The Church of England has adopted a kind of ecclesiastical Starmerism – doing much to win over those with little interest in it, and little to keep those who have been its demographic. As a shadow for Starmer’s 12 per cent approval, the Church enjoys its 2 per cent attendance.
He is at once more cosmopolitan and more parochial, more devout and more flippant than any recent writer who springs to mind.
As the King knows, Christians are better placed than rationalists to integrate Muslims into British society.
The fact that the new archbishop is a woman is not the issue – her controversial liberal views are.
Greed, poor judgement and an empathy by-pass are not criminal. With one calamitous Budget bringing the country to its economic knees and another imminent, no wonder Labour is keen to keep the Andrew saga simmering.
The non-white residents are socially conservative, entrepreneurial, upwardly mobile grafters with strong families. Any sensible right-wing party should be trying to woo them, not make them feel like they’re not wanted. If integration matters this is one way to achieve it.
Huge damage is being done to a great English institution that the Tory Party so often protected. But Conservative MPs have scarcely noticed that anything is happening.
Two years from its launch, problems with Project Spire’s legitimacy have not resolved. It is reasonable to infer that this is because it is ultra vires, outwith the Commissioners’ legal powers and charitable purposes.
In his brilliant new work Dinshaw shows how friends fell out in the 1640s.
The number of countries where Christians face high to extreme levels of persecution has almost doubled since the early 1990s, with over 350 million worshippers facing serious discrimination, abuse, and violence.
Pointing this out is not a vendetta against Welby but a call for an Archbishop to be held to the same standards for leadership of any large organisation.
I am wary that our post-Brexit anti-establishment tendency has allowed our national Church to become something too many Tories treat, at best, with indifference, and, at worse, as an enemy.
There is a cliché about politicians getting their hands on the levers of power and finding them not connected to anything. But the true power of a politician is language. It’s about using words to change the perception of what is important.