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The Bishop of Monmouth has criticized the Welsh Assembly for placing politics above good medicine. Bishop Dominic Walker told the Welsh Affairs committee in Parliament last week that the Assembly’s policy of providing all services to Welsh patients in Wales ran “counter to its policy of putting patients first”.

The problems arise with border issues when the ideologies seem to get in the way of the practicalities,” he said.

Joined by the Bishop of Hereford, the Rt. Rev. Anthony Priddis, on March 4 Bishop Walker urged the government to rethink the planned rationalization of health services.

In a statement to the committee Bishop Priddis said, “While reconfiguration of hospital services has been mooted in North Wales, it is hard to see how that could ever be achieved given the rural geography and population distribution served by Wrexham District General Hospital along with the other hospitals along the border.”

Under plans currently under review by the NHS neurosurgery patients in Liverpool would now have to travel to Swansea for care, while Welsh patients in England would find problems with their prescriptions.

“There is currently no prescription charge in Wales,” Bishop Priddis said, “but if someone living in Wales receives a prescription written by a doctor or dentist working in England, then they do have to pay at a Welsh or English pharmacy.

“The situation can result in Welsh patients who are seen in the emergency department of an English hospital decline a prescription that is then written for them because they want it written by their own Welsh GP, so as to avoid a prescription charge. This adds to everyone’s time and other costs,” he noted.

Both bishops urged the government to review the disparities in health care coverage on either side of the border, arguing it was unnecessary and ill-advised to foster incompatible health care systems between the regions.

The Bishop of Hereford, the Rt. Rev. Anthony Priddis

The former Bishop of Oxford has condemned the government’s inaction in the face of on-going human rights violations by the Indonesian government in West Papua.

Speaking in the House of Lords on Feb 26, Lord Harries said the government’s “bland disingenuousness” over West Papua had been discreditable. The Indonesian government was guilty of torture, “systematic brutality” and “genocide” against the indigenous people of Papua he said.

Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown conceded “the claim that there are major human rights abuses,” but noted the British government sought to work with the Indonesian government to “see it improve the conditions in Papua and to respect its special autonomy legislation.”

Lord Harries opened his remarks by saying that when he went shopping, he carried a bag displaying the West Papua “morning star” flag.  “If I shopped in West Papua with that bag, I would immediately be labelled a separatist and treated with brutality” and imprisoned, he said.

The government responded that Indonesia was making provisions for Papuans to be permitted to fly flag.  Lord Malloch-Brown called for “some understanding” for Indonesia as “flags are provocative things even in democracies that put an absolute premium on freedom of speech.”

“The Confederate flag in the United States continues to cause eruptions in every presidential campaign that I can recall,” the minister said.

Liberal Democratic peer Lord Avebury responded that “you do not go to prison for 20 years for flying the Confederate flag in the United States.”

“West Papua is a small country a long way away,” Lord Harries said, while “Indonesia is a big player with which we have major trade deals.”

“There are those who think that if only they stall long enough the problem will go away,” he said.  However, Lord Harries assured the government and the West Papuan people that their friends in the West would not abandon their cause in the face of economic self-interest or realpolitik, and asked the government to pursue this issue “with very great seriousness, conviction and urgency.”

The Bishop of Southwark has urged the government to rally the international community to take action on Zimbabwe.

Speaking in the House of Lords on Feb 6, the Rt. Rev. Tom Butler said that it was “incomprehensible” that the government had been unable to achieve an international consensus in the face of the “suffering” and “total collapse of the economy” facing Zimbabwe.

Bishop Butler said that while President Mugabe’s popularity among African leaders rested on his “apparent ability to act decisively on land reform,” the Zimbabwe strongman’s “short cuts” by means of “violent farm seizures” had been “disastrous” for the people.

Land confiscated from white farmers had been turned over to cronies of the regime resulting in the “devastation of Zimbabwe’s agriculture.”  The “bread basket of Africa” had been turned “into an unproductive wasteland” through government malfeasance, he said.

Dr. Butler urged the government to be clear in its commitment to help a “legitimate Zimbabwean Government” enact “land reform that is equitable for all Zimbabwean citizens.”

However, change was in the air, he said, pointing to the Feb 3 consecration of Bishop Sebastian Bakare in place of the Mugabe-loyalist Dr. Nolbert Kunonga.  “The good news is that this demonstrates how the brave people of Zimbabwe, given the opportunity, are more than ready to take responsibility for governance,” he said.

“What can happen at the heart of the church can happen at the heart of Government. Please, God, may it do so before too long,” he said.

Dr. Butler’s call for international pressure is being mirrored in acts of small civil disobedience within the country.  On Feb 8, 69 members of the Mothers’ Union of St. Andrew’s, Glen View in Harare were arrested by the police after they attempted to forcibly evict a Kunonga loyalist from the parish rectory.

The Mothers’ Union demanded the Rev. Martin Zifoti vacate the rectory and broke several windows, a French door, and knocked over a fence in their zeal.  Sixty-one members were released by the police, but eight were bound over by a magistrate to face charges of malicious mischief.

On Feb 11, the eight were arraigned before the Mbare Magistrates Court and released on bail.  Press reports of the proceedings stated that the court room was packed to capacity with members of the Mothers’ Union, dressed in blue skirts and white blouses, offering a public display of solidarity for their jailed sisters.

The former Bishop of Oxford has tabled a series of questions in Parliament, asking the government to press Indonesia to improve its human rights record in Western New Guinea.

In July the NGO, Human Rights Watch, accused the Indonesia of mounting a campaign of repression including extrajudicial executions, torture and rape against Papuan separatists. A November report by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture also recorded instances of police misconduct.

“Conditions in Papua’s Central Highlands are an important test of how Indonesia’s security forces perform when political tensions are high and regions are closed to outside observers,” said Joseph Saunders, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch. “The police are failing that test badly.”

“No one is being prosecuted for the crimes we documented,” Mr. Saunders said. “The police are acting as a law unto themselves.”

The Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua are closed to the press and outside aid agencies. It has been the scene of a low-level insurgency by guerrillas of the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM). The guerrillas have mounted a series of hit and run raids in recent years on the Indonesian security forces, who have responded by conducting anti-terrorist sweeps through remote jungle villages suspected of providing sanctuary to the OPM.

