When a clergyman damns a government I prefer he do so with a proper quantity of hellfire. They do it differently in the Church of England which, though lovely for evensong and all the rest of it, is not a political or particularly muscular enterprise. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s much-trumpeted blast against the Cameron-Clegg regiment this morning is, really, just the usual hand-wringing stuff. Pass along quietly please, nothing new to see here. It’s as threatening as being chased by a three-legged lamb.
If anything, the piece is a whimpering cry for Labour to do better. (See Bagehot for more on this.) It challenges the opposition rather more severely than it does a government which, this being a representative democracy in which we vote for MPs not policies, has all the legitimacy it needs.
And, as John Rentoul says, the Archbishop’s conclusion is baffling:
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?
A prize of some sort* to any reader who can tell me what that means.
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