Please type your message in the “Leave a Reply” box below and click “Submit Comment”. We try to attend to all messages left here within a week.
Leave a message here
– January 7, 2009Posted in: Uncategorized
About the Author
Tim Stratford is the Team Rector of Kirkby, and the Team Vicar of St. Chad's Church.
Re: Faith in the City
It’s nearly 25 years since the Faith in the City report was published with much controversy from the then Thatcherite Conservative Government of the 1980s, who said it was confirmation that the Church was run by a bunch of Marxists. The main criticism of the report by the Government then was that it was all about what the State should do to heal the wounds of poverty and exclusion in our inner cities and not very much of what the individual could do to help themselves, which no doubt harks back to Norman (now Lord) Tebbit’s comment of telling people to ‘get on their bikes’ to look for work. Now flash forward to 25 years later and we’re on the precipice of falling into a double dip recession, faced with all the same problems that we were looking at 25 years ago and the new ‘coalition’ Government is telling people that they should leave Council accommodation in one part of the country and move to areas where there are jobs (which to the majority of people means moving South and/or to London). Are we just hearing the same old rhetoric of Tebbit of telling people to ‘get (back) on their bikes’. Funny how things never really change.