The former Bishop of Oxford, Lord Harries asked the government what measures it had taken to “promote peaceful dialogue between West Papuan leaders and the Government of Indonesia;” what it had done in response to published reports by the UN and Human Rights NGO’s “on the use of torture by Indonesian security personnel in West Papua;” and whether it would press Jakarta to “freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly” and allow the West Papuans to fly their flag in public.

Speaking on behalf of the government, the Foreign Minister for Africa, Asia and the UN Lord Malloch-Brown responded on Jan 8 that the British government endorsed the call for dialogue and had queried Indonesian government leaders about the “situation in Papua, including human rights.”

The government also welcomed the UN’s November 2007 report on West Papua and looked forward to the final report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Dr Manfred Novak. However, the UN’s initial findings were that “notwithstanding the very real concerns about treatment of detainees,” Indonesia had “come a long way in recent years and is trying to make positive progress on human rights,” Lord Malloch-Brown said.

Britain “supports the territorial integrity of Indonesia and therefore does not support independence for Papua,” Lord Malloch-Brown said, and would not press Jakarta on the question of flying the Papuan flag.

The problem of child poverty in Britain was a function of broken families and absent parents, the Bishop of Southwell & Nottingham said in Parliament last week.

Speaking in the House of Lords on Dec 18 during the second reading of the government’s Child Maintenance Bill, Bishop George Cassidy applauded the government’s commitment to “ending child poverty by 2020.” However, putting the government to work at tackling the problem of broken families would have a more immediate and lasting effect, he argued.

A significant factor in the rate of child poverty was the failure of absent father’s to provide for their children. Only “one in three” one-parent families “receives any support from the non-resident parent, Bishop Cassidy said.
“If we are going to achieve the Government’s targets on child poverty, it is vitally important that this issue of maintenance is sorted out properly, particularly for the most vulnerable in our communities. Children are a gift, but creating a child also creates positive responsibilities towards that child. I sincerely hope that the Bill creates a commission that will play its part in helping parents to live up to their responsibilities, with enforcement as a last resort.”

He also supported the government decision to increase the “maintenance disregard for those on benefits” and for having understood that the child welfare agency’s “main purpose is to promote the welfare of the child rather than to claw back benefits. That should directly affect child poverty,” he said.

The Foreign Office Minister for Africa has commended the Archbishop of York for his support of democracy in Zimbabwe. Lord Malloch-Brown (pictured) backed Dr. John Sentamu’s words on Zimbabwe, and told Parliament on Dec 17 Britain will continue to support democracy in the beleaguered African nation.

During the debate on the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon last week, the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt. Rev. Tom Butler asked whether the “cutting up of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York’s clerical collar live on television as a protest was a helpful gesture?”

“I certainly do, my Lords; I just wish that I was bold enough to cut up my fine necktie too,” he said.

Britain’s representative to the EU-Africa summit, Lady Amos laid “out unequivocally [Zimbabwe's] disastrous economic and human rights situation” to the summit delegates. “There was no ambiguity” from Britain on this point, Lord Malloch-Brown.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government stood “four-square behind honest and fair elections in Zimbabwe. It is not enough for President Mugabe to agree to a piece of paper as a result of this mediation; he must be seen to change the laws and respect them and to allow genuinely free and fair elections”

“If those do not occur, we will in no way lessen-rather, we will increase-our objections to the Government of President Mugabe,” Lord Malloch-Brown assured Parliament.

The Bishop of Liverpool questioned the government last week on its efforts to implement provisions of the Millennium Development Goals, and asked if it would support international treaties to manage fresh water resources.

On Dec 11, Bishop James Jones tabled a question in the House of Lords asking what progress had been made in implementing the UN’s Convention on the Law of Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses “which seeks to alleviate tensions between nations with shared water resources.”

The Minister of State for Africa, Asia and the UN at the Foreign Office, Lord Malloch-Brown responded the government had “no immediate plans to accede” to the treaty as only 16 nations had so far endorsed it.

“With 35 countries required, there is little prospect of the convention entering into force,” he said.

Notwithstanding its failure to garner support, Lord Malloch-Brown said “its principles are widely applied.” The government had implemented water-sharing processes in the Middle East and Africa and would pursue this work independently of the UN convention.

Bishop Jones expressed his disappointment at the failure of the treaty to move forward and questioned the minister about the consequences. “Given the warnings about the impact of climate change on fresh water resources, and given the millennium development goal that hopes to reduce by half the number of people without access to fresh water, will the United Kingdom ensure at the Bali conference that priority is given to the allocation of funding for the management of fresh water resources?”

Lord Malloch-Brown agreed that Bishop Jones had raised “an important point” and assured him the government would draw the attention of the Bali conference on the environment to this issue.

“Africa is the region that is most vulnerable to climate change,” he said. “It is projected that by 2020 between 75 million and 250 million people will be exposed to an increase in water stress due to climate change, and that agricultural productivity will have been severely compromised by at least a 10 per cent decline in rainfall.”

Britain would press this point at the Bali conference and at other international gatherings seek “to secure more resources to redress the matter.”

Don’t blame the EU for Britain’s troubles, the Archbishop of York told the House of Lords on Dec 5.

“May we please stop blaming the EU for all our ills?” Dr. John Sentamu said during a debate on the European Council meeting in Lisbon. “We are responsible for our economic policy, education, health, security and international affairs. If those policies are not working out, please do not look over the border and blame others; what we are not doing is our own fault, because we are responsible here.”

“I call it BSE-always blaming someone else, instead of taking responsibility for ourselves,” he said.

Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.

The hill farmers of Cumbria are in danger of fading away, the Bishop of Carlisle said in his maiden speech to the House of Lords last week.

Farmers were facing the unprecedented combination of disease, low prices and unequal EU subsidies, with many about to go under, Bishop Graham Dow said on Dec 6.

While “hill farming is precarious financially at the best of times,” he said, “this year it has been disastrous.” The ban on livestock shipping in the wake of the foot and mouth outbreak in Surrey could not have come at a “worse time.”

The ban can “at exactly the point in the year when hill farmers sell their lambs and around one-third of the lambs are normally exported for food. When the auction marts reopened, the prices collapsed, both for the farmers on the higher fells and for those lower down. Those who kept their animals instead of selling them have had to buy winter foodstuffs, and the price of lamb has not recovered,” Bishop Dow said.

