{"id":3908,"date":"2011-06-09T17:42:43","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T17:42:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=3908"},"modified":"2013-09-19T13:34:16","modified_gmt":"2013-09-19T12:34:16","slug":"abc-guide-to-controversial-politics-for-those-with-short-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=3908","title":{"rendered":"ABC guide to controversial politics &#8211; for those with short memories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Turbulent priests have a long tradition within the Church in England. You don\u2019t have to look back as far the original one, Thomas \u00e0 Becket, murdered at the whim of King Henry II. The history of church and state in far more recent times has been one of horns being locked on a far wider ranger of issues than the ones the Archbishop of Canterbury rather gently raised yesterday in his guest editorial in the <em>New Statesman<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Those who suggested that Rowan Williams has made the most baldly political intervention by a serving Archbishop of Canterbury clearly have short memories. Robert Runcie, of <em>Faith in the City<\/em> fame, often pitched himself in opposition to the Thatcher government \u2013 on everything from the Falklands War to the Tories \u201clunatic\u201d nuclear arsenal and propensity to refer to their opponents in the miners\u2019 strike as \u201cscum\u201d. His successor George Carey, who dressed archiepiscopally to the right, attacked judges for their ignorance of the church and called for stricter controls on immigration to preserve \u201cour values\u201d. Rowan Williams himself has been forthrightly critical of \u00a0the war on Iraq and the extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden, not to mention the role of bankers in provoking global recession.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Few in the government seem to have noticed that the man acronymically known in the Church as the ABC also lamented the fact that the nation is \u201cstill waiting for a full and robust account of what the left would do differently\u201d. Dr Williams\u2019 intervention is as embarrassing for Ed Miliband as it is for David Cameron. It is, after all Labour, rather than the church, who should be providing the Opposition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Turbulent priests have a long tradition within the Church in England. You don\u2019t have to look back as far the original one, Thomas \u00e0 Becket, murdered at the whim of King Henry II. The history of church and state in far more recent times has been one of horns being locked on a far wider [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,190,37,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglican-communion","category-coalition-britain","category-politics","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3908"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8021,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908\/revisions\/8021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}