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Justin Welby v David Cameron: the Anglican Church is now the Labour Party at prayer
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| Contributor | Homegrown Democrat |
| Last Edited | Homegrown Democrat Mar 12, 2013 06:48pm |
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| Category | Blog Entry |
| Author | Tim Stanley |
| News Date | Tuesday, March 12, 2013 12:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, has launched an attack on the Government’s welfare reforms, arguing that they will throw some 200,000 children into poverty. This spat has the feeling of the kind of grand philosophical struggle that we tend to avoid in the UK – a socialist priest vs a conservative prime minister. But it comes with a reassuringly British twist: both men went to the same school. If they abolished Eton, I sometimes wonder who would be left to run this country. Harrovians?
Of course, Welby is less a revolutionary than a nice man doing what he thinks is his duty as a Christian. In this instance, he is mistaken. There is nothing Christian about “parking” people on welfare, shuffling them from one type of assistance to another and slowly cutting them off from the labour market. There is nothing Christian about a society in which whole generations of a family survive hand-to-mouth off the state, or in which a small minority make their living off the largesse of everyone else. We might be called to “render unto Caesar” a little tax money now and again, but there is also nothing Christian about a tax system that fleeces hard earners and then redistributes the money to privileged groups with little need for it (“thou shalt means test the winter fuel allowance”). What Welby is defending is less a Christian settlement than a socialist one. It says a lot about the establishment of the Anglican Church that they can’t tell the difference. |
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