One of the results of David Blunkett's resignation as Home Secretary has been the promotion of Ruth Kelly, MP for Bolton West, as Secretary of State for Education.
Kelly is not only a practising Roman Catholic, but associated with the right-wing organisation Opus Dei - an organisation that has had a lot of exposure recently as a result of the popularity of bestseller The Da Vinci Code. While not necessarily everything in the book is true, some disturbing facts are incontrovertible.
Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer. Its stated aim is to "spread throughout society a profound awareness of the universal call to holiness and apostolate through one's professional work carried out with freedom and personal responsibility" (Encyclopedia of Associations).
It has various classes of members. Numerary members pledge to remain celibate and give over all of their income to the organisation. They also carry out extreme forms of physical self-mortification.
Other classes of members make a less extreme commitment but all owe a strong allegiance to the organisation even when this conflicts with other commitments - for example to their families.
Thousands of testimonies from people who have left the organisation sound very much like those of people who have escaped from other cults -though since the early 1980s Opus Dei has been officially an integral part of the Roman Catholic Church.
This is despite the controversy surrounding not only the organisation generally but its founder, Escriva, recently canonised by the current Pope.
Escriva was a friend and defended Hitler, arguing that Franco was right to accept his help in the fight against Communism.
Escriva told Father Feltzman that "Hitler had been unjustly accused of killing 6 million Jews." "In fact he had killed only 4 million." Feltzman was prevented from testifying against him in the run up to his canonisation.
Looking at Kelly's parliamentary record, it is clear that her religious beliefs have had a huge impact on her practice as an MP. Kelly opposes abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research.
Rumour has it she takes these issues so seriously that she will not take a post at DID or Health because it may require her to condone that which her faith forbids.
Kelly is a complete government loyalist, but has some how managed to absent herself
Just before the Parliamentary recess for Christmas, she missed the 3line whip vote on living wills that so upset Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the head of the Catholic church in England and Wales.
She has also missed votes in June 1998 and February 2000 to lower the age of consent for gay sex to 16. She did not vote in an amendment to require single faith schools to take in non-believers in 2002.
She also 'forgot to vote for the government plan to allow gay couples to adopt children in 2002.
Teachers, students and parents may well need to step up the fight not only to defend the infrastructure of education under New Labour's Ruth Kelly, but to prevent the increasing intrusion of fundamentalist ideas into the curriculum. so that it can face new hazards. offer us solutions. ID cards have been just such a "solution" waiting patiently for a "problem" for many years.
There are practical as well as civil liberties reasons to reject the proposals for a National Identity Register (NIR). These were dramatically underlined in the week of the Queen's Speech when a crashed computer system brought much of the Department for Work and Pensions to a halt for several days.
Central government's record of being sold expensive, poor-performing computer systems by wealthy multinationals does not suggest that the NIR would be efficient or cost-effective, even if it had a worthy purpose. Which it does not.
Blunkett claimed that the NIR, and ID cards will help to combat identity theft, fraud and illegal migration.