From Robert Runcie’s attack on Tory Pharisees to Rowan Williams’s missives on the Iraq war, the ecclesiastical opposition housed in Lambeth Palace has in recent times been a frequent source of unease to the government of the day. If any ministers were hoping Justin Welby would be a quieter presence than his predecessor, they were disabused of this notion last weekend when, before even waiting for his enthronement, he backed a letter signed by 43 bishops attacking welfare cuts. The letter claimed that the proposed changes would throw 200,000 children into poverty.
It is understandable that the new archbishop felt obliged to sign the letter: this peculiar way of viewing child poverty has been woven into the Lambeth creed under Rowan Williams. It is an old trick. An arbitrary poverty line is drawn, and if a family’s income is £1 below it, then their children are said to have fallen into poverty. If tax credits put them just above this threshold, the children are deemed to have been ‘lifted out of poverty’.
One can search the Bible in vain for such a definition — the Good Samaritan hardly stood on the roadside with a calculator and a tax credit application form. But over the years, the Church of England’s interventions on social policy have been reduced to stone-throwing, easy protests and signing themselves up to the fashionable orthodoxy of the day. This is a great pity given the vast extent of the Church’s own social outreach — volunteers who are, in hundreds of ways, improving the lives of the poor.
But it was encouraging to see that when the archbishop spoke on his own terms, in a blog, he showed a keen understanding of the problems created by the welfare system as well as a respect for the man charged with sorting out the mess, Iain Duncan Smith. The nub of the issue, Dr Welby recognised, is that the welfare system is a trap. Try to escape by getting a job and you may be penalised, which in turn will put you back on welfare dependency, which in turn will have corrosive effects on the ambitions of your family. Welby, unlike many senior Anglicans, has first-hand experience of dealing with the families caught in this trap.
He recounted conversations with parishioners during his time as a parish priest: when they tried to take on extra work they found themselves in receipt of less money. This was — and remains — an outrage. This explains why foreign-born workers account for most of the rise in employment that David Cameron likes to boast about. Our own people are still paid to do nothing. This is not just an economic failure but a moral failure, as Welby pointed out. The welfare state is not a safety net but ‘a system that most people admit is shot full of holes, wrong incentives, and incredible complexity’.
Conservatives in recent years have frequently been accused of following a free-market ideology which is at odds with Christian teachings — but only by those who make a greater mistake. That is, to judge a policy by its intentions, not its results. However well-intentioned the last Labour government was, it failed to make serious progress on poverty because it consigned so many to a life of welfare dependency. A theme of self-reliance runs through the Bible, too. Universal credit, hinted Dr Welby, is a noble reform — even if he cavils at a real-terms reduction in benefits.
With his background in business, Dr Welby brings a very different outlook to the Church of England to that of Dr Williams, an aloof academic whose interventions in public debate were often diminished in their effect by dry and plodding prose. Not only is Welby’s understanding of economic reality much greater, he communicates in terms which are understandable to people without a degree in theology.
With the Catholic church struggling to make its voice heard above the child abuse scandals, Welby has an even greater opportunity to seize moral leadership. He cannot take a partisan stance in political debate, but neither should he shy away from speaking on subjects such as taxation, crime, defence and all the other issues which make up the business of the state.
Western churches were not born as obscure sects catering for a religious fringe, but as institutions at the heart of government. It is much to the benefit of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards that it has the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting on it. If ever there was an example of how modern society occasionally loses its moral underpinnings, it is the parts of the banking system over the past couple of decades where greed was allowed to block out any kind of responsibility towards others.
In Justin Welby, David Cameron has an intelligent, clear and independent critic of government policy who is prepared to debate, not just deliver lofty sermons. His enthronement presents a chance for the relationship between Downing Street and Lambeth Palace to be better than it has been for a generation. A more positive relationship with the Church of England is an important part of the process by which the Conservatives can make themselves once more a party which can reach across the whole country.
Comments