INEQUALITY is taken for granted in society and has ceased to shock, the Archbishop of York told Christians hosting a service at St James in the City, Liverpool, for the start of the Labour Party conference, on Sunday.
A uniting vision that recognised our common humanity was needed — something, he suggested, that had risen to the surface when people stood alongside each other in the queue to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II.
“We need to talk much more about the huge discrepancies of wealth and opportunity in our nation,” he said. “The way that we’re not a very United Kingdom, and the way that we need a new vision, a new home for everybody, but particularly, for the so many left-behind communities.”
Those without much wealth, and especially the poor, knew that wealth did not “trickle down” but “gathers and expands in the aquifers and coffers of the wealthy and is carefully guarded”, he told them.
Archbishop Cottrell had chosen to preach on Paul’s final words to Timothy: “Be rich in good deeds.” What beneficiaries of the tax cuts chose to do with the additional money was “an uncomfortable question only you can answer, and no politician or economist can make it for you”, he suggested. “It is about each of us asking what is right, what is best in us rising to the surface and shaping who we are.”
The queue for Westminster Hall had not only levelled everyone up — “David Beckham alongside a pensioner from Crewe or the unemployed job-seeker from Hull” — but had represented “something breaking out. . . Not just an outpouring of grief, but a reaffirmation of some of the things and the deep-seated values that are the best of us.
“Sometimes, these values are considered old-fashioned values, or British values. They are Christian values.”
So much in the nation in recent years had torn the country apart and had been ugly, he said. There had been nothing “mini” about the “mini-Budget” in a week when the child poverty gap between the north-east and the rest of the country had reached a 20-year high. The Children’s Society had reported children becoming more unhappy with their lives, and 85 per cent of parents were deeply worried about the cost-of-living crisis.
“Until we realise that our well-being is inextricably tied up with the well-being of our neighbour, we will never build a fair society,” he said. “The streams of grace may appear from time to time. But they will soon be covered over. Oh yes, we might be prepared to give our neighbour a handout, but never a hand up. It will always be charity, never justice.”
A good economy was meant to be like a well-run household, he suggested: “In a family — a household — it would be unthinkable that at the dinner table some are fed and others go hungry. Yet increasingly, the safety net in our nation is a foodbank, where more and more people have to go to get what our economy itself fails to provide.”
The Archbishop described that as “deeply shocking. What is even more shocking is that we’re not shocked any more. We take this kind of inequality for granted.”
The words of Mary in the Magnificat spoke not of levelling-up but overthrowing, he concluded. “It is redistribution. It is mercy and justice. And it can only come from a place of vision about who we are, where we belong, and where our mutual responsibilities lie. Without it we perish.
“We build walls and post sentries. Some get rich. Most don’t. Many are left behind altogether. Nations fragment. Dis-ease stirs. Walls are built higher. More sentries are recruited. More misery ensues. Discord ferments. Wars are started. And the most pressing issues of all — climate emergency, care for the poor, the excluded, the refugee — are neglected altogether.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, our brother and our Saviour, let us look for a better way, not putting our trust in wealth, but in God. Amen.”