Archbishops Get Right-Wing Kicking

The Telegraph is less than happy: the rotten Anglican Archbishops are passing severely adverse comment on Government policy: “In a direct and unapologetically ‘political’ intervention timed for the beginning of the General Election campaign, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, warn party leaders are selling a ‘lie’ that economic growth is the answer to Britain’s social problems” tells John Bingham.

Although what Bingham describes is not addressed just to the Tories, as he concedes - “The challenge to politicians and voters alike is contained in a new volume of essays to be published next week, edited by the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, and including lengthy contributions from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, the former Labour Cabinet minister Lord Adonis and others” - their supporters don’t like it.

Good right-wingers have lined up to howl in protest, and demonstrate their conformity to Olbermann’s Dictum (“the right exists in a perpetual state of victimhood”). Fraser Nelson, given a platform by the Tel, sniffs “The Church’s clichéd attack on the party flies in the face of its record on jobs and welfare”, but then shoots himself in the foot by telling “If there were a Nobel prize for telling political porkies, George Osborne would win every year”.

Nelson knows all about “telling porkies”: it was he who asserted that the press had agreed to meet the Leveson recommendations “to the millimetre”, when they offered anything but. Daily Mail Comment is simply dismissive: “In many respects, the Church’s shamelessly political pamphlet – with its emotive yet lazy claim that, outside prosperous parts of the South, the country is ‘trapped in apparently inevitable decline’ – is simply wrong”.

But the Vagina Monologue clearly considers the Anglican hierarchy worthy of a more thorough kicking, and so has turned to Damian Thompson, clueless pundit of no fixed hair appointment, to conclude “make no mistake: the truth is that the Church of England tried to strangle the Thatcherite reforms that turned Britain into the economic capital of Europe”. What, we’re now Germany? Or did we become Switzerland already?

And then, to really take the Communion Wafer, has come the serially clueless Tim Montgomerie, writing for CapX, a steaming by-product of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). “The bias to London in infrastructure spending is being addressed as George Osborne sets out major plans to build new road and rail links across the North” he blusters. Very good Monty, try getting out of London more. So far it’s all hot air.

But on he ploughs: “None of this was adequately acknowledged in the latest deeply questionable intervention from the Church of England”. There’s loyalty for you: Monty worships at an Anglican Cathedral, yet has no problem in slagging off its Archbishops. He wouldn’t get far doing that in the secular part of his world, where he has shamelessly and totally sold his soul to Creepy Uncle Rupe.

The Church is entitled to ask these questions. The mean-spirited responses say far more about those responding than they do about the Anglican hierarchy.