Even with the government’s financial support package the average family farm profit was “just £2,000 per farm family, which compares with £18,000 two years ago,” he said.
Farmers were unable to pay their bills and many were “borrowing more and getting deeper into debt.”

Beef and dairy farmers were trying to “keep afloat, but they have no possibility of investing capital in the future of their businesses. As they see it, their counterparts in Belgium and France receive much more support and competing with them in a European market is very difficult.”

Bishop Dow urged the government to seek a “level playing field across the single market of the EU” and introduce “clearer policies to support food supply and livestock.”

“If hill farming were to fade away, the Cumbrian fells would become wild and the well cared-for landscape would change dramatically, as would biodiversity,” he said, and the “social glue of rural communities” would vanish also.

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds endorsed Bishop Dows’ remarks and told Parliament “there must be a greater control of prices and a fairer market.”

“Unless more is done to end the silent collusion over the continued rush to cheap food, we shall continue to see decline particularly in the dairy and beef industries,” Bishop John Packer said.

The government has dismissed calls by the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds to give expedited financial assistance to farms infected with foot and mouth disease, saying the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (DEFRA) response was well in hand.

On Dec 6 Bishop John Packer tabled a question in the House of Lords to the government asking if it would begin making partial payments this month to farmers impacted by the recent outbreaks of livestock and poultry diseases.

The Minister of State for Sustainable Farming, Food and Animal Welfare at DEFRA, Lord Hooker said no, the government would not honor such a request. The Rural Payments Agency planned to “make more full payments to more farmers earlier than last year,” he said, but the government would not undermine its work “by insisting on a particular start date for payments.

Thanking the minister for his forthright answer, Bishop Packer responded by asking the government to form a blue ribbon panel to study the “full economic impact of animal disease outbreaks in order to establish a system which will respond quickly and sensitively to what I fear threaten to be increasingly frequent outbreaks?”

Lord Rooker declined to consider the proposal, but noted the government “is looking at the review of this year’s animal disease outbreaks.”

The animal disease outbreaks had “cost the taxpayer an absolute fortune,” the minister said and the total costs of “bluetongue, foot and mouth and avian influenza” were still being tabulated. “These matters are being reviewed so that we can learn lessons,” Lord Hooker said.

The Bishop of Newcastle has urged the Treasury not to break up the Northern Rock, but to find a single buyer to take over the ailing financial institution.

Speaking in the House of Lords Dec 3 debate on the global credit crunch, Bishop Martin Wharton asked the Government if it would commit to keeping Northern Rock “intact and hence safeguard the jobs of 6,000 people? Does he agree that if the Rock were to be sold off piecemeal, it would cause incalculable damage to the north-east?”

Deputy Chief Whip Lord Davies responded that the government sought to save Northern Rock and to “ensure that it gets back on to a stable basis with exactly the significant advantages that the right reverend Prelate identified.”

However, there were larger issues at play, Lord Davies, said: “namely, the stability of the financial system and confidence in the banks. That is why it was necessary for the Bank of England to act as it did, while at the same time guaranteeing as far as possible the security of public moneys in Northern Rock.”

Speculation as to the fate of the ailing bank is rife, with the Bank of England on Monday denying it favored nationalization and a Treasury spokesman saying the government’s preferred option was a sale of the entire institution. However, “As the Chancellor said, we are looking at all options.”

The Newcastle-based bank has been forced to borrow £25 billion from the Bank of England over the past two months to stave off insolvency. Northern Rock is weighing rival bids from a consortium led by the Virgin Group and the investment firm Olivant for its assets. A final deal is unlikely before the New Year, Northern Rock Chairman Bryan Sanderson said.

The Bishop of Liverpool has pressed the government to ensure that the prison reforms proposed under the Carter review include adequate provisions for inmate rehabilitation and training.

On Dec 5 Justice Minister Jack Straw announced the government would increase prison capacity in England and Wales to 96,000 by 2014, and “build up to three large ‘Titan’ prisons, housing around 2,500 prisoners each.”

Straw stated the government would spend an additional £1.2bn, on top of £1.5bn already allocated for the building programme, while also adopting an early release plan for non-violent offenders making the “eligible for release at the half-way point of their sentence, remaining on licence to the end of their sentence.”

Straw also announced plans for a working group to study Lord Carter’s “far-reaching proposals for a judge-led sentencing commission”, to prepare sentencing guidelines and monitor prison capacity. However the Justice Minister said the government’s plans had “nothing to do with linking individual sentences to resources.”

Bishop James Jones, the Church of England’s Bishop to Prisons, welcomed the spending increase, but asked had “a figure been attached to the extra expenditure on restoration, education and training programmes?”

The success of a penal policy, he observed, was measured by recidivism, and that “depends very much on education and training programmes in the prison.”

Speaking for the Ministry of Justice, Lord Hunt conceded the importance of prison training programmes. He announced a “research report looking at the cost effectiveness of restorative justice, which will help us plan for the future.”

Lord Hunt assured Bishop Jones that “matters of education, health, restorative justice and rehabilitation are all germane to taking forward a much more rational approach to prisons and sentencing, which is what the Carter review is designed to achieve.”

In his speech to Parliament, the justice minister said the government was winning the battle against crime. “This is the first Government since the war under whom crime has not risen, but has fallen by a third. Violent crime is down, burglary and vehicle crime are down, and the chance of being a victim of crime is now lower than at any time since 1981,” Straw said.

There was a need for new prisons, however, due to an increase in crime detection and longer terms of incarceration, the Justice Minister said.

The Bishop of Truro has endorsed the government’s Housing and Regeneration Bill, backing its call for the building of 45,000 new homes a year by 2010.

However Bishop William Ind urged the government not to overlook the housing needs of rural England, saying the lack of affordable housing was strangling rural life.

Housing prices had risen “in excess of 20 per cent a year” over the past 20 years, he told the House of Lords on Nov 13, adding that “many in your Lordships’ House will have children and grandchildren who simply cannot afford to buy a new house in the place that they want to live.”

Government support for home building “will begin to address the enormous shortage of supply for families who are unable to afford the market price for houses and it will at least begin to offer hope to the 1.6 million families who are currently on council house waiting lists.”

However, “good new houses are not enough,” Bishop Ind said.  “If we are going to help to create sustainable, organic communities, there need to be facilities such as schools, medical centres, shops, pubs, halls and churches; all of them are an essential part of the whole enterprise and cannot be added later as a kind of afterthought.”

