Opponents of legal abortion cannot be candidates for parliament under the banner of the U.K.’s Liberal Democrat Party, the party has declared in documents unearthed in the course of a discrimination suit on behalf of ousted pro-life candidate David Campanale.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, Campanale, an Anglican and award-winning veteran BBC journalist who said in November 2022 that after he was “overwhelmingly selected” for a Liberal Democrat selection “in a top target parliamentary seat,” he was called to the home of the party’s honorary president and “subjected to a two-hour interrogation about my Christian views,” including on abortion and homosexuality.
Campanale was ultimately de-selected via a vote of a party Extraordinary General Meeting. In response, concerned members filed a complaint with the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC), saying there were “multiple alleged breaches of equality law and our party constitution” evidencing “a supposedly liberal organization allowing clear religious discrimination and hostility to thrive within its ranks.”
On Friday, The Telegraph reported that party papers submitted in its defense at the Liverpool County Court argue that Liberal Democrats “had a right to deselect” Campanale because his “expressed religious beliefs against abortion, gay marriage and legal sex change conflicted with the fundamental values set out” by the party, and that “such beliefs could, through their incompatibility with the Liberal Democrats’ policy positions on those matters, undermine the party’s ability to gain the confidence of the electorate in the constituency of Sutton and Cheam.”
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams warned that such a stance sets a “worrying” precedent.
“If it is indeed impossible even to hold dissenting views, this ought to make it impossible for Orthodox Jews and most Muslims as well as Catholic and other Christians to represent the party. Is this really what the Lib Dems are saying?” he asked. “It is not enough to preserve one’s private conscientious judgement, it seems; total agreement in private and in public is demanded.”
The Liberal Democrat defense denied the vote was about religion, but rather about Campanale’s “negative behaviours” such as “failure to listen,” “expectation that others should do his work for him,” inability to take criticism, and failure to be sufficiently transparent about his views, including his past membership in the Christian People’s Alliance party.
In 2019, the Liberal Democrats released a manifesto pledging to “decriminalize abortion across the UK whilst retaining the existing 24-week limit,” “legislate for access to abortion facilities within Northern Ireland,” “fund abortion clinics to provide their services free of charge to service users regardless of nationality or residency,” and “make intimidation or harassment of abortion service users and staff outside clinics, or on common transport routes […] illegal.”