One of my vivid memories of lockdown is of homeless veterans, who normally slept rough, being given a place to stay in a hotel. Some marvellous volunteers emailed me to say that the men received a pitiful daily allowance. Nonetheless, they were tearfully grateful for the food they were given, and beyond thrilled to have hot water to shower in, and clean sheets. (Clean sheets may be one of the small pleasures that unite all mankind.)
When I heard the Archbishop of Canterbury using his Easter sermon to denounce the plan to send illegal migrants to Rwanda – “the principle must stand the judgment of God, and it cannot,” he warned – I wondered if that reliably clueless cleric was aware that our veterans were tipped back onto the streets once lockdown was over. Their hotel rooms were taken by thousands of men (the vast majority of the 37,000 asylum seekers in the UK are fit young males) who crossed the Channel after paying up to £7,000 each for their passage. Does Justin Welby know that around £5 million of taxpayers’ money is spent every day paying the bill for those 37,000, meaning hotel accommodation is in short supply? Like Mary and Joseph, the poorest Britons are informed there is no room at the (Holiday) Inn.
Most people – Godless heathens, the lot of us! – would prefer that £1.8 billion be spent on housing veterans, people who served their country before falling into destitution, or helping struggling youngsters find an affordable place to live.
What the archbishop can’t seem to get his head around is this: the British believe in queuing. We don’t approve of those who pay wicked people smugglers so they can jump the asylum queue while Christian families, persecuted in the Middle East for their faith, languish in sprawling refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey. Oh, and by the way, why is the Church of England less concerned for Christian women and children with nothing than it is for young Somalian males with smartphones?
The latest poll reveals the huge disconnect between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the fast-dwindling congregation of the C of E. Some 47 per cent of people support Priti Patel’s Rwanda deal, with 26 per cent opposing. Even Labour voters narrowly support the Government’s plan. A majority of us think that those who enter the UK by illegal means should be unable to claim asylum “if they pass through a safe country, or have a connection to a safe country”. A resounding 64 per cent think it’s right to remove people who are deemed inadmissible as asylum seekers “into the asylum system of another safe country”.
Unlike Justin Welby, I don’t believe these views indicate a lack of charity. On the contrary, they suggest that people really care about fairness and loving their neighbour. Sometimes, loving your neighbour means protecting borders so that overstretched public services don’t snap altogether.
As a sometime Sunday school teacher, I wouldn’t dream of trading scriptural quotations with England’s leading prelate. So let me just observe that the archbishop who uses his pulpit to stage holier-than-thou political interventions and castigate Conservatives for being immoral is the same priest who closed the churches with indecent haste at the start of lockdown before taking a sabbatical at his house in France.
I was, and I remain, deeply shocked that, at a time of incalculable national suffering, church doors were barred to the scared, the lonely and the grief-stricken. Would Jesus Christ have meekly acquiesced before a secular law that put the most sacred places of sanctuary and spiritual consolation out of bounds?
The man who made that historic misjudgment has much to rebuke himself for. “The principle must stand the judgement of God, and it cannot.”
