Police look on as far-right rioters burn a vehicle in Sunderland. Photograph: Chris Howson

When he retires, likely in 2026, Justin Welby will bring to a close a remarkable tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury: four general elections, six prime ministers, two royal weddings, the death of a monarch, and a coronation. Not since Geoffrey Fisher retired in 1961 has an Archbishop of Canterbury had such weighty constitutional responsibilities.

One such responsibility is the sermon at the Service for the New Parliament, which Welby opened recently by recognising ‘the ability of this country to hold those in power to account’; the peaceful transition of power that followed; and that danger abroad, as well as anger, abuse and threats at home, meant that ‘those who stood in the last election, whatever the result, are people of courage.’

It is undoubtedly true that anger, abuse and threats targeted at politicians have increased, yet as I read this, I felt a deep unease with the choice of words. Perhaps it’s because I had just learnt of the incident at Manchester Airport, or perhaps it was the suspension of seven Labour MPs for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap, both taking place later that same day, but my mind immediately wanted to affirm people’s anger and challenge the notion that all parliamentary candidates were inherently courageous. Could they not be driven by other things? Pride? Avarice? Lust for power? For me, the events of that day spoke of a rising authoritarianism in the UK driven by inequality and political ambition, so as I read Welby’s sermon delivered to a room of hundreds of lawmakers, I found myself asking ‘where is the Church’s prophetic voice in this?’

The twilight years of the Conservative government saw the passing of a raft of controversial new legislation: the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021; the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act 2021; the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021; the Nationality and Borders Act 2022; the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022; the Illegal Migration Act 2023; and the Public Order Act 2023 all received widespread criticism for their perceived erosion of civil liberties, expansion of state surveillance, and curtailment of the right to peaceful protest. Indeed, it’s under section 78 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 that we recently saw record prison terms for peaceful activists.

The collective impact of these new laws has already been devastating for many and will continue to be felt for many years after they are scrapped, assuming that day comes before the Lord’s return! And there’s good reason to be sceptical that it will. Labour have been almost silent on specific cases such as the Just Stop Oil activists’ sentences, and whilst their decision recently to remove the retrospective elements of the Illegal Migration Act is welcome, it is far from a rollback, which highlights Labour’s mixed signals concerning Conservative era legislation. This, of course, is somewhat understandable through a purely political lens – Labour, and Keir Starmer in particular, have been dogged by accusations of lying so adding further fuel to the fire is something they will want to avoid. And there is also the hard-nosed fact that keeping some, if not all, of this legislation on the statute books could simply prove helpful.

From a moral lens though?

Justin Welby was once asked in an interview if he felt powerful. ‘No’, he said unequivocally, before explaining that the role was less about ‘levers to pull’ than ‘influence and politics’. But who suggested the power of an archbishop would be anything other than influence and politics? There is indeed a considerable power in having the ear of the monarch, prime minister and just about anybody in the British establishment you wish. The more interesting question is why you have that power. It’s a question that contains many facets: history, politics, social-class, intent… but I think a particularly interesting lens is violence.

The interplay between politics, power, and violence runs far deeper than perhaps we are comfortable acknowledging. It does not take much to demonstrate this: just ask Suella Braverman about her ‘dream’ and ‘obsession’. Deporting vulnerable asylum-seeking people to Rwanda is a form of structural violence, and one which the Church and Welby, to their credit, have criticised. But so is restricting winter fuel payments. So is not capping care charges. So is the two child benefit cap. Some of these, again, have received pushback from the Church, but each is justified by the market-based economic orthodoxy of Labour’s ‘fiscal rules’. How much pushback will they receive?

This is a crucial question. In a recent episode of his podcast, former Tory chancellor and architect of austerity, George Osborne, praised current Labour Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, calling her a “mini-me” and stating of her budget “I don’t think there was anything she announced that I would have violently disagreed with or not done myself”. This should give us cause for concern. Tory austerity has been linked to 335,000 excess deaths between 2012 and 2019 alone, with one academic calling it “economic murder”. But the devastating impact of these policies extends even further.

