Too broad a Church
Sir: I am not implacably hostile to Justin Welby; I share Christian empathy with the Archbishop’s earnest struggles to attract a spiritually dead nation back to the Church of England as described by Dan Hitchens’s article (‘The lost shepherds’, 8 April). However I cannot agree with his strategy. A liberal church is doomed to failure because it’s selling something that we already have. I ask our bishops: what is the Church’s USP? What does it offer that we can’t get elsewhere? The Church used to stand apart as a bastion against a hostile world, but if all it does is follow along behind modern secular fads then it is admitting its own redundancy. If you permit everything, you stand for nothing.
Robert Frazer
Salford, Lancashire
Rishi’s no Nigel
Sir: A nice try from Rishi Sunak (‘What Nigel Lawson taught me’, 8 April), but I’m not buying it. I don’t think for a moment that Nigel Lawson would have presided over the Sunak Covid policy that contributed significantly to domestic inflation – the world’s most generous, unnecessary and longest-running furlough scheme. Nor would he now have chosen to increase corporation tax so markedly, at a time when UK business needs to be as competitive as possible if it is to grasp the opportunities of Brexit. He will collect less, not more capital gains tax as a result of his swingeing cuts to the annual allowance. Until there is proof otherwise, I view the Sunak (Hunt) management of the economy as socialistic and thoroughly unhelpful to enterprise and growth.
Alasdair Ogilvy
Stedham, West Sussex
Driven away
Sir: Ysenda Maxtone Graham, who must be a neighbour of mine, could have gone yet further in her criticism of the draconian council that is festooning Fulham with traffic cameras bearing £130 fines (‘Mental blocks’, 8 April).
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