The best future for British politics cannot be “a zero-sum, winner-take-all calculation, but must rest on the reconciled common good arrived at through good debate and disagreement,” the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote June 25 in The Mail on Sunday.
With the country so divided about how to leave the European Union, Archbishop Justin Welby called for a cross-party commission to “draw much of the poison from the debate.”
He said the Grenfell Tower inferno and the Borough Market and Manchester attacks “have tested our deepest values with an almost unrelenting ferocity — and brought out the best of communities in crisis.”
They have, however, “served to highlight divisions in our society.” The nation has been “severely tested in how we handle diversity, integration, social mobility, and inequality. Failure in these areas is ultimately a failure of values.”
He added: “Our values must be shaped by a recognition of the dignity of every human being, regardless of wealth, status, or influence. They must be values lived at home so that when we play what I believe can and should be a leading role, it is a role for the good of the poorest of the world.”
