A grubby way to rubbish the Archbishop

The intervention of Cardinal Archbishop Vincent Nichols in the "welfare" debate was indeed embarrassing for the government.  As far as the Daily Mail was concerned it demanded a response.  So they have today published a lengthy piece by Dominic Lawson headlined: "A Lefty Archbishop who's generous with YOUR money - but not his flock's".
To call this article grubby is an understatement.  Lawson is the son of Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has recently reinvented himself as the spokesman of climate change deniers.  Dominic starts his piece with a slur, to direct his readers' attention away from the issue and towards the Catholic church's meanness when it comes to money.  That paves the way for a kind of character assassination.  Nichols, he says, "is entitled to his opinion" but clearly doesn't understand the issues - which concern "breaking the cycle of dependency", of course - and he doesn't understand how popular this is with his parishioners.  But "Nichols's anathema owes more to political prejudice than to religious doctrine" because the Archbishop is "tribally Labour".  Why is Nichols wrong?  Here, Lawson fails, as Tories always do, to address the specific points.  To say that the government has torn up the safety net is wrong because it is spending £94bn a year on working age benefits.  That is a non sequitur.  The safety net was a minimum income level designed to ensure that no one was completely without money, and that, as we know, has gone.  Delays in paying benefits, as cited by the Archbishop?  Well, they have actually gone down a bit since 2009/10.  Food banks?  Here it gets very dirty indeed.  "Many users may be relying on it because they have spent too much of their welfare payments on less essential items, such as the Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, which now litter every high street in the nation's less affluent boroughs."  There is then one of those Tory untruths about Labour banning Jobcentres from pointing people towards food banks, and the Church of England's supposed support of this, and he ends by returning to his wife's little anecdote and using a cute biblical phrase about "motes and beams".
This is not journalism, of course; it's pure propaganda.  Perhaps the Archbishop will be heartened by the fact that the government felt it necessary to respond through its mouthpiece, the Mail.  And he will surely reflect that, according to the portrayal in the Christian gospels, Jesus was a Lefty.

Who cares?

Christian churches in this country have an honourable record, at least in recent decades, of getting up the noses of governments, particularly of the Tory kind.  I can remember a Church of England report in 1985 called Faith in the City, which really annoyed Margaret Thatcher.  The right's response is always to tell the church to keep out of politics.  And that's no doubt what they are doing now.  On Monday we read about the report of an independent commission chaired by the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, on poverty and the need for the "living wage".  This was reported in the Independent, which carried an interview with the Archbishop.  He warned that, "Millions of low-paid workers are trapped in an unbreakable cycle of poverty, and are even turning up at food banks in their lunch breaks asking for help to feed their families."  This is in vivid contrast to the government's mantra of "making work pay".  But last year IDS accused the bishops of ignoring the concerns of ordinary people!
Perhaps more embarrassing to Iain Duncan Smith, a Roman Catholic, is the intervention today of Britain's most senior Catholic cleric, Archbishop Vincent Nichols.  The Telegraph carries an interview with him, in which he says that the government's reforms have destroyed even the most basic safety net, and have become increasingly punitive.  He talks of a "crisis" and a "disgrace".  But up pops the anonymous DWP spokesperson to parrot the familiar lies (why does no one ever name this person?).
We've known for a long time that Duncan Smith tries to silence criticism on the BBC, but on Tuesday we learned that he, or his minions, tried to shut down a spoof Twitter account called "UKJobcentrePlus not".  You can read the story in the Independent.  The DWP's brand (?) and public information manager, Jon Woodcock, complained that it was set up "with deliberate and malicious intent to devalue and criticise the work of Jobcentre Plus" and that its tweets were "rude and potentially libellous".  The account was taken down.  But its creators won on appeal - and gained a lot of followers in the process.  Well done.