Fury as Welby says economy is ‘ broken and unequal’
Archbishop backs report by Blairite think-tank that calls for higher taxes and says: UK must renew its values
THE Archbishop of Canterbury last night said Britain’s economic model was ‘broken’ as he backed a report calling for higher taxes on the rich to tackle inequality.
In a highly political intervention, the Most Reverend Justin Welby said the UK stood at a watershed and claimed half of households had seen no meaningful income boost for a decade.
He suggested that youngsters were left behind while the richest had enjoyed runaway pay rises. Many had seen their living standards fall, with the gap between rich and poor destabilising the country.
He also called on Britain to renew its values and implement a fairer tax system to address a ‘ profound state of economic injustice’.
The Archbishop made his controversial remarks in an article for the Financial Times as he backed a report from a Left-wing thinktank on the issue of economic justice in Britain’s economy.
Archbishop Welby was also quoted in the report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, once described as New Labour’s favourite think-tank.
Last night, critics attacked the Archbishop – with Conservative MPs pointing out that Britain had record employment and describing his claim of a broken economy as ‘absurd’. They pointed to recent reports that suggested income inequality had actually narrowed.
Religious figures also suggested that the Archbishop should concentrate on the ‘spiritual crisis’ facing the country following news that more than half of Britons now identify as having no religion.
The IPPR report claimed Britain was stuck in the longest period of earnings stagnation for 150 years and that the wealth generated by economic growth has gone into profits rather than wages.
The report was produced by a 24-person Commission on Economic Justice assembled by the group, which included figures with prominent Labour Party or trade union connections, as well as some leading business figures.
The report painted a picture of unrelieved gloom. It said Britain was the ‘ most geographically unbalanced country in Europe’ and that more workers were on low pay than a decade ago.
It claimed Britain was ‘the most unequal’ of western European countries, and said nearly a third of children live in poverty.
Among other solutions, it called for stronger trade unions and a better distribution of wealth, potentially through new taxes. The Archbishop’s contribution produced dismay among some Church figures.
Andrea Minichiello Williams, a member of the CofE’s parliament, the General Synod, said: ‘We are in a spiritual crisis, and a reason we are in a spiritual crisis is that the Church of England has not taught Christianity. If the Church was to do its own work properly, then we might see the country flourishing in all areas of life.’
Tory MP Sir Paul Beresford said employment was at record levels and factory output was soaring. He added: ‘ Foreign firms are queueing up to invest. If the economy was broken that wouldn’t happen.’ Former minister Sir Gerald Howarth added: ‘The idea that the economy is broken is absurd. The IPPR is looking at a return to the Seventies and policies that would wreck the economy.’
A Treasury spokesman said: ‘We need to improve our productivity so we can build an economy that works for everyone. That is why we are investing £ 23billion in improving infrastructure, R&D and housing while reforming technical education for the high-paid, high-skilled jobs of the future.’
FINDING hope amid despair, a flicker of light in the blackest tunnel, is a key Christian virtue. Even so, for us proud Anglicans yesterday’s news about the latest churchgoing habits was pretty bleak.
The British Social Attitudes survey found the number of people who belong to a religion has for the first time dropped below half of the population.
Only 47 per cent of us now align ourselves with an organised religion and only 15 per cent say we follow the Church of England. Fifteen per cent!
As the U.S. novelist Raymond Chandler nearly said, it’s enough to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained- glass window. If only they would.
Cliches
Unfortunately, today’s bishops are too wet to be stirred to such action.
As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, he only seems interested in issuing Left-wing cliches about Brexit and egalitarianism.
The fundamentals and the mysteries of belief never seem to pass the lips of this outwardly dull ex-oil executive.
Yesterday’s statistics suggest the C of E is in a dire state.
Here is a once mighty civilising influence, an institution which from the time of Henry VIII has helped mould our sense of national identity and the British character.
It has for 500 years helped the poor and spread ideas of mercy and justice. Its Book Of Common Prayer and King James Bibles are wonders of world literature. This most lyrically Protestant of Churches has for half a millennium defined laws and inner horizons on morality and mortality.
Now barely one in six of us admits to being an Anglican and more than half of us set our faces against any organised idea of the spiritual and transcendent.
In other words, when our loved ones die, more than 50 per cent of us stonily refuse to countenance any glimmer of optimism that their souls may have passed elsewhere, and accept some cold, ultra-rationalist view that we humans are no more than a mere bagatelle of skin and gristle, extinguished at death as surely as a guttering candle.
How did Archbishop Welby respond to yesterday’s depressing social attitudes figures?
