Bish bash and a load of tosh

IT all started so well for Justin Welby at the TUC Congress.

The Archbishop of Canterbury received a standing ovation at the event in Manchester for a major speech in which he blasted “vast companies like Amazon” who he said “can get away with paying almost nothing in tax”.

And he was praised for saying zerohours contracts were the “reincarnation of an ancient evil”.

Less than 24 hours later it started to unravel when it emerged the Church of England invests heavily in – Amazon.

Church staff also came forward to say that people who worked for it were employed on zero-hour contracts.

So far, so terrible. Whoever briefed the archbishop, pictured below, or helped prepare his speech could well be looking for a new contract of their own.

The hypocrisy is undeniable. You can’t lay into a company for having an ethically dubious stance on paying taxes while benefiting from heavy investments in that company.

And you can’t call for the end of zero-hour contracts when your organisation employs people on those contracts.

Many of Archbishop Welby’s critics were Conservatives who felt his views were too similar to Labour policy – and they seized the opportunity to have a go at him. But it wasn’t just Tories who piled in. People questioned why the Church was sitting on a share portfolio worth £25billion while parishioners were fundraising to repair churches and congregations were digging deep to put money into the Sunday collection plates.

Now this has all come to light, you would expect the Church of England to disinvest from the tech giant it has accused of not paying “a real living wage” and “leeching off the taxpayer”.

But no. They say the most effective way to change things is to “be in the room with these companies”.

This is absurd. As shareholders they don’t seem to have managed to make things better for the workers or changed the amount of tax paid.

Faith organisations are at the forefront of helping the most needy in society. They provide food banks, are involved in running thousands of schools and plug gaps filled by local authority cuts.

Archbishop Welby should absolutely be speaking out on these issues and, if nothing else, he’s helped to put them back on the agenda at a time when Brexit is overshadowing everything.

But he also has an obligation to practise what he preaches. If he believes Amazon is so evil he should put his money where his mouth is and have nothing more to do with them. Otherwise people will just stop listening to what he has to say. And that would be a shame.