PM hits back over Archbishop of Canterbury's criticism of welfare reforms
Prime Minister David Cameron has mounted a robust defence of government policy following criticisms by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Mr Cameron said Dr Rowan Williams was "free to express political views" - but he "profoundly disagrees" with them.
Dr Williams criticised the coalition's flagship welfare reforms and branded the PM's Big Society "stale".
And he said "radical" policies "for which no-one voted" were being pushed through with "remarkable speed".
Mr Cameron was asked about the remarks in Dr Williams's article for the left-leaning New Statesman magazine (see below), the latest edition of which the most senior cleric in the Church of England guest-edited.
In the magazine, the Archbishop said the government was facing "bafflement and indignation" over its health and education plans: "With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no-one voted. At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context."
He added: "The anxiety and anger have to do with the feeling that not enough has been exposed to proper public argument."
He also said there had been a "quiet resurgence of the seductive language of 'deserving' and 'undeserving' poor" and he wrote that Mr Cameron's own Big Society initiative was viewed with "widespread suspicion" and the term had become "painfully stale".
But Mr Cameron, in Belfast ahead of addressing the Northern Ireland Assembly, rejected the criticisms.
He said: "I've never been one to say that the Church has to fight shy of making political interventions, but what I would say is that I profoundly disagree with many of the views that he's expressed, particularly on issues like debt and on welfare and education."
Mr Cameron said he saw nothing "good or moral" in passing national debts to the next generation, trapping people on welfare or in schools that were not offering a good education.
The prime minister added: "I am absolutely convinced that our policies are about actually giving people greater responsibility and greater chances in their life and I will defend those very vigorously."
Work and Pensions Secretary Mr Duncan Smith, whose sweeping welfare reforms aimed at making work pay came in for some criticism, said the Archbishop was entitled to his views but added: "I think in this respect it's a little unbalanced and unfair."
As the head of the country's principal state church, he sees himself as the nation's conscience, set apart from party politics.
But critics have already questioned whether he can be so outspoken, so wide-ranging and so political in tone, and maintain that position above the fray of party politics.
Mr Duncan Smith denied resurrecting the Victorian concept of the "deserving poor" and said the welfare system he had inherited from Labour had left many people abandoned on benefits, with a record number of workless households and "broken homes".
He added: "All of this is going on in a system which is, in itself, damaging the very people it seeks to save. There is no kindness in that."
Business Secretary Mr Cable told the BBC he welcomed debate with Dr Williams but said he was "wrong on the specifics" about health reforms - as there was a "very big debate" about them at the moment..
And he rejected the suggestion the coalition government did not have a mandate for its work: "The two parties of the coalition got substantially more than half of the total vote at the last election... so I don't think that criticism has much weight."
But Dr Williams got some support from the Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Rev Christopher Hill, who said his remarks had been "eminently reasonable".
And the Bishop of Leicester Tim Stevens told the BBC it was "right and natural" for an archbishop to draw attention to disquiet over government policies and said he had been "absolutely balanced in what he says".
Dr Williams is no stranger to controversy and has previously criticised the previous Labour government on various issues, including the Iraq war.
In his article he also appeared to question what Labour's "achievable alternatives" were.
He said that David Cameron's "Big Society" initiative was viewed with "widespread suspicion", but "we are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently and what a left-inspired version of localism might look like."
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair said there was a long-standing tradition of archbishops criticising government.
"Obviously people used to criticise our policies, not just on Iraq and foreign policy, but on domestic policy and reform as well. It's just part of the way things work," he said.
Labour's shadow education secretary Andy Burnham said: "Rowan Williams is saying what many people are feeling and the government in my view is very wrong to dismiss out of hand what he is saying - I think they should reflect a bit more carefully."
source
Dr. Rowan Williams, Head of the Church of England, writing in the New Statesman:
I can imagine a New Statesman reader looking at the contents of this issue and mentally supplying: "That's enough coalition ministers (Ed)." After all, the NS has never exactly been a platform for the establishment to explain itself. But it seems worth encouraging the present government to clarify what it is aiming for in two or three key areas, in the hope of sparking a livelier debate about where we are going - and perhaps even todiscover what the left's big idea currently is.