I wish I could say he met this crisis head-on, saying he understood or disputed the findings. I wish I could tell you he knelt in Trafalgar Square in public penance, or issued a fire-andbrimstone sermon, or told a joke, or issued a blood-curdling curse on all our houses.
Instead, he gave us his views on . . . the economy. He was putting his name to a report by a Blairite think-tank about economic justice and telling us (not that anyone was listening) Britain’s ‘economic model is broken’ and ‘we need to make fundamental choices about the sort of economy we need’.
Oh, and he was writing an opinion article for the Financial Times. That’s really going to bring in the faithful.
The report promoted yesterday by Welby had all the usual buzzwords and phrases of the London centre- Left: social commission . . . gap between rich and poor . . . new vision for the economy . . . zzzzzz.
If there is anything deader than the Church of England it is the language of our patronising, technocratic, liberal Archbishop Welby, fiddling as Christian England burns.
As a deputy warden of a (healthy) Herefordshire church and the husband of a countrychurch organist, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or rage, like some helmeted Crusader, at my Church’s travails.
Most of my fellow congregants will probably just fall back on the numb hope that in due course, as has been the way in history, churchgoing attitudes will change and the British people will again start asking themselves questions about death and the daunting hereafter.
It happened in the Dark Ages and in the 19th century, when congregations revived. But history does not always repeat itself and this is no time for complacency. If trends continue, we could face the effective disappearance of Christianity from these islands. What will replace it? Islam?
The Anglican hierarchy should formulate a plan to stem this decline in church attendances, but is pathetically ill-matched to the task.
Some might ask: what is the point of the Church of England? But it boils down, in the short term, to something more awkwardly personal: What is the point of the Archbishop of Canterbury?
I have never met Justin Welby. I suspect he is a godly and devout and honourable man.
The tragedy is he cannot radiate those qualities. I know it is uncharitable to say, but he is proving a dud. A non-event.
He’s a Blairite/ Cameroon archbish for a Brexit/Trump/ Corbyn age.
His activities yesterday said it all. Instead of concentrating on his day job — trying to fill emptying pews — he was filling his time with the Institute for Public Policy Research, a Centrist Establishment body loved by New Labour.
Snooty
Remote, snooty language about economic emancipation and social inclusion may go down well with civil servants and BBC managers, but it bores the bejaysus out of the British public. It’s a disaster that Archbishop Welby, who as I say is no doubt a sincere and clever man, cannot see this. He leads a Church which often tells us money is far from everything, yet here he was gazing into his navel about the economy.
As our leading churchman, he has an unrivalled pulpit to speak about spiritual matters.
He must surely have insights about death and eternity, if there be such a thing. Steeped in scripture as he is, he can teach us what wise prophets of the past thought and taught.
Yet he settles for blethering away at a think-tank about economic inequality.
When not trotting out Left-wing theories about egalitarianism, the Archbishop has given us his thoughts on Brexit, which he plainly dislikes. He has made life hard for Theresa May by saying her chances of a successful split from the EU by 2019 are ‘infinitesimally small’.
Vicar’s daughter Mrs May might have been well disposed to the Archbishop, but Downing Street has come to regard him as an irrelevant bore.
Welby talks of ‘the poison’ of the Brexit debate, plainly meaning pro-Brexiteers are responsible for that poison, not his friends in the hardline Remain camp.
Woeful
The bishops are out of step with many Anglican churchgoers on Brexit. After last year’s EU referendum, one Sunday we were lectured with an episcopal letter saying what a disaster it was.
I don’t suppose a single person in church that day agreed with our bishop on the matter — yet we had this political view rammed down our gullets in the name of religion.
What the heck has Brexit got to do with religion?
Margaret Thatcher (another churchgoer snobbishly alienated by senior Anglicans) said if you stand in the middle of the road, you will be run down from both directions.
The same is true in ecclesiastical leadership. In recent decades, top Anglicans have been terrified of being outspoken, one way or the other. Apologised almost for their own shadows. They have wrung their hands instead of wringing our withers.
And how topsy-turvy things have become. Even yesterday, while Welby droned on about the economy, Tory ex-leader Iain Duncan Smith and 43 other MPs were talking about a need for Britain to devote more importance to family life. We seldom hear such forthright words from the priesthood.
I believe the Church of England will survive and prosper. It will do so from two ends of the spectrum — its evangelical and its traditional wings, which both offer a clear view.
The one part of Anglicanism doomed to failure, alas, is the Centrist element personified by its current leader, the woeful Welby.