There is something childish about the secularist movement in Britain.

That an atheist councillor should have found it so unbearable to sit through a few moments of prayer at a council meeting that he felt the need to go to the highest court in the land to have his view override the will of others. Really?

This is a case that should have never gone to the High Court. Bideford Town Council, against which the legal action was brought, had reportedly being saying prayers since Elizabethan times and following the complaint from the councillor in question, twice voted to retain the saying of prayers during meetings.

One can only assume that the majority of councillors voted in favour of prayers not because they wanted to torture the atheist councillor but because they wanted to preserve a tradition to which they still attached immense value and importance.

It is incredible to think that people can be so intolerant that they cannot make a minor adjustment to their daily life to accommodate the beliefs or practices of others, particularly when these are part of the cultural heritage of this nation and do no harm.

It used to be called respect. These days the concept appears to be understood only in terms of what we expect from others.

It is a disservice to the very principle of equality that in its name the legitimate rights and freedoms of a rather substantial proportion of society are squashed so that the rights of a few can be upheld.

This in spite of the fact that there are still millions of people going to church each Sunday and millions more who claim to have some identification with the Christian faith, however tenuous.

If we continue to split hairs over what one group prefers and what another doesn’t, we are going to end up with a very miserly, stingy and disgruntled society in which people think only of their entitlement, rather than seeking the compromise that is necessary to make a multi-faith, multi-perspective society work.

The politically correct wing appears to be intent on bringing about equality at all costs - equality regardless of whom it tramples all over, equality that in the end is no equality at all.

Believers and non-believers alike should be mature enough to make some accommodation for their differences without having to enforce it in court or re-write the law books. Where we are right now is beginning to feel rather stifling.