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The implications of the financial crisis and the recession
Speech to General Synod on Thursday, 12 February 2009 A friend left the following stark message on a mobile phone belonging to one of my children. “Called to the Plaza. I am out – told to report to reception. Don’t use this email account again.”The person concerned is not UK-born, and while she was not one of the high earners in the City, work provided her with a social world as well. With some hundreds of others she was summoned to HQ. The people who faced her across the table were not from the HR department but they were lawyers and security.She was asked if she had left anything on her desk. She mentioned her handbag. She was told to go directly to reception where her bag would be brought to her by security. This of course reflects the relative ease with which great damage can be done in today’s wired-up world.The outrage at large bonuses is understandable, but it is an issue for perhaps one per cent of the 400,000 people who work in the financial services industry in London.We have been working as a diocese to respond to the likelihood of 150,000 unemployed on our side of the Thames. Some of the projects underway are mentioned in GS 1719. I am particularly interested in the Time Banking scheme which enables recipients of benefits to become co-workers and givers in their turn. The Time Bank is one of the few banks on which a run would be positively welcome.The clergy of the City of London have been in the front line of pastoral care. The same is true of Fiona Stewart Darling and her responsibility as the bishop’s chaplain on Canary Wharf, where the day-time parish numbers about 100,000 people. It is difficult to know whether to sympathise more with those who have lost their jobs, or those who are left carrying even greater loads with higher targets and fewer colleagues.Sometimes, indeed, people seem to be relieved to get off the treadmill and to be given an opportunity to reconsider what they really want out of life. One of the great implications of this turbulence for us is to re-boot our sense of what a truly flourishing human life consists of. The Crackberry culture is dangerously addictive and coming off is notoriously difficult.The wisest people in the City are saying that the world the other side of this crisis, when the business cycle turns up again, will look very different. For one thing, there will probably be a radical shift of power east of Suez.Whatever happens, the global Christian community is a source of hope. Although only 58 per cent of the population of Greater London chose to describe themselves as Christians in the most recent census, there are at least 650,000 baptised Christians worshipping in more than 4,000 churches every single week.The London Church Leaders organisation, which I chair, is determined to work with other bodies with a vision for what follows the turbulence, in terms of human flourishing and the common good, inspired by classical Christian social teaching. I doubt whether the present moment is going to yield easily to a new consensus about these things. But I do believe that we are called as believers to endure the cacophony of anger and competing visions; to try to decipher what the cacophony means; to tend what we love and what is life-giving, and in the process to discover a fresh way of trusting in God and communicating him.
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