London, England, Jun 11, 2011 / 12:10 pm
England’s top Catholic and Anglican clergy have gone head-to-head in a public war of words over the U.K. government’s policies on welfare, education and health.
In the June 8 edition of the English left-wing political journal New Statesman, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams accused the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government of causing “anxiety and anger” in implementing health, welfare and education reforms for which “no one voted.”
The Anglican archbishop also accused ministers of encouraging a “quiet resurgence of the seductive language of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor” in pursuing “punitive” action against “alleged abuses” in the welfare system.
And he reserved particular scorn for the London government’s plans to move power away from the state to lower level institutions - a policy the U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron calls his “Big Society” - labeling it nothing more than a “painfully stale slogan.”