Bishop Ind urged the government not to overlook rural England in its scheme, as in Cornwall may “local people simply cannot afford to live in the area in which they were born and brought up.”

In some areas over 50 per cent of the homes were second homes, he said.  “It is not for nothing that the area around Polzeath is known as ‘Fulham and Chelsea-on-Sea’.”

The rural house problem was “with us now. It is breaking up rural communities as well as families, as younger families are simply being forced to leave, causing bitterness and division” and if not addressed soon, could lead to the “death” of England’s rural communities, Bishop Ind said.

The Bishop of Portsmouth has urged the government not to fund its budget on the back of local councils, nor to shortchange the South of England of its fair share of government spending.

Dr. Kenneth Stevenson told the House of Lords on Nov 13 that Britain was “arguably the most centrally controlled nation in Europe.” There was a danger that underfunded mandates from Westminster would have the perverse affect of harming the social services provided by local councils to the aged and the young.

“To pay for each new programme or initiative, the Government are reducing funding to local authorities, which then will have less money to spend on their core work,” he said.

“As the greater part of this money goes on the social care of adults and children, they are always the worst affected,” Dr. Stevenson argued, noting that the point would soon be reached where local councils would only be able to “afford to do the statutory minimum.”

This would shift more of the burden onto the “voluntary sector where the churches and faith communities are prominently industrious,” he said.

The government’s legislative agenda held “much promise” Dr. Stevenson said, but urged an equitable balance be found between “central and local” government.

He also urged the government to invest more in the development of the Isle of Wight, which he said had the “second lowest wage level in the country and more than 25 per cent of the population on benefits.”

The Isle of Wight Council, he noted was seeking to be “carbon neutral” within a decade, and had “high hopes” of becoming a “major exporter of green energy from tidal power.” However the current Energy Bill needed to be “far more robust, as this kind of project will need careful nurturing, particularly as the South appears to have received what I am told is the worst settlement from government in 20 years,” he said.

Prisoner labour reform isn’t working, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds told the House of Lords last week.

Bishop John Packer said the current scheme of work opportunities programmes for prisoners was unimaginative, inadequately financed and did not build skills useful for the reintegration of convicts into society.

“Far more common,” he told Parliament on Nov 15 was “menial and boring work, which comes over as part of the punishment rather than an opportunity for the future. We are not far from the era of stitching mailbags.”

The problem was compounded, however, by the lack of a work ethic among criminals. While there were “excellent training and skills development” in some Young Offenders Institutions (YOIs), the prison service was often unable to capitalize on this due to the “unwillingness of the young men there to take part in employment.”

The issue was, at its heart, one of moral education, he argued. “Young men [in prison] have very little experience of a work environment; they find it difficult to adapt to the environment being sought within the prison. They need that opportunity if they are to take advantage of their future lives outside the prison.”

There was also “little incentive” for prisoners serving longer terms of incarceration to “develop patterns of work which will benefit them or society,” he said.

Bishop Packer urged the government to “look outside the box and provide a greater variety of opportunity for our prisoners in ways which will encourage them where they are, and into the future.”

Reintegration of prisoners into society would be helped the creation of “public/private partnership” that provide skills training, as well as a link to the community.

He urged the government to use the resources and skills provided by prison chaplains. “One way to do this is through chaplaincy not being confined as it now often is to the prison itself but linking up with the local parishes, so that those from the parishes have the opportunity to go into the prison and feel that they are a part of that,” Bishop Packer said.

He urged the government to develop programmes that will benefit “prisoners, the prison regimes and our whole community [so] that people will be drawn back into a proper place within our society and our communities.”

Immoral banking practices lay behind the credit crunch confronting Britain, the Bishop of St Albans told the House of Lords on Nov 14.

Speaking in response to the Northern Rock banking crisis, Bishop Christopher Herbert called for a fresh approach to restoring damaged trust in the banking industry. Lending money to customers who “are not really aware of the risks they are taking,” was financially and morally unsound, he said.

“Woe to you who join house to house, field to field, until there is room for no one but you,” Bishop Herbert reminded the Lords, citing Isaiah 5:8.

The Bible spoke cogently and repeatedly about the “relationship between social morality and economic affairs,” he said.  Then as now “greed began to prevail over justice, oppression was rife and mercy was no longer part of the social or political vocabulary.”

Press and political comments about the Northern Rock crisis had missed the “much bigger issues concerned with the probity of institutions. It misses those situations that are about the moral relationship that exists between trust and risk and reward; about the moral accountability of those who have financial control over the most vulnerable; and about the morality of a society in which the gap between rich and poor remains achingly large,” he said.

“In a democratic society, banking necessarily depends on trust,” Bishop Herbert said.  If “moral trust” is absent the “banking system will collapse.”

“The current failures in the system are as much to do with morality as with economic mechanics,” he said, urging the Treasury to rethink its response to the credit crisis.  The government should “call together senior bankers with ethicists, philosophers, theologians and academics to reflect on the moral values which underline banking practice in our country to see whether there is any room for improvement.”

While such an approach may appear “a touch academic and self indulgent” it would go a long way towards restoring confidence in the “financial rectitude” and moral probity of the banking system, Bishop Herbert said.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) was failing British farmers, the Bishop of Exeter told the House of Lords last week.

Speaking during the debate on the government’s response to the outbreaks of Foot and Mouth disease, on Nov 14 Bishop Michael Langrish (pictured left) questioned Lord Rooker, the Minister of State for Sustainable Farming, Food and Animal Welfare about the government’s farm polices.

Was not the minister aware, Bishop Langrish asked, of comments made by a ministry spokesman that “It is up to the market to decide food prices. The UK can source efficiently food from a wide variety of stable countries, and that enables Britain to obtain the best value for money”?

This statement indicated the government continued “take food security insufficiently seriously,” he said.

The government appeared uninterested in the plight of rural Britain he charged, and was “prepared to see the terminal decline of the UK farming industry through the pursuit of cheap food and the concomitant exploitation of UK farmers by the retail food industry,” Bishop Langrish said.

Lord Rooker (pictured right) told the House he was aware of the statement, but said it had been “taken out of context.”

