Not since the days of Margaret Thatcher has the Church of England attacked a Government with such sustained venom. Over the weekend a phalanx of Bishops preached variations on an identical theme. The Bishop of Manchester, Nigel McCullough, described the New Labour administration as “morally corrupt… beguiled by money. The Government believes that money can answer all of the problems and has encouraged greed and a love of money that the Bible says is the root of all evil.”<\/p>\n
The Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, fulminated that “While the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. When a big bank or car company goes bankrupt, it gets bailed out, but no one seems to be bailing out the ordinary people who are losing their jobs.” From the more prosperous Home Counties the Bishop of Winchester, Michael Scott-Joynt, declaimed that “The Government hasn’t done anything like enough to help those less well-off, particularly in terms of tax redistribution.”<\/p>\n