Established Church may live to regret the fight it picked with UK Government

By Keith Porteous Wood

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s plan of borrowing out of recession seems to have won the overwhelming support of Governments around the world to the point of forming a basis for an international recovery plan. The NSS is not party-politically aligned and is not expressing any opinion about the plan. But his Grace, Archbishop Williams, doubtless after prayerful reflection, has felt it incumbent on himself to dismiss the plan publicly as "the addict returning to the drug". This prompted Gordon Brown into invoking the bible to slap down the archbishop. Quoting the parable of the Good Samaritan, Mr Brown argued that the Government, "would not walk by on the other side" while families suffered. A wiser Dr Williams would have realised that he was biting the hand that fed him, but neither humility nor common sense is a job requirement: indeed history suggests they may even be a disadvantage to applicants. So Williams not only pressed on, but he did so even more intemperately than before by inviting a comparison between what he saw as Brown’s stubborn attachment to ideology and Nazi Germany.

So it is little wonder that five Anglican bishops presumably took a lead from their most senior prelate, and from his number two, the Archbishop of York, who has also lambasted the Government’s economic policy over the recession. Nor did the bishops confine their criticism to private meetings or correspondence: they did so with all the publicity they could muster, being quoted at length in the Sunday Telegraph on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year. And, like their leader, they did so in terms that even those inexpert in economic analysis would realise was ludicrously simplistic and exaggerated.

Most quoted was the Bishop of Manchester (Nigel McCulloch) who accused the (Labour) Government of being "morally corrupt" and "beguiled by money". The bishops of Carlisle, Durham, Hulme and Winchester also piled in with similar gusto.

The Episcopal ego trip has already backfired, and in the longer term may do so even more spectacularly. The Government, normally noted for its obsequiousness to the Church, closed ranks and blew the prelates out of the water. The Sunday Telegraph reported that “privately, senior Government figures [presumably including the Prime Minister] reacted with fury”. A senior source accused the bishops of a “totally unjustified political attack that is unrepresentative of the views of their dwindling congregations.” John McFall, a senior Labour MP and the chairman of the Commons Treasury Committee even went on record to ponder: “I don't know if at the bishops’ palaces there has been too much mulled wine passed around over the past few days.” Undeterred, the Bishop of London has now added similar fuel to the flames and the Archbishop Williams has taken another swipe at the Government in his New Year message.

Albeit these attacks by the Government on the Church were provoked, they are expressed in terms more cutting than the most strident National Secular Society press release. The attacks are unprecedented and are clear evidence of a serious deterioration in the relationship between Church and State. It is a relationship on which the Church is hugely dependent, but its arrogance and self-importance blinds it to this fact. Just a few weeks ago, several Labour MPs, including three former cabinet members, said they wanted the Government to press ahead with disestablishment of the Church. By the look of it, more senior figures may now be prepared to join them.

It was not just the Government that derided the prelates’ naïve outbursts. Kelvin McKenzie, former editor of the Sun, really laid into them on BBC1 television, describing what they said as “hot air”. The Church’s representative in the House of Commons Sir Stewart Bell (although admittedly also a Labour MP) went so far as to call it “nonsense”. He and I were on BBC Radio 5 Live for a half hour debate on what the bishops had said. Normally, Sir Stewart and I are fierce opponents, so it was a surreal experience to be on national radio with him united in tearing to shreds bishops of the Church he represents.

9 January 2009