Economy: Spring Statement

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bishop of Lincoln (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I thank those who have made me so welcome to your Lordships’ House, not least those who hail from Lincolnshire, including several proud doorkeepers who either live in the county or have served there in the armed services. We share a love for our historic county, the beauty of landscape and building, not least Lincoln Cathedral, about which noble Lords may have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack; the pleasure of its food—I am a bigger man now than I was when I went there—and, most importantly, the rugged, independent-mindedness of its people. I also thank those who have said warm words of encouragement in this debate.

I have been Bishop of Lincoln for over six years. My predecessor, Dr John Saxbee, is an expert in the work of the Danish theologian and philosopher Kierkegaard, one of whose most famous sayings is, “Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards”. Trying to understand my life backwards now, I can see that providentially much of who I was and what I did before coming to Lincoln in 2011 prepared me for the role that I now inhabit, and will inform and guide the contributions that I hope to make in your Lordships’ House.

I come from working-class roots in the former steel town of Consett in north-west Durham, a town that was only there because of the steelworks, the place where all the men in my family worked. I found faith and a vocation to the priesthood at the age of 13. It was a surprise to me—a surprise that has not exactly left me yet—that God was calling someone like me to be a priest. This vocation took me to south London, Hampshire and Portsmouth, where the journey back to my roots began. Portsmouth, although 350 miles south of Consett and a little warmer, has been described as a northern city on the south coast—a reminder that the north/south divide is as much a conceptual division as a crude geographical line. There I was able to begin to engage with issues of poverty, inequality and low educational attainment that reappear now where I currently serve.

My journey back to my roots—or, as we members of the north-eastern diaspora call it, “home”—continued with a national job in Church House, Westminster, overseeing the provision of ordained and lay ministry across the Church of England. That sensitised me to the challenges facing the communities and churches in areas on the edge such as the north-east itself, Cumbria, Cornwall, Herefordshire and of course Lincolnshire.

That brings me to where I am today and the role that I now play, and to the Chancellor’s Spring Statement. There are some things to welcome in what was announced —what has been called the light at the end of the tunnel: the modest improvement in economic forecasts and the prospect of an increase in spending on and investment in public services, which will be good news to the people of Lincolnshire, especially if what is devoted to Lincolnshire addresses the challenges that we actually face.

Lincolnshire is formed by its history and its geography. In the words of one recent book, we are “prisoners of geography”. The impact on Lincolnshire of 50% of its population living in sparse, rural settlements is huge. Size matters, and in Lincolnshire this is expressed in challenges faced by the health and education services, not to mention the threat that climate change poses to Lincolnshire, which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury sees in a recent book as having,

“significant bite not only for our generation but also for those as yet unborn”.

However, Lincolnshire is not all rural or flat fens. There are communities like Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Lincoln itself and Boston. In those areas that voted heavily in favour of Brexit, there are the usual challenges of urban life, and there are more to come when the full impact of welfare reform is experienced. Unless economic policy as articulated in the Statement is directed as much towards the interests of these communities as it is to the more prosperous corners of our country, we shall be failing in our duty to create a fairer and more integrated society. Already I see in those communities a sense of alienation from the metropolitan elite. In the typology of David Goodhart’s helpful book, the “somewheres” resent the “anywheres”, while the “anywheres” do not understand the values of the “'somewheres”.

This is not new. The Lincolnshire rising of 1537 and the Pilgrimage of Grace that followed, were obviously about first of all a commitment to the old religion, but perhaps also driven by the resentment that King Henry VIII and his commissioners were the rich elite from the south who had come to plunder their assets. The King made his views on Lincolnshire clear. The shire was, he said,

“the most brute and beastly of the whole realm”,

and he saw that the perpetrators of the rising were cruelly executed. In hoping to avoid a similar fate, it is none the less my sincere wish to be a small but proud voice for the successors of those good people of greater Lincolnshire in this place.