Labour needs to embrace – and use – the power of the Church.

Keir Starmer was in Baku last year when the news broke of the Makin review. The Prime Minister was in the Azerbaijani capital for a climate summit, but the old sins of the Church of England, as detailed in the review, threatened to derail the political news grid. 

Starmer, not across the details of horrific historic sexual abuse of children but comfortable enough in knowing right from wrong, refused to back the Archbishop of Canterbury. Within hours, Justin Welby had stepped down. 

Apart from this typically pointed yet subtle intervention, this is a prime minister and a No 10 who doesn’t do God. However, the Cabinet and the wider Parliamentary Labour Party is filled with Christians. David Lammy, the foreign secretary, was a choirboy at Peterborough Cathedral, Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, found God at university, Jonathan Reynolds, the Trade Secretary, is a former chair of Christians on the Left. Many others keep their faith private but are known to Christians within the Labour Party. 

It should hardly be surprising that a political party that “owes more to Methodism than Marxism” should have a strong religious vein. The Prime Minister, when marking the 75th anniversary of the NHS, attended a service at Westminster Abbey. There, he read from the Book of Revelation. That vision of a new Jerusalem harked back not just to the Bible, but to the mission of the post-war Labour government that created modern Britain. 

Clement Attlee, in the 1940s, however, had an unlikely ally which Starmer would do well to remember. William Temple was an Archbishop of Canterbury who revolutionised the Anglican Church, arguably devising the moral underpinnings of the welfare state in the process, and in turn won over his monied congregants to Attlee’s New Jerusalem. Starmer, however, cuts a lonely figure on the domestic stage. As he seeks “renewal”, the Prime Minister needs support for his “change” agenda. Starmer, we are told, wants to rebalance an economy after 14 years of austerity, stagnant wage growth since 2008, and deepening divisions in our ethnic, social and economic fabric.

If, like Attlee, he seeks a friend in Lambeth Palace, Starmer should start taking an interest in the person who will replace Justin Welby. The Prime Minister, despite praising the  “difference” churches can do in society prior to the election, seems unaware of quite what a significant difference the Church of England could make. Leaving aside the 33,000 social action groups, including homeless shelters and food banks, the Church has assets that could help that “renewal” agenda. The organisation boasts 200,000 acres of land, held by the Church commissioners, 42 dioceses, and 12,500 parishes. Its commissioners manage a £11.1bn investment fund, using financial muscle to push for progressive acts by corporations. Over a million students attend Church schools and the Church is active across the healthcare and hospice sector. 

When Labour came to power it was assumed by many within the Church that these assets could be repurposed for the nation. A push from Starmer to a new Archbishop might unlock the affordable housing the Church has previously hinted at, clean energy on its land and other suspiciously Labour-friendly sounding policies.

And yet, despite the potential, the only people who seem to be interested in the Archbishops’ appointment are the political right. The Church is increasingly a pawn in a wider game of anti-woke warriors.

Danny Kruger, the Tory MP and apparent friend of US Vice President and Catholic convert JD Vance, discussed in the Commons just before the Parliamentary recess, the role of the Church in combatting ‘woke’. He told MPs “woke is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism… hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities and nations.” 

Welby’s legacy of activist reform in the public square, while attempting (and often failing) to defuse social and moral issues, has left the right determined to not let history repeat itself. Evangelicals, both within parliament and outside it, are increasingly concerned with the social programme pursued by the government. Wes Streeting, although not an Evangelical, joined other Christians in Labour in expressing their unease at assisted suicide legislation. Julia Lopez, Conservative MP for Hornchurch and Upminster, pompously threatened the future Archbishop: “If whomever is appointed as the new Archbishop of Canterbury makes that same choice – intervening and emoting over tough political choices while ducking tougher moral ones – the Church may find even its supporters begin to question its privilege.”

Read it all in the New Statesman