Dear Justin Welby – here’s how you can really take on Wonga

I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a formidable Victorian vicar of my Yorkshire town of Helmsley. Gray was a social activist with strong opinions on everything from sanitation to election candidates, and he did a great deal of good for his parish — so I’m not averse to the idea of churchmen intervening in worldly affairs, and I think Archbishop Justin Welby was right to highlight the parasitical nature of ‘payday lenders’ such as Wonga, even if he was subsequently embarrassed to discover that the Church of England was an indirect investor in it. But by his own sophisticated standards I think he is a bit unworldly in his enthusiasm for credit unions as the morally acceptable solution to the cashflow problems of the poor.

The volume of borrowing (just under £1 billion) and number of borrowers (just over a million) from credit unions or financial co-operatives in the UK has roughly doubled since 2004, while the number of unions has shrunk by a third.