26th July 2013

So the Chancellor says that it’s his plan we’re all going to do well. We’re all in this together and we’ll all do well together, North and South, Plutocrat and Pauper. Tosh! If you believe that you’ll believe anything. If he believes his Orwellian statement which flies in the face of the evidence that with perilously few exceptions incomes are falling and none faster than those who rely on state funded benefits either through welfare benefits or tax allowances. But as the threatening billboards tour the country on the sides of delivery vans one group of people who won’t believe it are those who came here for a better life. As I was told in Italy last week by someone whose ambition it is to move to the UK, we just feel more comfortable speaking English. As one of today’s crossword clues captured it: A number of countries under one ruler? Answer: Empire. We English travelled the world, annexed it and demanded that folk spoke English, now they see the opportunity to flourish in the home of the language they were forced to learn, that is of course why the ridiculous, threatening billboards are in English, so that they will be understood, and what they say is, you’re not welcome here. A view reinforced when people from commonwealth countries are required to pay substantial bonds before they are allowed to visit. But were we ever welcome there? I guess that the Archbishop of York would know? The Ex Pat Ex Ugandan Judge is now launching a campaign to improve the pay of the low paid. Very correctly he identifies the problem of a Government subsidising businesses by offering various benefits to enable the low pay to actually survive in the low wage economy. The co-op is seeking, with the encouragement of its members, to implement the living wage but as the management of the Co-op as a business stress the ultimate impact is on the bottom line, profit. Is this what George Osborne means, that he will support the campaign to improve pay at the lower end of the income scale? I wonder how the Ugandan ex Pat Archbishop feels when he sees the Billboards, but then he is a legal immigrant. And his counterpart in Canterbury is going head to head with Wonga. By some strange, magic wave of his Arch-episcopate crook he is going to turn how many thousand Church of England Churches into Credit Union HQ’s. Gaining him a host of mainly, it seems, female fans amongst the commentariat. Of course that can only happen after the Church has disinvested in the Wonga holding company, which was apparently slightly embarrassing to the ex Oil Executive, Archbishop ‘light’ Welby, but he presses on regardless with his plan. When I started a community project in North Tyneside in the early eighties it took a good deal of lobbying before the church even began to take the reality of poverty seriously. Only after CAP and Faith in the City did the churches begin to engage with the realities of poverty in the urban, inner city and outer estate communities. It took seven years to launch a successful credit union so I am not sure that time is on the Archbishop’s side. I recall one meeting with Sir Richard O’Brien Chair of Faith in the City when person after person stood up to say that they simply could not afford to attend church because they had nothing for the collection. A conference I ran at the Cathedral in Newcastle drew a large group of people from an outer estate when I mentioned their expenses for travel there was an embarrassed smile as they revealed their strategy for travelling affordably on the Metro. So I wish Archbishop Welby well. After Rowan Williams’ poetry we turn to his successors’ concern with poverty and with Bankers. Now that I am retired I look back on a working life as a Parish Priest, qualifying as we did as a family for benefits and free school meals whilst still being one of the most affluent families in the Parish and wonder whether the effort (and the contradiction) was worthwhile? For me, now that I am a Church Pensioner, the jury is still out ………