Bishop Langrish’s intervention comes at a difficult time for British farming. On Nov 13, Jill Hopkinson, the National Rural Officer for the Church of England based at the Arthur Rank Centre reported that Agriculture in Great Britain was plagued with outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease, Bluetongue Disease and Avian Influenza.

On Nov 9 Bishop Langrish, the chairman of the Church’s Rural Strategy Group, called for fair trade for farmers, saying the pursuit of cheap food coupled with the buying power of the big supermarkets is putting farming livelihoods at risk.

“The business practices of the major food retailers have placed considerable stress on the farming community through the use of methods which we believe to be unfair and of which consumers seem to be unaware,” he said.

“As bishops of a church which is a major investor in the retail food industry and which is also the landlord to many tenant farmers, we have a duty to consider the relationship between these two areas of business.”

“In particular we have to ask whether this relationship is fair and whether it operates within what we consider to be the principles of Fair Trade. Are human beings treated with dignity and respect, or is there some exploitation of one group of people for the unfair gain of another?” Bishop Langrish asked.

The Bishop of Winchester has lambasted the government for backing away from its commitments toward Africa. Bishop Michael Scott-Joynt told the House of Lords on Nov 7 his ears were “cocked for one word in particular-Africa-but cocked in vain,” as he listened to the Queen’s speech.

Bishop Scott-Joynt urged the government to turn its attention towards the Congo and address the on-going instability in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa.

He asked the government what it was doing to ensure land reform, the demobilization of militias, and the support of nascent democratic institutions. Why would it not “funnel aid through church-based organisations? How [did] the Government view the contemporary scramble for Africa by China and a range of Islamic states?”, he asked.

He asked the government to tell Parliament who was funding the wars across the region, “because it would be good to get to the bottom of the matter.”

“Who is running the Great Lakes region,” Bishop Scott-Joynt demanded to know.

“Human rights abuses and impunity from them” were the rule in the Congo, he said. While there had been great strides in democratic reform, the “the place is very little better,” he said.

“There is a crying need for the accountability of the justice and police systems to be worked at and, if security sector reform is not given priority, there will be no peace and security within Congo or along and across its borders, no containing of pillage of mineral resources, and no working at good relationships with the countries of the Great Lakes region,” Bishop Scott-Joynt argued.

He asked the government where had “gone the front-line commitment-the concentration of the last Prime Minister and the present one when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the Commission for Africa?”

It had been fobbed off “to a thing called the Africa Partnership Forum, whose latest report the Government have not thought worth bringing to Parliament,” Bishop Scott-Joynt said.

Stability and nation-building in the Great Lakes Region was a matter “of deepest urgency” he said, urging the government to honor its commitments to the people of Africa.

The paramount duty of government is to protect the “most vulnerable” members of society, the Bishop of Leicester told the House of Lords on Nov 8 in response to the Queen’s speech.

Bishop Tim Stevens, who also serves as chairman of the Children’s Society, welcomed the Children and Young Persons Bill and the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill, saying reform of the government’s child care system was “long overdue.”

“The Government’s aspiration to reduce the outcome gap between children in care and their peers and to improve the experience of education for children in care is clearly right,” he said, but noted strict attention must be paid to the details of the legislation as “for successive generations we have not satisfactorily looked after our children and young people in care.”

The Children and Young Persons Bill gives councils powers to organise children’s care and ensure children do not move schools in Years 10 and 11, except in exceptional circumstances. By raising the standards for those children placed in care the Queen said the government would see that young people were not “forced out of care before they are ready.”

The Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill creates a Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission to replace the Child Support Agency. The government says it will have tougher powers to force absent parents to pay for their children.

Bishop Stevens urged the government to fund the progammes as “policies without people and resources, however, are empty shells and doomed to failure.”

The government’s plans reflect “high ideals about what children need,” but council taxes alone would not cover the costs. “I wonder how the local authorities are going to find the money to make these proposals work, when the Pre-Budget Report failed to show how we are going to make the painful decisions needed about the redistribution of wealth,” he asked.

Bishop Stevens noted the Child Maintenance Bill was a “focus of enormous concern.” He urged the government not to replicate the failed policies of the Child Support Agency, and to pursue a “radical rethinking” of the child maintenance system, encouraging parents to be “generous towards their children according to their own means.”

He also urged the government “to be bolder” and create a “right to advocacy for children with disabilities.” The 13,300 disabled children living outside their homes needed to “get their views heard” and to take a “proper part in the decisions that affect their lives.”

“This is what gives them dignity, respect and independence, which they are so often unintentionally denied, and it can provide a source of protection by ensuring that their voices are heard within what is otherwise experienced by them as a closed system,” he said.

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds has backed the government’s Education and Skills Bill announced in the Queen’s speech last week.

On Nov 8 Bishop John Packer endorsed the government’s plans to require by 2015 all 16 to 18-year-olds to be enrolled in school or vocational training programmes, however, he urged the government to ensure that provisions for their moral and spiritual education not be overlooked in the new bill.

By raising the school-leaving age, the Queen said the government would “raise education standards and give everyone the chance to reach their full potential”. The speech also announced new rights to skills training for adults and draft legislation to reform apprenticeships.

Bishop Packer told the House of Lords the Church of England had “long been committed to a full and engaging educational experience up to the age of 18. We welcome the opportunity to work with the Government to meet those aims in schools and FE and HE institutions.”

“This Bill will provide opportunities for those from deprived backgrounds to achieve greater status and recognition because of the higher status that should be accorded to skills education from 16 to 19,” he argued.

Bishop Packer urged the government “to correct the anomaly over the entitlement to provision for spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, which 16 to 19 year-olds have in schools but not in colleges.”

It would be “extraordinary to concentrate on specific skills and not to take account of those moral and social values that need to be at the heart of our community culture and therefore of our education system,” he said.

The contribution of young people to society was fostered by a sound provision for
“education in moral and social matters within the work of the FE colleges,” Bishop Packer argued.

Opportunities to “celebrate and value faith and to explore social development” were an important task of higher education. “It cannot simply be left as an optional extra. Values appropriate to our multi-faith society need to be inculcated in the overall provision made through these groundbreaking proposals,” he argued.

The former Bishop of Oxford has backed the government’s bill calling for the regulation of scientific research in human embryology and fertilization.

Speaking in the House of Lords on Nov 8 in response to the Queen’s Speech, Lord Harries stated that the rapidly increasing rate of scientific change required new rules and new thinking.

