NewsBreakingOnline

Archbishop of Canterbury issues broadside against ‘radical policies’ and ‘big society’ project in New Statesman editorial Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, has issued a broadside against the coalition government, claiming it is forcing through “radical policies for which no one voted”. He also challenges the ‘big society’ project and criticises the government for continuing to blame the country’s difficulties entirely on the deficit it inherited from Labour. The comments come in an editorial he has written as guest editor of this week’s New Statesman magazine. Full extracts are not available , but Williams says the “anxiety and anger” felt by voters is a result of the coalition’s failure to expose its policies to “proper public argument”. He writes: “Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present.” Williams accepts that the government’s big society agenda is not a “cynical walking-away from the problem”. But he warns there is confusion about how voluntary organisations will “pick up the responsibilities shed by government”, and says that the big society is 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 writes. He also criticises 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 challenges 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 criticises “the steady pressure” to increase “punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system”. Westminster politics “feels pretty stuck” he warns, 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. The coalition is facing “bafflement and indignation” over its plans to reform the health service and education, he writes. “With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted,” the archbishop says. “At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context.” He complains that the 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 says. 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 writes: “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.” Rowan Williams Liberal-Conservative coalition Liberal Democrats Conservatives New Statesman Newspapers & magazines George Osborne Economic policy Education policy Religion Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk