Dr Rowan Williams “launches a sustained attack on the Coalition Government in the most outspoken political intervention by an Archbishop of Canterbury for a generation.”
The Daily Telegraph report on the Archbishop’s guest editorial for New Stateman magazine states:
He warns that the public is gripped by “fear” over the Government’s reforms to education, the NHS and the benefits system and accuses David Cameron and Nick Clegg of forcing through “radical policies for which no one voted”.
Openly questioning the democratic legitimacy of the Coalition, the Archbishop dismisses the Prime Minister’s “Big Society” as a “painfully stale” slogan, and claims that it is “not enough” for ministers to blame Britain’s economic and social problems on the last Labour government.
The comments come in an article he has written as guest editor of this week’s New Statesman magazine.
His two-page critique, titled “The government needs to know how afraid people are”, is the most forthright political criticism by such a senior cleric since Robert Runcie enraged Margaret Thatcher with a series of attacks in the 1980s.
Lambeth Palace is braced for an angry response but Dr Williams, who became Archbishop of Canterbury nine years ago, is understood to believe that the moment is right for him to enter the political debate.
In the article, seen by The Daily Telegraph, he says the Coalition must “clarify what it is aiming for” in key areas of policy.
The Archbishop warns that Westminster politics “feels pretty stuck”, 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 Tory-Lib Dem alliance.
It is his attacks on the Coalition’s flagship policies, especially those of Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, and Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, which will attract the most attention.
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.” Mr 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.
Dr 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.
More broadly, the Prime Minister’s “Big Society” is viewed with “widespread suspicion” as an “opportunistic” cover for spending cuts.
The Archbishop warns that Mr Cameron’s plan to give local and voluntary groups a greater role running services has created concern that the Government will abandon its responsibility for tackling child poverty, illiteracy, and increasing access to the best schools.
“Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around questions such as these at present,” he says.
“It isn’t enough to respond with what sounds like a mixture of ‘This has been exposed to proper public argument” has created “anxiety and anger”.
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.
More broadly, the Prime Minister’s “Big Society” is viewed as an “opportunistic” cover for spending cuts.
The Archbishop warns that Mr Cameron’s plan to give local and voluntary groups a greater role running services has created concern that the Government will abandon its responsibility for tackling child poverty, illiteracy, and increasing access to the best schools. “Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around questions such as these at present,” he says.
The Archbishop reserves some of his harshest words for the programme of benefit reforms drawn up by Mr Duncan Smith, who also contributes to this week’s magazine, lamenting the “quiet resurgence of the seductive language of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor”.