Downing Street hits back at archbishop’s broadside

No 10 rejects claim by Rowan Williams that the government is forcing through ‘radical policies for which no one voted’ Downing Street has hit back at claims made by the head of the Church of England that the coalition government is forcing through “radical policies for which no one voted”. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, issued a broadside in which he also challenged the “big society” project and criticised the government for continuing to blame the country’s difficulties entirely on the deficit it inherited from Labour. Downing Street reacted swiftly to Williams’ comments, made in an editorial written as guest editor of this week’s New Statesman magazine. The government was taking the action needed to deal with the problems facing the country, a Downing Street spokesman said. “This government was elected to tackle the UK’s deep-rooted problems. Its clear policies on education, welfare, health and the economy are necessary to ensure we’re on the right track.” Williams wrote that the coalition is facing “bafflement and indignation” over its plans to reform the health service and education. “With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” he wrote. “At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context.” Vince Cable said he was “baffled” by the criticism, particularly on health reforms. Cable told Sky News: “I was a little bit baffled by criticism, as he was talking about the lack of debate around health reform, but actually, there is intense debate around health reform. My party in particular has raised the whole issue about whether we should be proceeding in this present form. There’s vigorous debate in the press and parliament and in the public. Clearly he’s entitled to speak up but it’s a very odd criticism.” Williams’ comments appear unusually critical of the government for a head of the Church of England. But former prime minister Tony Blair said senior clergy attacking government policy was nothing new. “I seem to remember, going back to when I started in parliament in 1983, that bishops attacking government is a pretty recurrent headline,” he told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme. “He is entitled to speak his mind. I remember people used to criticise our policies, not just on foreign policy and Iraq but on domestic policy and reform as well. It is just part of the way things work. I should imagine the government will say they are relaxed about it, and just get on with the things they want to do.” Williams accepted that the government’s big society agenda was not a “cynical walking-away from the problem”. But he warned there was confusion about how voluntary organisations will “pick up the responsibilities shed by government”, and said that the big society was seen with “widespread suspicion”. “The uncomfortable truth is that, while grass-roots initiatives and local mutualism are to be found flourishing in a great many places, they have been weakened by several decades of cultural fragmentation,” Williams wrote. He also criticised the chancellor, George Osborne, saying: “It isn’t enough to respond with what sounds like a mixture of, ‘this is the last government’s legacy’ and, ‘we’d like to do more, but just wait until the economy recovers a bit.’” The archbishop challenged the government’s approach to welfare reform, complaining of a “quiet resurgence of the seductive language of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor”. In comments directed at the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, Williams criticised “the steady pressure” to increase “punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system”. Westminster politics “feels pretty stuck” he warned, adding that his aim is to stimulate “a livelier debate” and to challenge the left to develop its own “big idea” as an alternative to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat alliance. He complained that education secretary Michael Gove’s free-school reforms passed through parliament last summer with little debate, using a timetable previously reserved for emergency anti-terrorism laws. Separate reforms to universities will see tuition fees treble and funding for humanities courses cut. Williams says education “might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing”. But “the feeling that not enough has been exposed to proper public argument” has created “anxiety and anger” in the country. Britain needs a long-term education policy “that will deliver the critical tools for democratic involvement, not simply skills that serve the economy”, he said. Lord Tebbit, former Conservative chairman and cabinet minister, said it was part of the archbishop of Canterbury’s job to “make comments of a political kind in this area”. Tebbit, a critic of the coalition, told Today that Williams was highlighting a “problem of coalition”. “He is quite right that there are policies of the coalition for which nobody seemed to vote, and policies for which people voted which are not being carried through by the coalition,” he said. “But that is the problem of coalition.” In a separate guest column for the magazine, the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, argues that religion already does the big society’s job – and does it better. Sacks wrote: “A powerful store of social capital still exists. It is called religion: the churches, synagogues and other places of worship that still bring people together in shared belonging and mutual responsibility. The evidence shows that religious people – defined by regular attendance at a place of worship – actually do make better neighbours”. The reason for this is simple, Sacks argues: “Religion creates community, community creates altruism and altruism turns us away from self and towards the common good.” Liberal-Conservative coalition Rowan Williams Religion Patrick Wintour Hélène Mulholland guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 9, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.