Politics & Power Quote by Polly Toynbee

Toynbee’s sentence is built like a double-take. It starts with an almost novelistic establishing shot of modern Britain: “this heathen nation of empty pews,” a place where religion has been demoted from public authority to architectural aesthetic, where “bare, ruined choirs” become “luxury loft living.” That image isn’t incidental; it’s an argument. Faith, in this telling, is not resurgent belief but real estate branding, a symptom of secularization and inequality sharing the same postcode.

Then comes the pivot: “a Labour government - yes, a Labour government -” the stuttered emphasis functioning as both incredulity and indictment. The repetition is a rhetorical elbow in the ribs, signaling that what follows isn’t merely surprising but politically unnatural. Labour, the party historically associated with egalitarianism and state provision, is cast as midwife to a policy that (to Toynbee’s audience) risks importing selection, segregation, and clerical influence into the education system.

The subtext is a charge of ideological drift. In a country she frames as post-Christian in practice, the state is not responding to popular devotion; it’s manufacturing institutional religion for administrative convenience and electoral calculus. “Deliberately creating” matters: this isn’t passive accommodation of minorities or parental choice, but an active construction of a parallel system. Toynbee’s irony is pointed: while the nation repurposes churches into private luxury, the government repurposes religion into public policy. The oddness isn’t theological; it’s political, a portrait of a center-left power willing to outsource civic cohesion to faith precisely when faith has emptied out.