That Britain is, effectively, a secular state brooks little prospect of contradiction. This may be said despite the persistence of a variety of constitutional and legal arrangements which entrench certain religious facilities, and which protect and privilege a church that is established by law. Beyond the specific provisions which affect the Church of England, there are others which recognise and facilitate the exercise of religion more generally. The Church of England is still the residual legatee of a policy which, as Hooker put it, ‘there is not any man of the Church of England but the same is also a member of the commonwealth, nor any man a member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England’. If that Erastian formula is no longer warranted, none the less the spirit it exudes is still sufficiently in evidence to confer on the Church legitimacy and primacy in religious affairs. Its temporal head is the monarch, its senior officials are appointed by the Prime Minister in the name of the crown; its legal affairs are intimately bound up to the general legal system, and courts, presided over by regular lay lawyers, govern its practices, furbishments and the discipline of its personnel. It enjoys automatic financial concessions granted only on supplication to other religious bodies, and, perhaps above all, it is accorded the presidency on all state and civic occasions in which religious ministrations are called for – from mercifully rare coronations to regular daily prayers in parliament, from the launching of battleships and from armistice day parades, down to the opening of local civic buildings.