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The Archbishop of Canterbury has kicked off 2023 by putting the Church of England on a collision course with Rishi Sunak’s government.
Justin Welby is a canny political operator who is almost certainly the most political archbishop of Canterbury in recent years. And there have been a few of those.
During 2022 he led an onslaught against the Tories’ controversial plan to deport illegal asylum seekers, condemning it in his Easter sermon as “the opposite of the nature of God”.
And last month, in his latest major intervention in the House of Lords, he led a debate on Tory immigration policy and denounced it as “grossly wasteful”, “staggering inefficient” and “cruel”.
Now, in a slick New Year message accompanied by soft music, he has attacked the Conservatives’ approach to social care, claiming the system is broken and the government needs to rise to the challenge of fixing it.
And, ominously for the government, he has served notice that along with the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, he is poised to publish a blockbuster report on social care, proposing “a hopeful vision of our society”.
It is unlikely that Mr Sunak and senior Tory ministers will find the report hopeful, however. All the signs are that it will trigger a furious clash with Conservative MPs.
Johnson and May failed to fix social care
Social care has been a political minefield for the last four Tory prime ministers: Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak.
It derailed Mrs May’s ill-fated 2017 general election campaign, when her plan was brutally attacked as a “dementia tax”, prompting a mid-campaign U-turn and then a “nothing has changed” claim that defied credibility.
On the day Mr Johnson became PM in July 2019, he declared: “I am announcing now – on the steps of Downing Street – that we will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have…
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