We were very happy to welcome Bishop Terry at our Core Group meeting at the end of February. This gave us an opportunity to tell him about the aims and work of the Commission and to ask him to send a message to our readers which you will see below. We look forward to further meetings with him.

Poverty and Homeless Action week in January was supposed to mobilise public opinion within the churches and beyond to put pressure on our political leaders to bring about change. However as Church Action on Poverty notes, the least well-off are a third less likely to vote than their affluent counterparts and four times less likely to become school governors. There is a role here for individual Christians and Churches to press not just for an end to child poverty but also towards the goal of ending poverty across all generations in the UK by 2020.
I
nequality in Britain is at a 40-year high. It cannot be right that boardroom bosses can award themselves multi-million pound bonuses at the same time as their workers still fall below the poverty line. Ten years ago the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales commented in The Common Good: “There must come a point at which the scale of the gap between the very wealthy and those at the bottom of the range of income begins to undermine the common good: this is the point at which society starts to be run for the benefit of the rich, not for all its members.” Perhaps it is time for our bishops to speak again and to insist on a change.

Our next meeting will be on May 3 at English Martyrs, York where our speaker is to be the well-known activist Bruce Kent, He is a wonderful speaker so please make a special effort to come.

And finally, the Commission have instituted an Annual Anthony Storey Memorial Lecture and we are delighted that the speaker at the inaugural lecture on 17 May will be Paul Vallely. Further details can be found on the last page of the newsletter.

Chris Dove