ideology, rather than a genuine grievance?
On the most basic level, taxpayer money is going towards paying for a legal challenge against another organisation supported by the taxpayer. The sums involved are hardly small. The bill for the case so far has already been estimated at between £100,000 and £150,000, while the pupil is being represented by a King’s Counsel.
Worse, the money is being used to fund a case that, if successful, is likely to have profoundly negative consequences for the school system as whole. It could end up greatly diminishing an educational institution that has succeeded in lifting up children of all backgrounds in a deprived area of the capital. It would damage the authority of the headteacher to set the rules as she sees fit. It may well result in pressure on other schools to give special treatment to particular groups for fear of facing similar lawsuits, even if that undermines school cohesion and results in problems with discipline.
There has been a worrying tendency for activist groups to seek to use the courts to try to impose their favoured policies. So-called “lawfare” has been spotted in everything from the fight over Brexit to net-zero policy. At the very least, taxpayers should not be expected to fund these battles.
