Not so Christian

By D.K.

CHRISTIANITY is important to David Cameron: that is the clear message coming from Downing Street this morning. In a piece for the Church Times, the prime minister has announced that he wants Britain to be "more confident about our status as a Christian country" and "frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people’s lives".

What on earth to make then of a briefing given to the Daily Mail this morning by someone in the Department of Work and Pensions, denouncing one of Britain's foremost Christian charities: the Trussell Trust, an organisation which runs 420 food banks across Britain. According to a DWP source, its chairman, Chris Mould, is engaging in “fairly misleading and emotionally manipulative publicity seeking”. This is apparently because he is “effectively running a business”. The comments echo similar ones made by the welfare secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, a little before Christmas.

I visited one Trussell Trust foodbank in Brixton not long ago. This “business” operates mostly out of churches and community centres. It gets its food from donations, some of which come from corporations and some from members of the public. Not everybody can claim free food parcels: they are given out to people who are referred to the food banks, either by other charities or by local job centres. Most people in Britain have probably encountered Trussell Trust volunteers at one point or another, waiting outside supermarkets to ask shoppers to buy them some more cans of baked beans or orange squash. Sure, the charity is expanding, and it considers it a mark of success that it is getting organisations to refer people to it. But that's because it wants to help more people. Since when was operating like a business a problem for Conservatives?

What about the other accusation—that Mr Mould’s complaints about Britain’s welfare system are “misleading” and “emotionally manipulative”? This is a little more persuasive, but still falls short. Mr Mould argues that people are going to food banks because, among other reasons, they are being denied welfare benefits. DWP types argue that this is disgraceful because the benefits system is definitely generous enough to cover food costs. But they are the ones being misleading. The problem isn't that benefits are too low. It is that too often people aren't receiving benefits at all. Just take jobseeker's allowance (JSA). Since 2011, the number of people on JSA “sanctioned”—that is, denied their benefits for a punitive reason—has doubled. Even though unemployment is now falling sharply, the number of people sanctioned is as high as it has ever been. (Apologies for the crude chart—our graphics people are on holiday.)

Mr Duncan Smith and his advisers could argue that sanctions are necessary. If welfare is going to work as a safety net, not as a source of dependency, then it needs to be tough. Indeed, the government does argue this, often. The system is meant to be harsh. That’s the point: to make people suffer, so that next time, they do go to the job interview, do write up the curriculum vitae, do try harder to get jobs. In some respects, it even seems to work.

What ministers and their advisers should not argue is that there is no suffering. Indeed, they don't even need to argue that. Lots of people don't get their benefits simply because of incompetence. Why not promise to fix the sheer bureacratic nastiness of the system even as it is made tougher? Why not look a little harder at the sanctions regime and its limitations?

Instead, government advisers are quietly leaking venom about people who are for the most part trying to make the life of the poorest a little easier. On the day that the prime minister is trying to argue that we should all be a little more Christian, that seems just a little unpleasant.