There is a clear feeling that the debate around our public services is so fundamental that it cannot be left just to politicians and those who run the services. Enter the church
David Brindle writing in The Guardian yesterday states:
Doubtless the Downing Street radar will have clocked the fact that the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, is to be the closing speaker at the Guardian Public Services Summit on Friday. It is probably noted in a fat No 10 file marked “Turbulent Priests”.
Just as his mentor Lady Thatcher famously had trouble with the church, David Cameron is finding bishops can be bothersome. Their pivotal part in the House of Lords amendments of the welfare reform bill, due back today in the Commons, has been a source of considerable annoyance to ministers.
Next week, the church’s General Synod will discuss the NHS. We can safely assume it will not be giving a warm welcome to the changes set out in the health and social care bill. As an official preview puts it: “The Church of England has always had a strong commitment to the ideals of the NHS. The debate will give the synod an opportunity to offer public expression of the church’s concerns and priorities in the light of its vocation to seek health and healing.”
There are those – not necessarily on the political right – who question the church’s “meddling” in affairs of state. But it can justifiably claim to have a longstanding interest in the way we have run our public services for the past 64 years. Indeed, it can claim a founding interest in the 1948 system.
Although the precise origin of the term “welfare state” is open to debate, historians agree that it was popularised by the then Archbishop of York, William Temple, who in 1941 published a book, Citizen and Churchman, in which he contrasted the “welfare-state” with the fascist “power-state” and defined its role in supporting the vulnerable. Just months previously, Anglican, Roman Catholic and Free Church leaders had united behind a wartime manifesto, Foundations for Peace, which called for abolition of extreme inequality and a guarantee of equal educational opportunities for all children.
In 1942, Temple, by then Archbishop of Canterbury, addressed the Industrial Christian Fellowship at the Albert Hall. Astonishingly, 10,000 people turned up to support demands for post-war central planning of employment, housing and social security.
So church leaders who face questioning of their credentials for intervening in matters temporal can point to a rich tradition. And they can do their pointing with dirty hands: any vision of a “big society” must involve the church and other faith groups because they are already engaged in such work on the ground. The Church Urban Fund, set up by the Church of England in 1987 after its Faith in the City report which so riled Thatcher, continues to support more than 300 projects in the inner cities every year. The Church and Community Fund has for almost a century backed small but vital schemes that support homeless people and others in need. And in leading the argument for raising the benefits cap proposed in the welfare reform bill, the Children’s Society, the church’s partner charity, has been speaking with the authority of an organisation that annually provides £40m of services for disadvantaged youngsters.
But history and the church’s good works are not the only reasons for inviting Chartres to address the Guardian summit. For there is a clear feeling that the current debate around our public services is so fundamental that it cannot be left just to politicians and those who run the services. If we are to hack off bits of the welfare state in response to the fiscal crisis, then we face moral and ethical questions that take us back to Temple and those wartime dialectics. Some would say the butchery has already begun.
• David Brindle is the Guardian’s public services editor.