Will Andy Burnham stand up for Christians?

Every incoming British prime minister in recent years has inherited similar challenges: economic stagnation, high immigration, a struggling NHS and an increasingly volatile international scene. But Andy Burnham will also inherit a less familiar problem – namely, the British state’s growing intolerance of ordinary Christian life.

The new PM takes office at a moment when Christians are increasingly finding themselves on the wrong side of existing or proposed laws that threaten the public expression of their beliefs. Just this month, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) issued new guidance on its version of the ‘buffer zone’ laws. Having been rolled out across the UK on the back of the Public Order Act 2023, buffer-zone laws prohibit anti-abortion ‘protests’ within certain perimeters around clinics and hospitals that provide abortion services.

The PSNI suggests that under these rules, Christian visitors or hospital chaplains could actually be committing a crime by carrying a Bible through a public area of a hospital or praying with patients on request, if it is perceived to ‘influence’ an onlooker about a decision to have an abortion. There are no exemptions for clergy. Even where a patient explicitly requests prayer, officers are instructed to consider whether someone else accessing abortion services nearby could reasonably be ‘influenced or distressed’.

In other words, a hospital chaplain comforting grieving parents with scriptural verses after the loss of a child could find himself subject to police scrutiny. That is an astonishing position for any liberal democracy to find itself in.

The PSNI insists it is not ‘banning’ Bibles or prayer, and police stress that each case will be judged individually. Yet that reassurance misses the point. The fact that carrying a Bible through a hospital corridor has become something requiring police guidance at all tells us how dramatically the legal landscape has shifted. This will have a chilling effect on free speech and religious liberty. After all, who wants to take legal advice before making a hospital visit?

Buffer-zone laws are said to tackle already criminal behaviour, like harassment and violence, outside abortion facilities. In truth they seek to prohibit all forms of ‘influence’ within around 150 metres or so of anywhere an abortion may take place. What counts as ‘influence’ has been left so nebulous that peaceful Christians practising their faith risk being turned into criminals.

In July 2024, a then 76-year-old pastor Clive Johnston was preaching the Bible verse, John 3:16, as part of an outdoor Sunday service near Causeway Hospital in Coleraine. His sermon made no mention of abortion. There was no placard, no shouting, no hostility. Yet because it took place within a designated buffer zone, Johnston was convicted in May and given a fine. His appeal is now pending.

Johnston’s case has attracted international attention. The US State Department described the prosecution as an ‘egregious violation’ of freedom of expression and religious liberty. Would our own government take a similar view?

Other Christians have been prosecuted under anti-social-behaviour laws. Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested in November 2022 after violating a ‘public space protection order’ (PSPO), by praying outside a closed clinic in Worcestershire. This shows how an ever-expanding legal framework has led to the regulation of peaceful religious expression. That should concern everyone, irrespective of where they stand on abortion.

What is perhaps most striking is how often the public was assured none of this would happen. And yet here we are, with the PSNI contemplating whether hospital chaplains carrying Bibles might constitute an illegal act.

Other legal threats are coming down the track, too. The government’s draft Conversion Practices Bill has been presented as targeting coercive and abusive attempts to ‘convert’ gay and lesbian people – activity already prohibited under existing criminal law. But this poorly drafted bill goes considerably further. Lawyers, parents, clinicians and church leaders are worried that ordinary pastoral ministry and parental guidance will fall under prohibited ‘conversion practices’. It could mean the criminalisation of parents advising their gender-confused teenager against irreversible and damaging medical interventions, or the criminalisation of pastors for advising people on the traditional Christian teaching on sexuality.

The concern with this growing legal edifice is not what parliament intends today, but how these laws are interpreted tomorrow. It certainly seems that with each new measure, justified by reference to genuinely harmful (and often already illegal) conduct, the space in which Christianity can be expressed publicly gets that bit smaller.

This is the Britain Andy Burnham has inherited. His government will face many defining tests. But one of the most important may be whether it is content to allow this attack on religious freedom to continue.