The liberal establishment is in a right tizzy.

Following some pungent comments by senior Catholic figures (thank God for the Catholics’ insistence on their right to speak out clearly on moral issues) and ahead of next month’s vote on the Human Fertilization and Embryology (HFE) Bill, Gordon Brown has done a U-turn and decided to allow a free vote on the more contentious parts of the Bill. It’s took him his usual long period of dithering and indecision before he finally conceded to normal parliamentary practice on this matter of individual conscience.

The secular liberal elite (and one or two senior Catholics including Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, chief executive of the Medical Research Council) are aghast. Gosh, the peasants, the people and the prejudiced are revolting. Don’t the great unwashed understand who knows best on these moral issues? A free vote in Parliament of all places! Whatever happened to our cherished all-controlling secular nanny state?

So, the hand-baggers have been hand-bagged and – inevitably – the fight-back begins. It starts on the front page of today’s house-magazine for the liberal elite, The Independent on Sunday (IoS), with banner headlines (ironically under a full-colour tabloid-style advertisement to “Train Your Brian” – yes, really, you couldn’t make it up) informing the world of their outstanding news scoop: “Exclusive: Right Wing Christian Group Pays For Commons Researchers.”

This world-shattering earth-moving piece of news (clearly more important than the renewed murderous fighting in Basra, this weekend’s vital elections in Zimbabwe or the key UN climate-change convention in Bangkok) is all about 12 innocuous wide-eyed young Interns who personally scrimp and save for the supposedly glamorous privilege of working for a year as an assistant to an MP. It’s a decade-old political education programme for young people who are attached to MPs of all parties, but the work is often tedious and unglamorous and their status is sometimes little above that of the tea lady.

But they are CHRISTIANS and they are sponsored by a CHRISTIAN organisation! Oooh! And the sponsoring organisation, CARE, is strongly against aspects of the HFE Bill. Oooooh! CARE has (unspecified) “links to the powerful Christian right in America”. Oooooooh! The IoS has smelt a Christian conspiracy against the HFE Bill…

Actually, I’d like to smell an effective IoS conspiracy against Christians in the article, but the story is so weak and so unworthy of any front page that I’ve nothing to get my teeth into.

And the best bit is a quote from that fount of all non-believer wisdom, celeb Professor Richard Dawkins (I love the man, we so badly need him to continue with his high-profile and entertaining proselytism on behalf atheist fundamentalism and shrill bigotry). “If only these restless busybodies (CARE) would keep their prejudices to themselves, nobody would object,” he opined, “but they can’t resist inflicting their ignorant opinions on others.”

Ah yes. Such a helpful contribution from such a wise, erudite, open-minded, liberal Oxford academic.

If you want to see an intelligent but completely closed mind that’s been shut tight with lock and bolt, you’ll do no better than to read Prof Dawkins. Even good academic atheists are embarrassed by him. Or as the director of the Human Genome Project said, “Dawkins has abandoned his much cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism.”

When the IoS has to buttress their article with quotes from Richard Dawkins you know that their story is weak, very weak.

Come on IoS, you can do better than this.

Seven years ago Newham Council announced that it intended to regenerate the predominantly council housing stock in my electoral ward in Canning Town. Nothing wrong with that: many of the homes were in urgent need of rebuilding or renovation.

But it became a classic New Labour project, typical of their many projects up and down the country that are more concerned with ends than means, of achieving targets rather than helping people. Despite buckets of warm empty words about “consultation” and “involving residents in decision- making”, the scheme was ruthlessly driven top-down from the executive mayor’s office.

The working-class people of Canning Town became irrelevant in the town hall’s blind obsession with yuppifying the neighbourhood. Locals were moved about like pawns on a chess board. The regeneration was done to and at the local people, nor for and with them – a superb opportunity for community regeneration replaced by an ugly example of community destruction.

This scenario was well illustrated at a meeting I had this week with the parents of children at Oasis Nursery School on Burke Street.

Oasis is an excellent nursery school, one of four in our neighbourhood but the only stand-alone one. It has received outstanding Ofsted assessments and is a popular and happy place with a superb head and committed staff. It is streets ahead of the other nursery schools. It’s a diamond and a unique asset in deprived under-serviced Canning Town.

All the local schools, like Oasis, are suffering from a fall in pupil numbers as families are moved out of the area as a result of the housing project. In addition, planners tell us that the Oasis building itself is to be bulldozed to make way for a new road and development of the surrounding land.

So DOH! Our imaginative town hall came up with an intelligent creative plan. They’re going to close the best nursery school in the borough and spread the pupils and staff around into much lower-performing schools nearby. That’s it. End of. The committee met, the slide-rules and calculators came out and the decision to terminate one of Newham’s few outstanding schools was taken, top down. Educational excellence is replaced by mediocrity. The parents I met are distraught.

Is it beyond the wit of man and Newham town hall to be a little more resourceful and inventive – even if this entails more financial risk? The developers are set to make £millions from the housing regeneration project. How about they are compelled build a new and larger nursery school for the community? (It’s called Section 106.) Oasis staff and pupils could then move in and the children from other underperforming local nurseries should be offered places too – which may of course lead to their closure. But at least educational mediocrity would be replaced by excellence. And I’m confident from my meeting that it would be supported by parents and local community.

Oasis is destined to be shut in August. Is it too late for Newham Council to see sense?