mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/27-bishops-slam-david-camerons-3164033
Britain’s leading bishops denounce David Cameron’s welfare reforms for creating a “national crisis”.
In an unprecedented attack on the Tory-led Coalition, 27 Anglican bishops and 16 other clergy accuse the Tory-led coalition of creating hardship and hunger.
For so many leading members of the clergy to launch such a direct attack on the Government of the day is unprecedented.
This is the most significant political move by the Church of England since its Faith in the City report in the 1980s attacking Margaret Thatcher’s cuts.
It underlines the deep concern felt by the churches over the Coalition’s brutal welfare cuts which have left so many facing hunger and hardship.
In a letter to the Daily Mirror, 27 Anglican bishops and 16 other faith leaders say the PM has a “moral duty” to act on the growing number going hungry.
The intervention comes after Britain’s leading Catholic Archbishop Vincent Nichols said the Government’s benefit cuts were a “disgrace.”
A rattled Mr Cameron hit back by claiming the reforms were a “moral mission” and gave people “hope”.
But he is now also at war with the Church of England and other faith groups including the Quakers and Methodists.
n their letter the bishops say “Britain is the world’s seventh largest economy and yet people are going hungry.”
It continues: “We must, as a society, face up to the fact that over half of people using foodbanks have been put in that situation by cut backs to and failures in the benefit system, whether it be payment delays or punitive sanctions.”
Signed by 27 of the 59 Church of England bishops, it notes that half a million people have visited foodbanks since last Easter, while 5,500 people were admitted to hospital in the UK for malnutrition last year.
The church leaders also challenge Mr Cameron’s claim that his reforms are part of a “moral mission.”
“We often hear talk of hard choices. Surely few can be harder than that faced by the tens of thousands of older people who must ‘heat or eat’ each winter, harder than those faced by families whose wages have stayed flat while food prices have gone up 30% in just five years.
“Yet beyond even this we must, as a society, face up to the fact that over half of people using foodbanks have been put in that situation by cut backs to and failures in the benefit system, whether it be payment delays or punitive sanctions,’ the letter says.
It concludes by telling the Prime Minister he has an “acute moral imperative to act.”
“Hundreds of thousands of people are doing so already, as they set up and support foodbanks across the UK. But this is a national crisis, and one we must raise
We call on government to do its part: acting to investigate food markets that are failing, to make sure that work pays, and to ensure that the welfare system provides a robust last line of defence against hunger,” the bishops write.
Signatories include the Bishops of Durham, Oxford, Manchester, Salisbury, Newcastle, Gloucester and Leicester.
The Bishop of Chelsmford, the Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, said: “Food banks provide a fantastic service but it is scandalous that in our society we should need a single food bank let alone hundreds of them.
“It feels to me we are a more divided society than even a year ago and that troubles me deeply.”
Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves MP said: “This letter should be a wake up call to David Cameron.
The Bishops’ letter is part of the End Hunger Fast campaign – which is calling on people to fast during lent in solidarity with the UK’s hungry families.
The campaign will culminate with a vigil in Parliament Square in the run up to Easter.
The Rev Keith Hebden, founder of the End Hunger Fast campaign, said the Government was “failing in its duty of care” to provide a basic safety net…
"We must reconsider urgently the society we are becoming; the hunger we permit. For David Cameron to defend what is happening in the welfare system as a part of his ‘moral mission’, when the reality is that hundreds of thousands of Britains have been left hungry is truly shocking,” he told the Mirror.
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