A member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Lord Harries said there had been a shift in “social attitudes” in the 17 years since Parliament adopted its first regulations.

“There was a time, as the old song put it, when love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage,” he noted.

“They went also with sex, pregnancy, birth and children being brought up by that couple. In the 1960s, with the advent of reliable contraception in the form of the pill, the link between sex and pregnancy was decisively broken.”

Scientific advances and changing social mores had served to “break the nexus of marriage, sex, pregnancy, birth and upbringing at every point,” Lord Harries said, noting that earlier this year “a single Japanese woman in her 60s, who had gone to America to have a donated embryo implanted in her womb, had given birth to a child.”

The “one moral principle” that had emerged in this process of scientific and social change had been “that of informed consent.”

However this led to the moral question of when might fertility treatments be refused?

Parliament must legislate in this field, setting forth the “wider, social reasons for particular requests not being granted,” Lord Harries said. “If such requests are to be refused, there must be good, convincing, grave reasons; otherwise, the principle of informed consent will remain the only and the overriding consideration.”

The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt. Rev. Tim Stevens told Parliament the Church of England remained “deeply cautious” about cloning and “especially about the creation of human/animal hybrids.” The Church would continue to press for “very tight controls on embryo experiments and for constant review of the licensing of research into hybrids to ensure that the claimed therapeutic benefits are the only rationale for continuing research programmes.”

Dr. Andrew Goddard, Tutor in Christian Ethics at Wycliffe Hall urged the Church to watch closely the debate. Writing on his blog “Theology & Ethics”, Dr. Goddard noted the possibilities created by scientific research in the life sciences held significant moral questions.

“The problem is certainly compounded when we replace these connections simply by an appeal to human will and desire, often cloaked in the language of rights,” he noted.

THE GOVERNMENT has been challenged to do more to educate young people about the dangers of Female Genital Mutilation.

The call came from the Rt Rev George Cassidy, Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham. His intervention came during a debate initiated by Labour peer Baroness Rendell who asked the government about the Metropolitan Police’s efforts to combat the crime.

Lord West noted that the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 made it an offence for women to betaken abroad for female genital mutilation or circumcision: a cultural practice followed in a number of African and Arab countries that has come under harsh criticism from health and rights activists and has been condemned by the African Churches.

The government was currently investigating the prevalence of FGM among migrants to the UK and had ‘instigated awareness raising initiatives, including the training of health professionals.’ He noted the Metropolitan Police was investigating approximately 30 cases reported since July.

Lord West told Bishop Cassidy the police were investigating suspected cases of FGM through its child abuse investigation command under Project Azure. “This is an enforcement campaign, but it also focuses on raising awareness within communities that this is an illegal practice,” he said.

There was a ‘cultural dimension’ to FGM, Lord West said. “But that does not mean that the practice is not still barbarous. Some communities used to practise cannibalism, but that would not be accepted today. It is a difficult issue but we are doing as much as we can to stop this dreadful practice,” the minister explained.

THE GOVERNMENT has been questioned over its efforts to ensure access for aid agencies to the people of Northern Uganda.

The call came from the Bishop of Chelmsford, the Rt Rev John Gladwin, who also serves as chairman of Christian Aid, on Oct 29 asked Baroness Vandera, a DfID Minister, if the government was talking to the Ugandan authorities to help development agencies operate there.

The question arose during a debate initiated by Baroness Cox on the government’s support for the peace process in Northern Uganda. Baroness Vandera said the bishop’s concerns were well stated, as a recent report from the World Food Programme found that food aid was not reaching an estimated 150,000 people.

The British government was responding to the problem by providing ‘support for emergency rations to be airlifted to areas that were not accessible by road. Efforts have also been made to improve road access,’ she said with Britain ‘bearing some of the costs of engineering to rebuild some of the roads to ensure that access is available for basic services.’

Baroness Cox urged the government to ‘make peace a priority’ in Northern Uganda.

THE ARCHBISHOP of York and the Bishop of Winchester have endorsed Lib-Dem Home Affairs spokesman Lord Avebury’s call to give asylum seekers the benefit of British civil liberties and greater access to legal protections.

Lord Avebury’s amendments came in the third reading of the UK Borders Bill. He argued that a clause in the proposed legislation imposed ‘residence and reporting conditions on any person whatever granted leave to enter or remain in the UK unless that grant is for an indefinite period.’

“Hundreds of thousands of immigrants therefore face the possibility that they may be required to report monthly, weekly or even daily to an immigration officer, to reside at a specified address or to be present at that place of residence at particular times,” Lord Avebury said

The Bishop of Coventry, the Rt. Rev. Colin Bennetts has urged the government to support credit unions as a tool to promote thrift and broaden the access of low income wage earners to banking services. 

Following upon a 2006 Treasure Select Committee report which suggested a free financial advice service be introduced to support the 8 million people who earn £10,000 to £20,000 per year in Britain, on Oct 15 Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott asked the government what work was being done to support low and middle income wage earners to find “debt and pensions advice.”

“The queues outside Northern Rock hammered what is left of the savings culture in this country” Lord Oakeshott said, noting the one remaining trusted advisor, Citizens Advice, was being starved for resources by the government.  He urged the government to reverse course saying “surely it should be made the key to giving advice to the many people with deepening financial problems in this country.”

Bishop Bennetts asked the government whether it agreed that “credit unions are an excellent way of helping those on low incomes to manage their finances, in contrast to some of the unregulated savings schemes that have proved so disastrous?”

Over a quarter of a million people are addicted to gambling, a government report has found. The Gambling Prevalence Survey 2007 found that those hooked on gambling numbered over 284,000, while over 68 percent of the population played games of chance last year in Britain.

The study, prepared on behalf of the Gambling Commission, found that 32 million adults had participated in some form of gambling activity within the past year. A similar study in 1999 found that 33 million adults or 72 percent of the population were gamblers.

The most popular form of gambling is the National Lottery draw with 10 million participants or 57% of the population.

Scratchcards (20%), betting on horse races (17%) and playing slot machines (14%) also topped the list, while internet gambling rounded out the top five at 6%.

Problem gamblers were estimated to comprise 0.6% of the adult population, or 284,000 people. The 1999 survey identified 0.5% of the adult population with a gambling problem, or around 236,000 adults.

