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GETTING BACK TO NORMAL

Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor (Sunday 1st February 2009)

Before Christmas, five Anglican bishops took the downturn in the economy as an opportunity to lambast the government for its multi-million-pound bailout of the banks as a way of triggering economic growth. It might be argued that the time for the bishops to inveigh against rampant consumerism and easy credit (which encouraged us all, including, it must be said, the Church of England, to live beyond our means) was at the time of boom rather than the time of bust. But are there things to be learnt from our present financial woes?

We are no doubt all feeling the pinch – and some in our society will be feeling the economic downturn much more severely than others. It’s a time when as individuals and families, as a Church and as a nation, we’ll tend to look to our own resources, to attend to our own personal survival in rough economic weather. But this downturn in our financial fortunes might be an opportunity, not least for the Church, not simply to weather the storm and wait for normal service to be resumed as soon as possible – but to recognise that in a global economy it is not enough for the rich to grow richer in the Thatcherite belief that the market is always right and that wealth will trickle down to the poorest.

It is time not simply to impose extra regulation on the banks to ensure they don’t mess up next time round but to articulate a new sense of our membership one of another in the global economy. Simply tweaking old financial institutions (the IMF and the World Bank etc) and returning to the old capitalist mindset will not do. The late 1980s saw the collapse of one discredited economic and political philosophy. Perhaps this millennium, with the new reality in the American White House, will encourage us towards a complete overhaul of our unbridled capitalism as we strive for a more equitable and therefore, possibly, a more peaceful world.

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