Bishops and Benefits.
Analysis and prescription.
I had a small, bit part, in Faith in the City., it was largely a walk on role rather than a speaking part.
I was asked by the Bishop of the Diocese where I worked to write the Diocesan Submission to the Commission established by Robert Runcie.
The essence of my report came from a comment, actually made later and directly to the Commission by an officer of the Local Authority, the North East has three problems, Poverty, Poverty, Poverty.
My second involvement was to make all the arrangements for the Commission's visit to the North East.
The commissioners heard again and again about too much week at the end of the money, shame at not being able to afford to house, feed or clothe families adequately and not attending Church because people had no money for the collection.
When the report was published there was a follow up conference in Newcastle and I made a slide presentation of inner city and outer estate poverty with a voice over that I scripted.
After it was shown the Chairman commented that the problem here is that anyone can be good at analysis but what is needed is a prescription that helps to change things for the better.
The analysis offered by Faith in the City was sharp and clear but the failure of the document was that the prescription offered was to put it crudely more welfare which raises the inevitable question can you solve the problem of welfare dependency by prescribing more welfare?
Clearly at one level if you simply don't have enough money to house, feed and clothe your family then more money will help but if there are deeper underlying structural problems within the economy both nationally and locally more money is not the entire answer.
Now the Bishop's have written a Pastoral Letter which follows hard on the heels of the Archbishop's book Rock and Sand.
So is this meddling in politics?
Is it partisan?
Is it interfering with the political process which is the purview of politicians and no-one else?
Both documents manage to combine a degree of wisdom with a sense of looking for justice for the poorest in society.
The notion that those with the broadest shoulders should share a greater part of the burden of austerity should seem to most sensible people to be a reasonable idea. It is certainly not a Marxist view, if anything it is a compassionate view and one that arises out of the Christian ideal of 'the common good'.
Rather than condemning the con-dems in fact the Bishop's seem to be calling for the ideal of 'the big society' to be reclaimed and re-worked.
Whilst the right of centre press have described the pastoral letter as Tory bashing in fact the bishop's analysis is pretty consistent with that of the Tory Party and their prescription is pretty anodyne with the possible exception of a mild slap on the wrist for for describing people on welfare as undeserving.
What I would have liked to see coming from the Bishop's was a much sharper analysis leading to a more compelling prescription.
The analysis has to describe the failure of capitalism itself to contribute to, promote or even imagine the ideal of the common good.
Clearly if capitalism is the chosen mechanism for generating and sharing wealth in global society and the analysis points to its failure, after all even Ed Miliband is just asking for a kinder capitalism, then the Tory MP's who described the letter as a left wing manifesto or (even) factually wrong might have been right!
Standing alongside the Bishop's letter however are two other commentaries, one demonstrating the failure of austerity (see Simon Wren-Lewis in the London Review of Books) and the other a speech reported in the Guardian given by the Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis given in Zagreb in 2013.
In the speech Varoufakis describes neoliberalism as toxic propaganda against which we need to be immunised.
Describing himself as an 'erratic Marxist' he shares an insight from Marx:
That 'wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by the state through taxation' is of course the underlying neo-con belief that underpins both Cameron and Osborne's political agenda promising to take people out of tax as much and as far as possible, when money is commodified as it is in their world view then that money is yours if you are one of the hard working strivers.
But Marx has demonstrated that this view is false, precisely the opposite applies, 'wealth is collectively produced' by workers in offices and factories and then 'privately appropriated' by means of production and property rights.
So if the Bishop's had wanted, they might have challenged the underlying proposition of capitalism which increasingly in Europe, America and Japan is failing to produce a 'common good' by simply storing more and more wealth into its own barns leaving less and less to be enjoyed by the wider community and shared either through work or, as work increasingly becomes an inadequate distribution channel, through the idea of a basic income to be enjoyed by all.
Analysis and prescription.
I had a small, bit part, in Faith in the City., it was largely a walk on role rather than a speaking part.
I was asked by the Bishop of the Diocese where I worked to write the Diocesan Submission to the Commission established by Robert Runcie.
The essence of my report came from a comment, actually made later and directly to the Commission by an officer of the Local Authority, the North East has three problems, Poverty, Poverty, Poverty.
My second involvement was to make all the arrangements for the Commission's visit to the North East.
The commissioners heard again and again about too much week at the end of the money, shame at not being able to afford to house, feed or clothe families adequately and not attending Church because people had no money for the collection.
When the report was published there was a follow up conference in Newcastle and I made a slide presentation of inner city and outer estate poverty with a voice over that I scripted.
After it was shown the Chairman commented that the problem here is that anyone can be good at analysis but what is needed is a prescription that helps to change things for the better.
The analysis offered by Faith in the City was sharp and clear but the failure of the document was that the prescription offered was to put it crudely more welfare which raises the inevitable question can you solve the problem of welfare dependency by prescribing more welfare?
Clearly at one level if you simply don't have enough money to house, feed and clothe your family then more money will help but if there are deeper underlying structural problems within the economy both nationally and locally more money is not the entire answer.
Now the Bishop's have written a Pastoral Letter which follows hard on the heels of the Archbishop's book Rock and Sand.
So is this meddling in politics?
Is it partisan?
Is it interfering with the political process which is the purview of politicians and no-one else?
Both documents manage to combine a degree of wisdom with a sense of looking for justice for the poorest in society.
The notion that those with the broadest shoulders should share a greater part of the burden of austerity should seem to most sensible people to be a reasonable idea. It is certainly not a Marxist view, if anything it is a compassionate view and one that arises out of the Christian ideal of 'the common good'.
Rather than condemning the con-dems in fact the Bishop's seem to be calling for the ideal of 'the big society' to be reclaimed and re-worked.
Whilst the right of centre press have described the pastoral letter as Tory bashing in fact the bishop's analysis is pretty consistent with that of the Tory Party and their prescription is pretty anodyne with the possible exception of a mild slap on the wrist for for describing people on welfare as undeserving.
What I would have liked to see coming from the Bishop's was a much sharper analysis leading to a more compelling prescription.
The analysis has to describe the failure of capitalism itself to contribute to, promote or even imagine the ideal of the common good.
Clearly if capitalism is the chosen mechanism for generating and sharing wealth in global society and the analysis points to its failure, after all even Ed Miliband is just asking for a kinder capitalism, then the Tory MP's who described the letter as a left wing manifesto or (even) factually wrong might have been right!
Standing alongside the Bishop's letter however are two other commentaries, one demonstrating the failure of austerity (see Simon Wren-Lewis in the London Review of Books) and the other a speech reported in the Guardian given by the Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis given in Zagreb in 2013.
In the speech Varoufakis describes neoliberalism as toxic propaganda against which we need to be immunised.
Describing himself as an 'erratic Marxist' he shares an insight from Marx:
That 'wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by the state through taxation' is of course the underlying neo-con belief that underpins both Cameron and Osborne's political agenda promising to take people out of tax as much and as far as possible, when money is commodified as it is in their world view then that money is yours if you are one of the hard working strivers.
But Marx has demonstrated that this view is false, precisely the opposite applies, 'wealth is collectively produced' by workers in offices and factories and then 'privately appropriated' by means of production and property rights.
So if the Bishop's had wanted, they might have challenged the underlying proposition of capitalism which increasingly in Europe, America and Japan is failing to produce a 'common good' by simply storing more and more wealth into its own barns leaving less and less to be enjoyed by the wider community and shared either through work or, as work increasingly becomes an inadequate distribution channel, through the idea of a basic income to be enjoyed by all.
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