Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Lord Tebbit, the former Conservative minister who described the Church of England’s 1985 Faith in the City in report as “Marxist”, said: “No one would dispute the right of the Archbishop to make comments of a political kind in this area; it’s part of his job, I think, to do so. And he’s quite right there are policies of the Coalition for which nobody seemed to vote and policies for which people voted which are not being carried through by the Coalition. But that’s the problem of coalition.”
Speaking on the same programme, the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd John Pritchard, said that Dr Williams was acting as “a critical friend” of the Government, and raising “issues which are of concern to the constituencies we represent.
“What he’s saying is . . . it has come to be [that] we have a speed and scale of change which is sometimes hard to cope with.”
An optimistic article. It is not clear that the author is really aware of how much controversy ++Williams’ remarks have created in England.
Williams’ latest has not gone down well, particularly when it has been so easy for everyone from the Times Leader to the Archbishop of Westminster to show how he gets his basic facts wrong in this piece.