Bishops across the country, backed by Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, have condemned the coalition government’s controversial welfare reforms, which they say risk pushing thousands of children into poverty and homelessness.
Eighteen Church of England bishops, backed by Williams and the archbishop of York, John Sentamu, are demanding that ministers rewrite their flagship plan to impose a £500-a-week benefit cap on families.
A £500-a-week benefit cap on families? Problematic? Indeed, for whether reckoned in Greenbacks, Loons, or Roos that’s just about $800 per week. Nearly $42,000 per year. In government benefits? Contested?
Since I farm for a living I have the periodic tough year. This is one of them. Our income for a family of three will be well below $20,000. “Official” poverty, yet we don’t go looking for government handouts and subsidies, even though our combined efforts this year approach 6000 hours of often-difficult labour, and that is with an infant in the home.
We see at one glance what is wrong with both Britain and with the ABC.
What’s not stated is that a preponderant plurality of benefit recipients are un-assimilated immigrants, many of them Muslims. Britain has not yet learnt — but is, I suspect, doing — that you cannot solve a demographic problem (insufficient babies) by increasing immigration, unless those immigrants become well-assimilated and productive citizens.
The reality is that the century-old welfare democracy was utterly dependent upon a growing population of productive citizens. That no longer exists, and the great “progressive” experiment will collapse of its own weight regardless of +Cantuar’s fulminations.
Even with the higher cost of living in England, it is hard to believe that a family, even with a dozen children would not manage to live on £500 a week [or almost $800 for our cousins]. This may of course be small beer when you have two palaces and bottomless funds from kindly Americans to fly you round the world promoting the ‘listening process’ but it is more than many of those not on benefits bring up their families on.
It might mean a move from accomodation in expensive areas, but the idea that people are entitled to live in accomodation in areas that the people paying for them through taxes are unable to afford shows how out of touch some in the church are. Our archbishops and a few of our bishops have chosen the wrong issue on which to nail our colors to the mast.
Needless to say, less than a month after the Fraser fiasco at St Paul’s, their odd intervention is again making us a laughing stock in the papers. Plus ça change.