Durham's next stage
Whenever the Bishop of Durham makes a political statement which enrages Conservative MPs, the Archbishop of Canterbury feels that he has to defend him without at the same time endorsing what he has said. The latest incident of this kind concerns Dr Jenkins' fear, expressed in a recent Credo program- me, that 'if we don't create the communal sharing society', Britain will suffer 'an increasing growth of what you might call, a police state'. One feels that Lambeth Palace would be better advised to make no comment, and simply to refer those in- terested to the full texts of Dr Jenkins's pronouncements. They would then discov- er the coherence of what pass as his ideas on the questions of the day. On solving unemployment, he told Credo:
Well it [the Government] can't do anything much on their job creation side clearly at the moment, I mean I quite see their point that unless you get the industrial machine so to speak rolling faster you're not likely to generate more jobs but it has got to balance the need to do that with the need to stop making the unemployed more miserable. . .
On paying for social spending: I again, I can't go into detail in that, but I mean a series of things occur to me. . . Would Dr Jenkins print money?
I think I would probably, though this again would have to be worked out in detail, with the various experts and soon.
His vision of the future?
. . . towards what you might call a labour- intensive caring society which had to live averagely at a lower standard than now but because people cared for one another they found point in it and might then be in a position to take off again in whatever is the, you know, next stage.
The, you know, next stage in Dr Jenkins's career should be that no one asks him to go on television for a very long time.
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