AN ANGLICAN layman who was deselected as a Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate is suing the party under the Equality Act, claiming that he has been subject to discrimination due to his Christian beliefs.
A petition calling on the party to reinstate David Campanale — which warns that failure to do will send a “chilling message to Christians” — has been signed by the Bishops of Winchester and Guildford (Letters, 24 May and 31 May).
Mr Campanale, a former BBC investigative journalist who held a seat as a Liberal Democrat councillor from 1986 to 1994, was announced because the Liberal Democrat candidate for Sutton and Cheam in January 2022, having first been approved as a prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) in 2017. According to his legal claim, submitted last month, he was “almost immediately” the topic of complaints made by members of the local party, culminating in attempts to deselect him.
“These complaints were made due to his protected beliefs and the steps taken to deselect him were motivated primarily by animosity from local party members to his protected beliefs,” the legal claim states. Among the examples of discrimination referred to are a gathering at the house of the local party’s president, Lord Tope, at which Mr Campanale was “interrogated” by about 30 members and “mocked and abused in relation to his beliefs”. He was, the claim says, told to not campaign in certain wards, and was excluded from meetings and party literature.
The legal claim names as defendants the chairs of the party on the local, regional, and national levels. Mr Campanale raised a minimum of 26 separate complaints about his treatment, the claim states, however the party “did not act on any of his concerns and/or take his complaints of discrimination and victimisation seriously”.
He was deselected last August, and a latest candidate, Luke Taylor, has since been chosen. Mr Taylor is called in Mr Campanale’s claim as amongst those that led the deselection campaign. Information sent to local party members prematurely of the deselection vote stated that Mr Campanale was “unable, or unwilling, to know and address the concerns expressed to him”, and that concerns about him were “by no means related to his personal and non secular beliefs” — a claim that Mr Campanale disputes.
The local party claimed that his full political history had not been “properly declared and scrutinised as a part of the choice process”, and that there have been concerns about his political positions. In 2022, the Liberal Democrats Standards Office dismissed all complaints about Mr Campanale, concluding that the evidence was “limited, lacks credibility and is unconvincing”.
Mr Campanale, who serves on the PCC of St John the Evangelist, Kingston upon Thames, and has previously been a director of Tearfund, first campaigned for the Liberal Democrats in 1982. He left the party in 1998 “for private reasons” and later chaired the Christian People’s Alliance (CPA), which emerged from the cross-party Movement for Christian Democracy. In an article for the web site Lib Dem Voice in 2022, he said that he had left the CPA almost a decade earlier, “when it was infiltrated by extremists. I fully repudiate the offensive and divisive campaigns the people using the name now pursue.”
He wrote: “It can also be fair to say that like other politicians, my views have evolved. So Sutton party members heard me publicly state my support for the law on same-sex marriage. After all, I stood on our 2019 General Election manifesto.”
Among the “protected beliefs” referred to in his legal claim are the idea that “marriage is exclusively the union of 1 man and one woman,” and that “abortion is flawed.” The claim states that Mr Campanale has “never hidden his faith or religious beliefs”, and that he declared all past political affiliations before his selection. In an interview with the Christian Institute in 2022, he said that, through the selection process, members had did not use the hustings to ask questions on his beliefs.
Mr Campanale appealed against his deselection on the grounds that the method had not been run appropriately, and that his treatment amounted to discrimination. In March, a panel of the English Candidates Committee rejected the appeal, finding “no evidence of such discriminatory conduct” by the local party. Mr Campanale has now appealed against this decision to the English Appeals Panel.
In 2022, the Government’s Equality Advisory and Support Service said that it was “likely” that Mr Campanale had been “subject to harassment and potential victimisation”. Evidence was then passed to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, with whom quite a few complaints about Mr Campanale’s treatment have been lodged by each individual party members and the Liberal Democrat Christian Forum, which has also complained to the party’s Federal President. A letter to the EHRC seen by the Daily Telegraph warns that “evidence depicts a supposedly liberal organisation allowing clear religious discrimination and hostility to thrive inside its ranks”.
In 2023, a panel of the English Candidates Committee rejected an application to have Mr Campanale faraway from the approved candidates list, and noted an “illiberal attitude towards Mr Campanale’s socially conservative faith”. The ECC is chaired by the Revd Margaret Joachim, a C of E priest with PTO in London.
On Wednesday, a celebration spokesperson said: “The Liberal Democrat Leader and all of our London MPs are church-going Christians, and this complex case about David Campanale, which began during Covid, resulted in him being deselected and the local party overwhelmingly voting for a latest candidate.”
More than 20,000 people have now signed a petition calling for Mr Campanale’s reinstatement, which describes him as “a Christian who actually believes in biblical teaching — a seemingly unforgivable sin for the Lib Dems.”
Among the signatories is the Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Revd Andrew Watson.
”I even have something of a temporary for freedom of faith and belief within the House of Lords, and am concerned that we don’t inadvertently drift right into a society which discriminates against very able and compassionate people on the premise of their sincerely-held Christian convictions,” he said on Wednesday. “The decision to deselect David, along with the hostile questioning to which he’s been subjected, seems to me a working example. Much the identical happened to Kate Forbes and the SNP, which makes me feel that it may very well be the start of a trend, which needs calling out.”
The Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Revd Philip Mounstephen, wrote on the social media site X earlier this month: “The deselection of David Campanale on the grounds of his beliefs alone is shockingly illiberal. On this basis Gladstone wouldn’t have been allowed to face in Sutton & Cheam.”
The case follows that of Tim Farron, who resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats in 2017, saying that it was unimaginable for him to reconcile his position with being a “faithful Christian” (News, 16 June 2017). In 2019, Rob Flello, a Roman Catholic, was deselected because the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Stoke-on-Trent South (News, 29 November 2019). A celebration statement said that it had change into clear “how greatly his values diverge from ours”.
