The archbishop speaks out

I have long since become accustomed to Britain's church leaders speaking out on some political topic or another, and time and again I find myself not in any way surprised that church attendances nowadays aren't what they were.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols has recently been speaking out against the government's welfare reforms, and he has been rewarded with the invective of tabloid journalist Dominic Lawson.

Dominic Lawson is the son of the evil former government minister Nigel Lawson, but of course he is not responsible for his parentage.

The archbishop has quite rightly observed that many people in Britain are going hungry as a result of welfare reforms.  In reply, Lawson notes that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, is himself a practising Catholic.  I have some questions for him.

If the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is really a Catholic, then why does he serve in a government which condones abortion on demand?  And what about homosexual marriage?

I do not know where the Roman Catholic Church stands on mendacity, but the present government tells one lie after another.  For example a senior civil servant recently maintained that benefits sanctions are imposed only as a last resort.  That is utterly not true.  They are commonly imposed as a first resort.

Lawson continues:

It’s nonsense to say that there is no longer ‘a safety net’ when the state is currently spending £94 billion a year on working age benefits; and the time processing benefits claims — the most cited reason for destitution — has actually improved over the past few years.  The official figures are that 92 per cent of them are processed on time; in 2009/10 it was as low as 86 per cent.

Maybe Dominic Lawson would like to discuss his views with some of the many victims of benefits sanctions.  Also, if the number of benefits claims being processed in good time is as low as 92 percent, then surely someone somewhere should be held to account.

Lawson also suggests that food bank dependency is linked to fixed odds betting terminals, but he does not call for these  dreadful machines to be outlawed.

Lawson attempts to justify the welfare reforms by making reference to the public sector net debt of over £1.2 trillion - but he does not mention the fact that the government was only recently trying to commit this country to yet another illegal war.

Maybe Dominic Lawson would like to explain why the government cannot seek to reform its finances by adopting a stance of armed neutrality, abolishing overseas aid, and not paying excessive salaries to government ministers and civil servants who cannot work out how to assess welfare claims in good time.

I somehow suspect that Mr Lawson is no more of an economist than his evil father.  As for the archbishop, I will admit that he is right on this occasion.

Related previous posts include:

Catholics, stand by your Polish brother 

We get monkeys anyway

Gambling ruins lives

The way out of Benefits Street

A reasoned approach to war