The British Gambling Prevalence Survey was undertaken by the Gambling Commission to quantify the “nature and scale of gambling in Great Britain.”

“It was commissioned as part of the Gambling Commission’s commitment to the licensing objectives of keeping crime out of gambling, ensuring gambling is conducted fairly and openly, and protecting children and vulnerable people from harm from gambling,” the government said.

However the Rt. Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane argued the “key message” of the report is that problem gambling had not increased. “This is a complacent statement” he argued as those affected by problem gambling were not just the gamblers, but their families and society as a whole.

“Gambling is now mainstream in British life through the presence of the National Lottery and scratch cards,” he said. “Its presence steadily corrodes the quality of our national life” while the “dream of instant wealth creates empty hopes,” Bishop Chillingworth argued.

“The support of ‘good causes’ is not an adequate justification for institutionalised gambling on this scale. It creates issues of values for voluntary organisations and for churches who are forced to seek funding from the Lottery in spite of their opposition to gambling,” he argued.

On March 28 the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of Peterborough and Southwell and Nottingham backed Liberal Democrat Lord Clement-Jones in opposing plans for a Manchester super casino, defeating the governments Gambling Order.

Speaking in the House Dr. Williams said his “unease” with the Gambling bill was with the “sleight of hand by which the whole business of the gambling industry has become coupled with the regeneration theme in ways which-I have to be candid-I find quite baffling.”

“While it is undoubtedly true statistically that casino gambling represents a relatively small segment of the overall problem of addictive gambling, none the less it represents a significant part and a social factor whose impact on its immediate environment is not restricted to addictive gambling,” he argued in opposition to the bill.

The Bishops of Norwich and Worcester have called for the repeal of regulations permitting the use of physical restraints upon youthful offenders.

The Rt Rev Graham James and the Rt. Rev. Dr. Peter Selby endorsed the proposal made by Lord Carlile, the president of the Howard League for Penal Reform, that would rescind the Secure Training Centre (Amendment Rules) 2007 statutory instrument, which came into force earlier this month.

The new regulations, which permit children held in STCs to be placed in restraint for reasons of “good order and discipline,” superseded rules allowing restraint only in cases of risk of harm or flight.

The new regulations were “frankly awful and inadequate” and if “taken at face value” would permit “physical violence towards teenage prisoners” when in the “subjective opinion” of a warder “violence is necessary, to ensure good order and discipline,” Lord Carlile said.

The use of physical restraints would become one of the “first choices available in any secure training centre, whenever there is a sign of trouble. That is simply unacceptable,” he added.

Bishop James supported Lord Carlile’s call for reform, noting he was “not sure how training and physical restraint go together. While physical restraint may be necessary sometimes, it is quite as likely to breed resentment, bitterness and further violence as much as it is compliance.”

“If it is now impossible to maintain good order and discipline” in STC’s, the “last thing we need is more permissive regulation” that permits “even more extensive use of physical restraint,” he said.

The Bishop of Worcester, Dr. Peter Selby stated he would be “happiest if these rules were annulled,” noting he was “disquieted even by the thought that these rules will be on the statute book.”

“Statutory frameworks” create an “ethos, climates of opinion or cultures,” he explained where “using physical restraint where necessary for the purpose of restoring order” becomes possible.

This “opens the way for rogue officers to feel that there is a sneaking level of public support for them doing what we believe to be unacceptable,” he said.

“This is not a debate between people who think that looking after disturbed young people is easy and those who think it difficult,” Dr. Selby said, but a dispute over government sanctioned violence.

Justice Minister Lord Hunt told the peers the regulations were not “an attempt to open the door to the inappropriate use of restraint.” He said, “A threat to good order and discipline is more than a simple refusal to follow an instruction from a member of staff. It must involve behaviour which puts the safe running of the wider establishment at risk.”

The government promised it would create an independent review panel to review the use of restraints on youthful offenders and clarify the new regulations.

Lord Carlile asked the review not be a “major delaying tactic” while evidence was “there to be acted upon.” Dr. Selby stated the government’s promise of clarification of restraint rules was “positively Orwellian.”

In a rare display of cross party cooperation, members of the House of Lords ridiculed government-sponsored regulations requiring churches and cathedrals to display “no-smoking” signs. However the government stated it had no plans to review or revise the regulations at the present time as its agenda was to create a cultural transformation against smoking in Britain.

Asked whether churches and cathedrals would be exempted from the “no-smoking” sign regulations, government health spokesman Baroness Royall said “Churches are not exempted from signage requirements under smoke-free legislation” of the Health Act 2006.

The regulations require an “A5, that is half an A4 piece of paper, saying, ‘No smoking. It is against the law to smoke in St Stephen’s’, or St Mary the Virgin or whatever the name of the church may be. It does not have to be displayed on a great big notice board at the front of the church; it can be just inside the church on a notice board. I do not think it is a particularly onerous charge for churches,” she said during July 16 House of Lords debate.

“This is a nonsensical regulation that attacks no habit,” Liberal Democrat peer Lord Roberts said, while Lord Lawson said the regulations showed a “profound lack of logic in the Government’s position.”

“In the past, when smoking was permitted in some public places but not in others, it might have been a help to the public to have a notice to indicate where smoking was not permitted. Now, when smoking is not permitted in any public place, there is no need for notices to warn people, but notices are required,” he said.

Labour peer Lord Faulkner asked whether Roman Catholic churches might post the signs in English and Latin. “Will my noble friend give some guidance on that matter” asking whether “Non licet fumare” or “Luminarium nullus” would satisfy government inspectors?

While “there was a lot of debate about signage” when the legislation was being drafted, those “taking part did not believe that anybody, especially the Government, would be stupid enough to insist that there should be ‘no smoking’ signs in churches,” Independent Labor peer Lord Stoddart said.

Conservative peer Baroness Cumberlege noted the Roman Catholic Church had promulgated a papal bull against smoking in 1650, saying, “For over 400 years, that law has been obeyed without the need for any signs.”

Asked what evidence there was of smoking in church, Baroness Royall stated “I think some gentlemen of the road, for example, may well have smoked in churches in the past. But here we are talking about a cultural change. It is encouraging people not to smoke.”

The Bishop of Norwich encouraged the government “to take a fair and proportionate approach to the enforcement of this legislation, recognising that the smoking of tobacco in churches and cathedrals has been much less prevalent than the legal burning of incense.”

