The Government has failed to find a vision for the country and has not built a cohesive society, the Archbishop of York has claimed.
Dr John Sentamu said that racism had been allowed to flourish and that Britain was no longer the “great nation” it once had been. Instead, it was a nation in crisis. “Britain is in a very, very uncomfortable place,” he said.
In a wide-ranging speech on the country’s “broken society”, the Ugandan-born archbishop called for Britain to regain the values of “mission and enterprise” that had made it so effective when it had an empire.
His comments follow weeks of debate between political and religious leaders over the impact of multiculturalism on Britain, which has centered on claims from fellow senior bishops that the country has no-go areas for non-Muslims and will adopt aspects of Islamic sharia law in due course.
The criticism from the Church of England’s second most senior figure will come as a blow to Gordon Brown, who yesterday, at Labour’s spring conference, vowed to build “the Britain of our dreams” and a country where “security and opportunity for all is within our grasp”.
Dr Sentamu said that it had suffered from a loss of identity, which had made it less able to welcome immigrants and had deepened tensions between communities.
But Sentamu conspicuously fails to put his finger on the central issue, which has been the enormous deterioration in Christian faith in the country since the 1950s. People in the UK now experience enormous rates of divorce, abortion, teenage pregnancy, alcohol abuse at ever younger ages, and broadcasting stained with pornography and blasphemy. The liberal leadership of the Church of England has too often connived in the nationhal moral decline.
Here here Gordian:
++York is spot on in ananlysis but remains blind to one of the main causes- the manner in which the C of E dipped out of schools, national life and watered down its message. The country has lost its way in tandem with a church that has largely grown wet, feminised and totally limp.
This is the price of raising multiculturalism to a policy level, of institutionalising what is at best a circumstantial benefit. What it has done is divide an established identity until its segments no longer can recognize the whole. One divides the identity buy allowing immigrants the status of national identity elements when they have neither cause nor desire to integrate into a larger personality; and by championing all minorities at the cost of maintaining a majority, the have destroyed the majority. The notion, the “tyranny of the majority” has taken such hold that being part of a majority has become sinful, despotic-by-definition so that society’s members now seek to be part of a special interest minority.
The entries above are all correct enough, but they do not assess sufficiently the damage that “multicuturalism “has done. LM
Multiculturalism is fatal to a national identity. Once, the boast that one was an Englishman meant something identifiable. I’ve been going to England since 1972 and the deterioration of its society is quite marked.
#3: But I do agree with the criticism of multiculturalism. Multiculti was one of those sacred cows in 1970s-80s Britain, and any critic of it was shouted down as a ‘racist’. Sentamu couldn’t fault it because he was personally a great beneficiary of the UK’s hospitality to foreigners seking asylum. The educated middle classes will get on OK, regardless of their race or religion (that is, until the rise of jihadism). But creating an underclass distinguished by their race, religion and low educational achievement was always going to be disastrous in a post-industrial economy.