But should we be funding any Relegion

I know that in Sweden, Germany Portugal and so on the state fundsthe official church, but the statement today by Ruth Kelly that, "our strategy of funding and engagement must shift significantly towards those organisations that are taking a proactive leadership role in tackling extremism and defending our shared values" is utterly wrong.

It is not the business of the state, particularly a nominally Christian state with an established religion should be funding any religion. Engagement maybe, but funding no way. Surely that is half the problem.

There again the comments by the chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Massoud Shadjareh, were priceless,
The government he said, should not "financial muscle to socially engineer a new brand of Islam which will be subservient to its foreign policy".

After all, it seems to me that all this ruddy government ever tries to do is to socially engineer the populous into a client fiefdom.

Updated,
I note that Robbie Millen has a similar view, but maybe puts it a little bit better,

What a bright idea: so the Government should stop splurging cash and influence on nutbag Muslim groups or those groups that equivocate about the loonies in their ranks. Perhaps I'm not being sophisticated, but you would have thought that Ministers might have got around to this sooner? Erm, and I'm going to get very controversial here, maybe the Government shouldn't have been giving our money to extremists in the first place. I guess Ministers were too busy bloviating about integration and devising cunning new ways of stopping people flying with harmless objects to actually do something so practical.