Broadcast May 27 2010
I’m just back from a week of meetings in Edinburgh. My church’s big bash - the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland - has just concluded.
One of the difficult situations we had to confront in the church over these days mirrors that of our new coalition government and the country – the need for cuts. The simple fact is that we have been spending more money than we have got.
Now it would be possible to identify how to implement these cuts quite quickly. Just seek out some churches that are small or financially struggling and close them down. The only problem with that idea is that there is more to life than economics. The church has built-in mechanisms to protect both the poorest communities and remote rural areas of the country, to ensure that there will always be a presence in areas of greatest need. This makes deciding where the cuts will fall even more difficult, but it also hopefully helps to ensure we are acting as fairly as we can.
The UK as a whole faces stark economic realities, and now the Conservative/Lib Dem Government have to decide on budgets and priorities.
And they have to do more than find areas of spending to cut. The Church is urging them to “poverty proof” their policies – in other words to ensure that the decisions they take do not create more hardship for those already at the edges of society and widen the gap between rich and poor.
The words of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the teaching of Jesus all emphasise the imperative to care for the poorest and most vulnerable.
I read recently a fascinating book called The Spirit Level. Written by two professors; Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the book is a study of inequality in some of the world’s richest countries and concludes that what matters most about a society is not how rich or poor people are but rather the gap between the richest and the poorest.
Where there is greater inequality there are greater problems in areas of health, education, crime and almost every indicator of well-being, and this effects all citizens and not just the poorest. The negative effects of inequality pervade the whole fabric of society.
The message seems clear – a more equal society is a better society for all of us.
And if that’s true, then whatever our faith, it is something we should all support.