Is Rachel Reeves taking a leaf out of the George Osborne playbook?

After the Chancellor's statement, George Osborne and Ed Balls are wondering if austerity will appear in her plans.

🎧 LISTEN https://t.co/9qA6ffpP8h pic.twitter.com/BN2m70UAo8

— Political Currency (@polcurrency) August 2, 2024

Far-right movements find fertile soil in communities that have been left behind. In one of the post-industrial cities I lived in most recently, the far-right was growing at an alarming rate after decades of underinvestment in the community and years of austerity on top of that. People are angry and they’re right to be angry. Some end up organising to make their community better, others end up organising with the far-right. This is not just fearmongering. A far-right demonstration organised by Tommy Robinson and containing overtly Christian framing saw 20-30,000 attendees last month, the largest for a far-right event in the UK for decades. A few days later, the far-right were on the streets of Southport weaponising the tragic and brutal murders of three young girls against Muslims and those seeking asylum, despite the fact the suspect was born in Cardiff to a Christian family. Since then we have seen this unrest spread, with dozens of far-right riots taking place up and down the country. Thankfully communities have came together to reject the far-right and repair the damage, but we are beyond the stage of warning shots being fired. Unless we start sharing wealth and resources more equitably, investing in the areas that really need it, unless we stop stripping our poorest areas of their dignity, the far-right will fill the void. That is what they do.

Keir Starmer’s response to these events has been mixed at best. Despite accusations from far-right poster boy, Nigel Farage, that the riots have been dealt with more harshly than other recent demonstrations, the evidence for this is scant. Indeed if there is a case to be made that so called “two-tier policing” may be present, it is notable that these riots have already lasted longer than the most recent widespread riots which occurred in 2011 and, of course, as race-riots, pose threats that were simply not present in 2011. And yet, it’s hard to escape the feeling that, to some extent, we’ve been here before. Whilst the response of Starmer and the police has evidently been lackadaisical, the authoritarian rhetoric has ramped up: a new police unit is to be set up with greater powers such as expanded use of facial recognition technology, cases are being fast-tracked through courts that will sit overnight, and the rioters “will regret it“.

It can be very tempting with such dangerous movements to adopt the ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ response, but there are good reasons to be cautious. As Director of Public Prosecutions following the 2011 riots, Starmer pursued an especially punitive strategy. As Oliver Eagleton writes:

The CPS adopted a blanket strategy of pressing charges ‘in all but the most exceptional of circumstances’, which meant working with police to jail people who, in any other situation, would not have been prosecuted – including one defendant who stole a small box of doughnuts, and another who was given a stolen pair of shorts by someone else[…] Starmer demanded twenty-four-hour court sittings with no pause on weekends to increase the rate of convictions, and made a personal appearance at 4am in Highbury Magistrates Court to boost morale. Senior legal figures described these special hearings as ‘kangaroo courts’ and ‘conveyor-belt justice’, with one defence lawyer observing that, ‘They were bringing 13-, 14-, 15-year olds into court at two or three o’clock in the morning … How are they meant to understand what I’m saying and understand what they have to do, understand what the evidence was and what was going to happen to them?’ Young defendants were sometimes separated from their parents and denied food or water. The judgements handed down were swift and brutal (The Starmer Project, Pg.50-51).

Again, it is very important to emphasise that the nature of the 2011 riots was different to that of the 2024 riots, being started after the all-too-familiar story of police shooting a black man, Mark Duggan, dead. The common thread is the broader context of growing inequality and poverty throughout the country and a government committed to further austerity. Of course it is absolutely correct that the far-right must be stopped. Targeting people on the basis of their ethnicity, national origin or religious identity is not something we should ever tolerate. However, it is hard to take seriously a government that was far too slow to act and now seems intent on making up for lost time by pursuing a punitive approach to riots caused, in large part, by austerity policies they intend to continue.

