SUBMERGED beneath the national furore about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s leader in the New Statesman (News, 10 June; Comment, 17 June) was his call to “discover what the Left’s big idea currently is”. The task of opposition is not to “collude”, Dr Williams said, “but to define some achievable alternatives”. It is a crucial point — and it is part of the Church’s job, too.
But the Archbishop made himself vulnerable when he said that the Government was pushing forward policies, particularly on public spending, “for which no one voted”. Predictably, the same charge was immediately thrown back at the Archbishop himself: where was his popular mandate?
It also weakened Dr Williams’s central point, that this Government’s programme was precisely the kind of thing that most people voted for, in the absence of the alternative he suggests we desperately need. Put another way, none of the three main parties have offered the electorate an option to dissent from the dominant economic narrative and resulting policies that the Church, among others, has consistently criticised.
But if Dr Williams had taken a slightly broader definition of “the Left”, he would have seen that there has, in fact, been an alternative on offer — one that overlaps closely with the Churches’ own perspectives and values.
At the last election, the Green Party advocated an approach based on putting the economy back in its place as servant rather than master, and challenging the centrality of profiteering and consumerism. It suggested that sustainability and equality rather than GDP should take centre-stage in decision-making.
These values were translated into plans for dealing with the deficit: a financial-transaction tax; abolition of the the upper limit for National Insurance contributions; a return of corporation tax to 30 per cent; an increase in the capital-gains tax-rate to the recipient’s highest income-tax rate; a clampdown on tax havens; and reform of inheritance tax based on the wealth of the recipient rather than of the deceased.
These and other proposals, such as the scrapping of nuclear weapons, an end to new nuclear power stations, and scrapping subsidies for arms exports, would raise hundreds of billions of pounds.
A “Green New Deal” was also proposed, to provide long-term investment and job creation; a drive to cut working hours in the UK from the longest in Europe to a more balanced 35-hour working week; an increase in the minimum wage, to make it a “living” wage; and a greater emphasis on alternative economic models, such as mutuals and co-operatives.
In education, changes were proposed to challenge the view that schools are institutions to create economic units to compete in the global marketplace. In health, a holistic approach was advocated which resisted the further introduction of market forces. As Einstein put it, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”; or, as Jesus put it: “new wineskins for new wine”.
The Archbishop could not be expected to throw his weight behind any individual party manifesto, but, in his stated goal of seeing the Left present a fresh perspective, he — and, for that matter, the Church in general — should acknowledge that there are political actors who are already articulating the kind of alternative vision, values, and policies that the Archbishop might well endorse.
To acknowledge as much would help to silence those critics who have suggested that he should put up or shut up.
Jonathan Bartley is director of the theological think tank Ekklesia.