The political debate in the UK at the moment feels pretty stuck. An idea whose roots are firmly in a particular strand of associational socialism has been adopted enthusiastically by the Conservatives. The widespread suspicion that this has been done for opportunistic or money-saving reasons allows many to dismiss what there is of a programme for "big society" initiatives; even the term has fast become painfully stale. But we are still waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently and what a left-inspired version of localism might look like.
Digging a bit deeper, there are a good many on the left and right who sense that the tectonic plates of British - European? - politics are shifting. Managerial politics, attempting with shrinking success to negotiate life in the shadow of big finance, is not an attractive rallying point, whether it labels itself (New) Labour or Conservative. There is, in the middle of a lot of confusion, an increasingly audible plea for some basic thinking about democracy itself - and the urgency of this is underlined by what is happening in the Middle East and North Africa.
Incidentally, this casts some light on the bafflement and indignation that the present government is facing over its proposals for reform in health and education. With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted. At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context. Not many people want government by plebiscite, certainly. But, for example, the comprehensive reworking of the Education Act 1944 that is now going forward might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing in the context of election debates. The anxiety and anger have to do with the feeling that not enough has been exposed to proper public argument.
I don't think that the government's commitment to localism and devolved power is simply a cynical walking-away from the problem. But I do think that there is confusion about the means that have to be willed in order to achieve the end. If civil society organisations are going to have to pick up
responsibilities shed by government, the crucial questions are these. First, what services must have cast-iron guarantees of nationwide standards, parity and continuity? (Look at what is happening to youth services, surely a strategic priority.) Second, how, therefore, does national government underwrite these strategic "absolutes" so as to make sure that, even in a straitened financial climate, there is a continuing investment in the long term, a continuing response to what most would see as root issues: child poverty, poor literacy, the deficit in access to educational excellence, sustainable infrastructure in poorer communities (rural as well as urban), and so on? What is too important to be left to even the most resourceful localism?
Government badly needs to hear just how much plain fear there is around such questions at present. It isn't enough to respond with what sounds like a mixture of, "This is the last government's legacy," and, "We'd like to do more, but just wait until the economy recovers a bit." To acknowledge the reality of fear is not necessarily to collude with it. But not to recognise how pervasive it is risks making it worse. Equally, the task of opposition is not to collude in it, either, but to define some achievable alternatives. And, for that to happen, we need sharp-edged statements of where the disagreements lie.
The uncomfortable truth is that, while grass-roots initiatives and local mutualism are to be found flourishing in a great many places, they have been weakened by several decades of cultural fragmentation. The old syndicalist and co-operative traditions cannot be reinvented overnight and, in some areas, they have to be invented for the first time.
This is not helped by a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, nor by the steady pressure to increase what look like punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system. If what is in view - as Iain Duncan Smith argues passionately on page 18 - is real empowerment for communities of marginal people, we need better communication about strategic imperatives, more positive messages about what cannot and will not be left to chance and - surely one of the most important things of all - a long-term education policy at every level that will deliver the critical tools for democratic involvement, not simply skills that serve the economy.
For someone like myself, there is an ironic satisfaction in the way several political thinkers today are quarrying theological traditions for ways forward. True, religious perspectives on these issues have often got bogged down in varieties of paternalism. But there is another theological strand to be retrieved that is not about "the poor" as objects of kindness but about the nature of sustainable community, seeing it as one in which what circulates - like the flow of blood - is the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this is what is at the heart of St Paul's ideas about community at its fullest; community, in his terms, as God wants to see it.
A democracy that would measure up to this sort of ideal - religious in its roots but not exclusive or confessional - would be one in which the central question about any policy would be: how far does it equip a person or group to engage generously and for the long term in building the resourcefulness and well-being of any other person or group, with the state seen as a "community of communities", to use a phrase popular among syndicalists of an earlier generation?
A democracy going beyond populism or majoritarianism but also beyond a Balkanised focus on the local that fixed in stone a variety of postcode lotteries; a democracy capable of real argument about shared needs and hopes and real generosity: any takers?
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2011/06/long-term-government-democracy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13713606