The government stated it was aware of the concerns raised by the peers, and noted the legislation would be reviewed in three years time.

A wholly elected House of Lords would upset the balance of powers of the British constitution, the Bishop of Norwich said in Parliament last week in defense of an appointed second chamber during the government sponsored debate on Lords reform.

“The desire for a wholly or overwhelmingly elected second Chamber proposes a radical change in our constitutional arrangements,” Bishop Graham James said. If the Lords were to be a “revising chamber” for the House of Commons, then its members should have a “particular range of expertise and experience that elections alone do not necessarily produce.”

“Can the Minister see that balance and experience being contained within a wholly elected system?” Bishop James asked justice minister Lord Hunt. He urged the government to adopt legislation backed by all parties to create a House of Lords founded upon “experience and expertise which I hope can be retained in the new arrangements.”

The Bishop’s comments came in the wake of a statement given to the Commons by Justice Secretary Jack Straw on July 19, who stated a “comprehensive reform package” for the Lords would be in Labour’s next election manifesto. Mr. Straw said the government sought to end the “anomaly” of hereditary peers being part of the second chamber and form “an elected House of Lords” that would “complement the Commons and not be a rival to it.”

In March the government’s push to reform the Lords stalled after the Commons voted to create an 100% or 80% elected second chamber, while the Lords backed an all-appointed second chamber.

A cross-party working group, whose membership includes the Bishop of Chelmsford, has been tasked with crafting proposals that would delineate the Lords powers and membership.

“In dealing with such a central element of the constitution it’s right that there’s as much all-party agreement as is possible,” Mr. Straw said, however, he accepted there would not be “total agreement” on Lords reform, “but the constitution does not belong to any one party and it should not be used as a partisan tool.”

Conservative shadow justice secretary Nick Herbert “welcomed” Mr. Straw’s call for an elected Lords, but noted, “the real message” of his statement was that “Lords reform is on ice until after the next election.”

However Tory backbencher Sir Patrick Cormack said the majority of Conservative MPs were opposed to an elected second chamber and accused the government of seeking to “destroy” the constitution.

In the peers’ debate, Bishop James stated that after one hundred years “we seem to be inching towards some resolution,” on the reform of the second chamber. “I greatly welcome, as do all on these Benches, the consensus approach,” he said, and urged the government to accept proposals that would keep balance, expertise and experience at the center of the House of Lords.

The Bishop of Norwich has urged the government not to abandon its obligations to the Commonwealth by subordinating British trade policy to the EU.

Speaking during a Lords debate on the Commonwealth on July 18, Bishop Graham James argued EU trade negotiations with the developing nations of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) were skewed in favor of the West.

“I know well that the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is that the poor are blessed, but we do not increase their blessing by making them poorer,” he said. Keeping a “high doctrine of the Commonwealth” could prevent impoverishing its members during the current round of trade talks.

Harkening to the 1926 Imperial Conference which stated the Commonwealth countries were those “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs,” Bishop James stated this was the “spirit” which continued to animate the Commonwealth.

“It is an extraordinary ideal to live up to, one that is not exactly easy when member states vary so much in economic power, resources and wealth,” he said.

Current trade negotiations between the EU and the ACP countries threatened the economic integrity of some Commonwealth nations. “Many Commonwealth countries” believe the will be “worse off”, he said and “fear” that “EU aid will be dangled as a carrot and waved as a stick if African countries, in particular, do not open up their markets to European companies in the area of service provision and government procurement.”

“How does our part in this EU process reflect our Commonwealth aspiration[s],” Bishop James asked the government.

Last month the Anglican Church of Kenya called upon its government to reject an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and Kenya, saying free trade with Europe would not be fair trade.

“Trade should be at the service of people and not for profit,” the Kenyan church said.

“Hence trade policies should enhance people’s livelihoods through the protection of human rights. It is for this reason that we the church representatives affirm the principles of justice, equity and protection of human rights. These principles should guide any trade policy making and agreements,” they said.

The Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham has raised the question of teen violence in the House of Lords, and has urged the government to view the matter not simply as an issue of material deprivation, but of moral and relational collapse.

Speaking on July 3, Bishop George Cassidy asked Home Office minister Lord Bassam what priority his department had given to the rise in violent death among teenagers. The government replied that it saw the violent death of any young person as “a tragedy” and stated it “continues to give, the issues of guns and knife crime the highest priority.

The government took a “three-themed approach of policing, powers and prevention” to alleviate the problem of youth crime Lord Bassam said.

Bishop Cassidy questioned whether the “these violent incidents are the result as much of relational poverty as of material poverty?” and urged the government to adopt policies responding to the moral causes of youth crime.

Youth crime arose from a “variety of issues, such as family conflict, low achievement at school, the availability of drugs or weapons, and a lack of social commitment,” the Home Office minister responded, and were being actively addressed by the government.

The Bishop of Worcester urged the government also to “pay tribute” to charitable social initiatives such as the Damilola Taylor Trust campaign to combat youth crime. Bishop Peter Selby said the Trust was engaged in a campaign to invite young people to “respect your life, not a knife.”

It had much success in mentoring young people, he argued, by promoting the life and work of those who had turned their back on violence.

DELEGATES to the first International Women’s Summit on Women’s Leadership and HIV and AIDS in Nairobi have unveiled a 10-point action plan to foster leadership roles for women in combating the spread of HIV/AIDS. The July 4-10 conference organised by the World Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) drew 1,500 delegates from around the world to address the impact of HIV/AIDS on women.While united in their desire to end the pandemic, Church leaders in the East African nation remain divided on strategies to combat the spread of the disease. Moral principles must be paramount in developing prevention strategies, the chairman of Kenya’s Roman Catholic Episcopal Conference, Archbishop John Njue said at the end of the conference, stating the church opposed the use of condoms. The Anglican Church, however, supported the use of condoms to prevent the spread of the disease, but cautioned against inadvertently giving the message that support for condom use was support for sexual license. In a sermon last December on World AIDS Day, Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya stated condoms should be used by “discordant couples, partners who are both infected and for child spacing within the context of marriage only.”

Read it all in The Church of England Newspaper.

The Bishop of Liverpool has condemned the “deplorable social evil” of human trafficking and has urged the government to invest f