Archbishops attack coalition for ‘evil’ of inequality

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have risked infuriating Tory leaders with a blistering attack on the coalition government for abandoning Britain’s poorest people while allowing the rich to get richer. They question David Cameron’s mantra “We're all in this together” and condemn inequality as “evil”.

The attack comes in a volume of essays titled On Rock or Sand?, to be published next week and seen by the Daily Telegraph.

The two archbishops – Justin Welby of Canterbury and John Sentamu of York - say the Christian values of solidarity and selflessness have been discarded in favour of “every person for themselves” with “rampant consumerism and individualism” dominating politics since the 1980s.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Church of England has strayed a long way from the days when it was described as “the Tory Party at prayer”. But the attack will anger many Tories because it undermines the central plank of their election strategy - that the economy is working again - and comes only hours after George Osborne was boasting that the UK has the “discipline and the ambition” to “become the most prosperous of any major economy by the 2030s”.

In a speech to the Royal Economic Society, the Chancellor said that becoming the richest G7 country in the world would will “not [be] easy to achieve but I believe we should set our expectations high”.

Tories had hoped that in Welby - a former oil trader in the City – they had found an Archbishop of Canterbury who would be more sympathetic than the “bearded leftie” Rowan Williams who preceded him.

Yet Welby writes that “entire towns and regions” are now “trapped in an apparently inescapable economic downward spiral” made worse by the government’s austerity policies. “We believe that if we can fix the economy, the fixing of human beings will automatically follow,” says Welby. “That is a lie.”

• Countdown to 7 May: Check The Week’s daily election round-up

The book advocates a new redistribution of wealth, quoting the slogan popularised by Karl Marx: “From each, according to his resources, to each, according to his need.”

Questioned by the Telegraph, Dr Sentamu acknowledged: “That sounds extremely left-wing doesn’t it? The truth is it is the theology of where I am coming from.

“If God has created us unique, [and] all of us have got his image and likeness, is it ever right that I should have more when somebody else has nothing?”

The Telegraph says the new book invites comparisons with Faith in the City, the Church of England report published 30 years ago which was attacked by Conservatives as “pure Marxist theology”.

In his conclusion, Sentamu hails that 1985 report as a “courageous witness” to Christian values, and laments how the Church “lost its nerve” in the face of “savage attack” from the Thatcher government.

Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, who is in Washington to launch an international “inclusive prosperity” report today, has never worn his religion on his sleeve but he may count his blessings this morning. The only snag is that it might be too left-wing for Labour even under ‘Red Ed’ Miliband.