As a committed antifascist, I strongly believe there are times when the far-right must be countered with a fist, but it is very hard to heal a wound with more violence. Our communities need restoration, not more authoritarianism. Where there is the opportunity for restorative justice, this must be taken, and given the youth of many of those involved, there is every reason to believe those opportunities may be plentiful. The 2011 rioters, who clearly deserved it more, were not given this option. The same mistake should not be made now, especially when it would only serve to further entrench reactionary political positions in already disaffected people.

It should also be noted that expanded police and judicial powers don’t just affect those they ostensibly target in the first instance, but all of us if they can be manipulated to apply in other situations. There is a long history of left-wing movements being targeted with powers initially brought in to tackle unrelated groups, so we must be very careful about granting new powers to police and rushing a judicial process that is already set up to fail people.

Nevertheless, many of the economic points here are moot if there is, as Rachel Reeves says, ‘not a huge amount of money there’. There are, we are told, ‘tough decisions’ to be made or as Welby says, ‘decisions of immeasurable difficulty’. But are they? Is Welby right when he says that politics ‘demands the allocation of limited resources to limitless need’, mirroring Reeves’ recent reversal of the John Maynard Keynes quote that “we can afford anything we can do”? This is clearly an important question for him – he writes at length on this and related subjects in his first two books, and yet trying to pin him down can prove a frustrating task. For example, is it true that ‘the market is not efficient’ (Reimagining Britain, pg.150) or is it ‘an extremely efficient mechanism of distribution’ (Dethroning Mammon, pg.30)? I think in his heart Welby is a Keynesian – he told me as much in a Q&A once – and from my, admittedly biased, point of view, it could be a lot worse! But I wonder how many in government know that?

Many of us like to think we would, or even do, speak truth to power, but when we’re actually confronted with it, either in ourselves or our colleagues, we struggle to recognise it for what it is. After twenty-five years of worshipping and, latterly, discerning in the Church of England, I see plenty of power, but few people realising they hold it. I suspect this can be partially explained by a kind of Church of England pragmatism. The kind of pragmatism one might have when approaching a topic with no ‘skin in the game’. Sure, it seems eminently sensible, but ultimately it has a fundamentally occlusive effect on one’s worldview.

The issue of poverty is pressing. Quite literally. The experience of it is like having everything pressing in on you all at once. I’m not sure the Church of England understands this. It’s not that it’s full of terrible people doing terrible things – I know from experience that there are many who care very deeply about it and some with deeply insightful lived experience. But the Church’s very structure precludes change at a fundamental level. It can speak out on specific issues to an extent, it can offer guidance to political leaders, it can even influence the creation of the welfare state, but there comes a point where you are just too close to power to act prophetically. How could that not be the case for those appointed by a king?

In his recent article for Crucible, Al Barrett draws a distinction between the power of God, characterised by its smallness in the figure of Jesus, and the power of the Church. ‘Why’, he asks, ‘does the Church seem obsessed with ‘big’?’ It’s a perennial question because there is, at the heart of the Church of England, a contradiction. Part of the role of an established church is, we are told, that it is ‘for everyone’, and there are undoubtedly some wonderful people working in our communities to try and make that so. But I don’t know how they can ever really succeed when, for example, expressing my difficulty with the potential of having to swear an oath of allegiance to an unelected monarch, led an ordained friend to tell me ‘just do what we all do: cross your fingers’. We cannot be a church for everyone, let alone a prophetic church, if we constantly have to negotiate or pretend away our convictions, especially if those convictions either bear no relation to our ability to fulfil God’s calling on us, or form a part of that calling. God cannot be tricked.

Kallistos Ware once argued that ‘God is never so strong as when he is most weak’ (The Orthodox Way, pg.108-109). So must it be for the Church. Just as Christ modelled self-emptying love, so must we give up ‘not with a sense of rebellious bitterness, but willingly and out of love’, that which we imagine makes us stronger, but ultimately strips us of the prophetic.