On 9th March Rachel Taggart-Ryan, the campaigns officer at Humanist UK, joined the Bromley Humanist monthly meeting to discuss her work.
Rachel Taggart-Ryan is the Campaigns Officer at Humanists UK and has been in the role for five years. Her talk focused on the work of the Public Affairs and Policy team and the ways in which they carry out their campaigns. Rachel started by giving an overview of the six areas of their work: Public affairs, Policy, Campaigns, Media, Legal, and Helping people.
She described public affairs as our work trying to persuade decision makers – mostly politicians – to take, or sometimes not take certain actions. Policy is about building up the case and refining the positions we take on our issues. Campaigning is the process by which you will effect change and part of this can be through working with the media to highlight your cause and sometimes it means taking challenges and litigation through the court. A final part of this is helping people. As a charity people come to us for advice when they think they have experienced discrimiantion or need our expertise to resolve a problem. She said that public affairs work mostly involves working with three key groups of stakeholders: ministers and civil servants, All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, and collaborating with civil society.
She said, Humanists UK meet regularly with civil servants on areas of interest to us – whether this be the faith schools, Religious Education, and Relationships and Sex Education teams in the Department for Education; the Human Rights and Democracy Department at the Foreign and Development Office; visa and Immigration at the Home Office, the Religion or Belief Team at the Equality and Human Rights Commission; or the illegal schools team at Ofsted; in total our work intersects with eleven government departments and a number more non-departmental public bodies. We have a lot of plates to spin, and some quite complex stakeholder management is involved. We also meet fairly regularly with ministers. For example, we met with Sajid Javid, when he was the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and Lord Agnew when he was School Minister. We also have frequent meetings with the Labour and Liberal Democrat front bench teams, for example we had meetings with Lib Dem Foreign Affairs spokesperson Layla Moran, and another with Lord Watson who leads on education for Labour in the Lords.
She went on to talk about the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group which is a grouping of around 100 MPs and peers from all parties; humanists who are willing, as Stephen Fry puts it, to nail their colours to the mast and take up our causes within Parliament. The Chair of the Group is Crispin Blunt, our first Conservative Chair, and his Co-Chair is Baroness Joan Bakewell. Other key members are Lord Dubs and Keir Starmer.
Often our most effective work is done with the APPHG. That may mean asking written or oral questions; writing to ministers; tabling amendments to Government bills, and to help facilitate meetings with ministers. The APPHG two weeks ago organised a backbench debate on humanist marriages in England and Wales. Once we wrote 70 parliamentary questions on the same topic so that we could bombard the Government into submission over their new policy on faith school admissions, which does appear to have somewhat worked…
She went on to describe some of their work with other organisations in coalition on various issues. To give you a few examples of this, I sit on the steering group of Voice for Choice, which brings together organisations campaigning for women’s reproductive rights. Our Director is on the board of the Religious Education Council for England and Wales. We co-founded the Accord Coalition for Inclusive Education and we sit on the advisory group of the Sex Education Forum.
She then described other ways in which Humanists UK campaigns such as carrying out original research, responding to Government consultations, working with the media and journalists to get coverage of our issues and described some of the legal cases that Humanists UK has either taken or been involved in the past few years.
She finished the presentation by talking about the role of local activists in key campaigns such as the legal recognition of humanist marriage and how influential letters to your MP can be in driving forward action in Parliament. The meeting then entered into a QandA session.
