http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfo ... 339652.stm

I've read that article quite a few times and I still find it confusing

It’s the start of the formalisation of the Church of the Carbon Footprint.

Basically, if you decide to lead our life by a moral code that is not based in a religion, you can use the discrimination laws to protect you. That is what this person did.

I think it sets a worrying precedent.

For frak's sake.

Waste of fecking space. I cant believe rubbish like this is even given the time of day.

+1, and I sort of got that from one of the paragraphs, but the thing just got more confusing as it went on

I think you guys are letting anti-environmentalist paranoia affect your comprehension skills.

It's quite clear from the story that the case is about whether or not the guy lost his job for reasons other than those stated (the need to lay off non essential staff in a recession). The only relevance of the environmentalism issue is derived from the fact that he was employed in an environmental capacity.

Aside from that, what is wrong with being protected from dismissal from your job for holding a non religious ideological position? If you were sacked for being a Marxist, or voting Tory or whatever your dirty little secret may be, rather than doing something actually wrong, then you would deserve recompense. In this regard, being a Greeny is no different from being a Tory.

The actual downside of this story is that if he wins, he may set a precedent for BNP members who have been forced out of the army or police forces to make huge compensation claims.

Even on reading the story again, I'm still not sure as to what arguments both sides are using for me to determine what happened in the run-up to the appeal

That's because they aren't arguing about that yet.

I would assume that he went before an employment tribunal, and they ruled that the issue was outside their remit the law on what counts as a "religion, religious belief, or philosophical belief" is really rather vague.

So he had to go before a judge and argue that the law protects him against dismissal for being a greenyite on the grounds that this qualifies as "a philosophy"

The judge agreed so now he gets his day in court to argue about whether he was made redundant for normal reasons, or because he was annoyingly ecomaniacal. If the former, he loses, if the latter he gets money.

Now that the article has been updated, it reads a bit more clearly (and it's changed a fair bit too). We're still working on a fair bit of assumption here that could have been partially sorted out with a bit of a timeframe of events...