Dr Rowan Williams has launched a sustained attack on the Coalition in the most outspoken political intervention by an Archbishop of Canterbury for a generation.Read the rest here.
He warns that the public is gripped by “fear” over the Government’s reforms to education, the NHS and the benefits system and accuses David Cameron and Nick Clegg of forcing through “radical policies for which no one voted”.
Openly questioning the democratic legitimacy of the Coalition, the Archbishop dismisses the Prime Minister’s “Big Society” as a “painfully stale” slogan, and claims that it is “not enough” for ministers to blame Britain’s economic and social problems on the last Labour government.
The comments come in an article he has written as guest editor of this week’s New Statesman magazine.
His two-page critique, titled “The government needs to know how afraid people are”, is the most forthright political criticism by such a senior cleric since Robert Runcie enraged Margaret Thatcher with a series of attacks in the 1980s.
Lambeth Palace is braced for an angry response but Dr Williams, who became Archbishop of Canterbury nine years ago, is understood to believe that the moment is right for him to enter the political debate.
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4 comments:
I'm in England at the moment. Rowan Williams is being dismissed on TV here as far-left (??).
The ABC is, however, a member of the House of Lords, so one can't say it's none of his business, exactly.
Other MPs are saying well, it's a free country, people can say what they please. Nobody will listen, of course (that part remains unsaid) and it doesn't matter what anybody thinks, even if it's the majority of the people.
In many respects, the politcal situation here is very similar to that in the USA.
I personally applaud the ABC.
Well done, Rowan Williams. I wonder if his Catholic counterpart will have the courage to stand beside the ABC.
Fear! Terror! Dread! Calamity!
It seems to me that what is happening in England is a necessary corrective to a bad situation, so naturally people's conservative, status-quo defending impulses come out. The Archbishop is just doing what many people do when they have to face reality: impeaching the motives and characters of people who have been dealt the unenviable task of making unavoidable changes.
I suppose the ABC's pontificating about politics is just part of his (thus far quite effective) plan of inaction in the face of the Anglican Communion's rapid disintegration into oblivion.
Britain, like most other places, no longer has the money nor the native birthrate to maintain its welfare state. +Rowan can wring his hands all he wants. Does he really think Middle Easterners and Eastern Europeans are coming there to pay taxes for his nursing home bills?
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