At the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple reacts to a recent speech by the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, in which the good reverend takes aim at an easy target (loan sharks) and announces a new policy Dalrymple finds a little ridiculous:
…the Archbishop, acceding to the cliché, decreed that henceforward all church wardens, bell ringers, organists, flower-arrangers and the like should undergo a check by the Criminal Records Bureau (the organization that keeps all British criminal records), failing agreement to which they will not be permitted any longer to perform their voluntary duties.
It is timely, then, to ask the really important question: did the Archbishop himself have a CRB check before he was elevated to Canterbury, and if not, why not?
After all there is no reason to suppose that archbishops are less prone to paedophilic tendencies than flower-arrangers, indeed rather the opposite, in so far as flower-arrangers tend to be women and archbishops, even nowadays, tend to be men. And let us not forget that the Archbishop is a former oil trader, and therefore suspect ex officio as it were.
Just a brief point: the companies the archbishop was attacking were not loan sharks but payday loan companies. In other word perfectly legal. And no one was coerced into taking the loans out in the first instance.