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  1. Politics
12 June 2011

Canterbury tales

More comment on the Archbishop's NS guest-edit.

By Jonathan Derbyshire

Today, the Sunday papers are having their say on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarkable leading article in this week’s New Statesman, which he guest-edited. Here’s a roundup of the commentary.

Like most Fleet Street commentators, Matthew d’Ancona, in the Sunday Telegraph, reads Rowan Williams’s leader as “an astonishing attack on the Coalition”, passing over in silence the Archbishop’s observation that “we are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently [to the coalition government] and what a left-inspired version of localism might look like. D’Ancona spends some time examining Dr Williams’s claim – which has attracted most attention this week – that “we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no-one voted”. D’Ancona at least grasps, as many other commentators haven’t, that the Archbishop was not questioning the legitimacy of the coalition as such, but rather its mandate to carry out certain policies (especially in relation to public sector reform) that were not in either of the governing parties’ election manifestos. In response, he quotes from a recent book on the coalition by regular NS contributor Vernon Bogdanor:

As Vernon Bogdanor, David Cameron’s former tutor, argues in his book on the Coalition: “In future… if we are entering a world of hung parliaments, the manifesto will be seen as nothing more than a bargaining chip, parts of which can be done away with once the votes have been counted.” Lest we forget: Miliband himself was a member of Labour’s negotiating team in the post-election inter-party talks 13 months ago. In the unlikely event that he and his colleagues had cobbled together a “rainbow coalition”, would he – and indeed Dr Williams – have considered its decisions in government illegitimate, too?

In the same newspaper, Tim Montgomerie chastises the Archbishop for failing to acknowledge the role played by Christian Conservatives (like himself and Iain Duncan Smith) in the formulation of current government policy. Predictably, Montgomerie doesn’t mention that Dr Williams commissioned a column from IDS, in which the Work and Pensions Secretary defends the coalition’s welfare reforms. He’s more interested in reminding the Archbishop – as if he doesn’t know – that those reforms spring from the work that Duncan Smith and Montgomerie did together at the Centre for Social Justice, the right-wing thinktank formed after IDS visited the blighted Glasgow housing scheme of Easterhouse in 2002. (I discussed the work of the CSJ in an interview with Duncan Smith last year.) “Inspired by Catholic social teaching,” Montgomerie writes, “[Christian Conservatives] sought to build a Conservatism that was as serious about tackling social injustice and environmental pollution as it was about crime or red tape.” Montgomerie goes on:

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Conservatives believe government has an important role in providing a safety net for everyone – but that strong families, a good education and work are the best routes out of poverty. Sadly, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s New Statesman article leaned on the language of the Left, a language of spending and regulation.

That’s a crude misrepresentation of what the Archbishop wrote. Rather than dismissing the government’s welfare reforms out of hand, he urged ministers to present their message more clearly:

If what is in view – as Iain Duncan Smith argues passionately … – is real empowerment for communities of marginal people, we need better communication about strategic imperatives, more positive messages about what cannot and will not be left to chance …

There’s nothing there that suggests a statist contempt for “empowering” the poor and the “marginal”. Indeed, it seems to me that all the Archbishop is doing is suggesting that the government make Montgomerie’s point – that “Conservatives believe government has an important role in providing a safety net for everyone – but that strong families, a good education and work are the best routes out of poverty” – more sharply.

Neither d’Ancona nor Montgomerie questions the constitutional propriety of the Archbishop’s intervention. David Cameron didn’t query Dr Williams’s right to pronounce on public matters either; this was left to the odd Tory backwoodsman and people like Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, with whom I debated the question on Radio 4’s The World Tonight on Thursday. A leader in today’s Observer defends the Archbishop’s right to speak out:

[S]ome have argued that his intervention was misguided because the spiritual head of the Anglican church ought not to be getting political. We don’t agree. To his credit, neither does David Cameron. He was correct to say that Rowan Williams is entirely free to express opinions that the government disagrees with.

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