Did Archbishop Williams ‘misjudge the political mood’ ?

Contrary to the declaration in the Daily Mail that the Archbishop Rowan Williams had ‘misjudged the political mood’ in his trenchant call to the powerful and privileged in his Jubilee congregation to stand up against the “ludicrous financial greed, of environmental recklessness, of collective fear of strangers and collective contempt for the unsuccessful and marginal”, his message has proved to be prophetic.

Even as the Archbishop was delivering his sermon, the modern day morality tale of the nexus between the powerful and the powerless was unfolding under the shadow of London Bridge, the site through which the pomp and pageantry of the Queen’s diamond jubilee regatta was flowing.

The 'collective contempt' of the privileged and rich towards the “unsuccessful and marginal “ that the Archbishop referred to was clearly closer to home than any of the congregation envisaged. 80 jobseekers and apprentices - designated as stewards for the Jubilee celebrations - were being bussed into London in the middle of the night from the South West.

In a scene reminiscent of Dickensian England executives of Close Protection UK - funded through a lucrative welfare-to work contract - thought it acceptable to expect the unemployed to sleep under London Bridge and an ill-equipped campsite without basic sleeping, toilet or changing facilities for a paltry £2.80 per hour for 14-hour shifts.

The long shadow of the Occupy protestors – the symbolic 99% protesting against the greed of the 1% - who had turned St. Paul’s Cathedral into a battleground between the 'Davids' defending deprived communities and the Goliath ‘Masters’ of the square mile, must have shaped the Archbishop’s reflections.

The Church’s role as the conscience of the nation is not new. The arc of history knits the exploitation of labour in the industrial era with the contemporary reality of austerity Britain in the new millennium. In 2012, inequality has returned to 1918 levels with the average pay of chief executives being £4.2 million or 162 times the British average. With the stratification of society becoming increasingly institutionalized, paying heed to the Archbishop’s call to communitarianism, requires nothing less than a Damascene conversion.

For a government that has shaped a political ideology on the triptych of commerce, consumerism and cuts, the likelihood of creating a society that transcends “narrow individual fulfillmen”for the greater good lies within the realms of an alternate universe.

Instead the values that defined organisations working for the common good - charities like Tomorrow’s People (whose CEO, Baroness Scott, is a Tory peer) who secured the initial £3 million Work Programme contract which was in turn sub-contracted to Close Protection UK- have morphed into entities that mimic the ethos of the private sector i.e. putting profit before people.

Similarly, the scandal surrounding another Work Programme contractor - A4E currently under investigation for fraud amounting to millions of pounds of public monies - should not surprise us. The raft of measures announced by the government to reduce the burdens on businesses by rolling back equality, health and safety and scrutiny safeguards have effectively licensed greed and taken away any measure of state protection offered to the most vulnerable.

The Archbishop’s address exposes the dark underbelly that is the flipside of political, economic and class privilege. It forces us to look beyond the labels that those in power ascribe to the powerless – scroungers, benefit cheats, wanton criminals – by flipping the mirror which reflects back the rapaciousness of the MPs caught with their fingers in the public till, the offshore tax fugitives, the self-interested donors filling the party coffers etc. While the state censures the summer rioters with heavy prison sentences, the self-same state aids and abets Work Programme contractors in their criminality through their regime of light touch regulation.

In the days and weeks to come the call for an inquiry into the Close Protection UK scandal will no doubt dominate many a political pundits’ commentary. The politicians will - to use a biblical allusion - do a Pontius Pilate and wash their hands of this sorry affair.

The truth is that the outgoing Archbishop has succeeded in pricking the conscience of the government in his steadfast commitment to preaching the message of social justice and equality. The voices of Tory dissent have been gathering apace for some time, calling for a more traditionalist candidate to succeed the ‘liberal’ and reformist incumbent. Whoever replaces him, Rowan Williams’ call for each of us to “show honour, extend hospitality to strangers, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep, live in harmony with one another” must remain the Church’s clarion call if it is to remain relevant to the aspirations of those without voice, power or influence.

Ratna Lachman, Director Just West Yorkshire