Articles of Faith blog: Karl Marx 'right' to condemn capitalism, says Rowan

Leaders of the Church of England launched fierce attacks on the world’s stock market traders last night, condemning them as bank robbers and asset strippers and calling for a judicial review into Britain’s financial services.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York demanded stronger regulation and an end to speculation and living on debt.

Dr Rowan Williams spoke out in defence of Karl Marx, defending key aspects of his critique of capitalism and gave a warning that society was running the risk of idolatry in its relationship with wealth. And in a hard-hitting speech to bankers in London, Dr John Sentamu condemned traders who had profited from the crisis as “bank robbers” and said that the market had taken its rules from Alice in Wonderland.

Dr Sentamu said no one was guiltless in the present crisis and that everyone had joined in worshipping the false god of money. In an interview with The Times he added that the time had come for a formal inquiry into the banking and finance industry. He said that this should take the form of a judicial review which could investigate every aspect of recent events and find out exactly who in the industry had abandoned ethics, leading to crises such as the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB.

Dr Sentamu quoted the Bible text: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” He said: “We have all gone to this temple called money. We have all worshipped at it. No one is guiltless . . . we have all become enslaved.” The Archbishop, a former High Court judge in Uganda, the country of his birth, said that he could think immediately of a dozen judges who would be well equipped to head an inquiry into the industry.

Dr Sentamu described his concern about the market, where “the share value of a bank was no longer dependent on the strength of its performance, but rather on the willingness of the Government to bail it out”.

Speaking at the Worshipful Company of International Bankers’ annual dinner in London, he said: “To a bystander like me, those who made £190 million deliberately underselling the shares of HBOS, in spite of a very strong capital base, and drove it into the arms of Lloyds TSB, are clearly bank robbers and asset strippers. We find ourselves in a market system which seems to have taken its rules of trade from Alice in Wonderland.

“Our country has built its financial strength historically on the manufacturing of goods, where money was the medium of exchange. In the last week we have seen its systems come close to ruin because now money is no longer being the medium of exchange for goods, but rather is the very item that is being traded.”

Dr Williams, in an article in Friday’s Spectator, compares today’s debtors and financiers to the feckless young clerics and landowners described in the novels of Trollope. He writes: “Individuals find that their own personal financial decisions and calculations have nothing to do with what is happening to their resources, in a process for which a debt is simply someone else’s wholly disposable asset.”

Criticising the practices which involve financial institutions selling debts on to each other, Dr Williams says: “It is no use pretending that the financial world can maintain indefinitely the degree of exemption from scrutiny and regulation that it has got used to.”

He calls for a basis of “common prosperity” to be established and suggests that other financial practices besides short-selling should also be banned. “Without a background of social stability everyone will eventually suffer.”

Dr Williams says the crisis is underpinned by deeper moral issues, and that the connection between money and material reality has to be reestablished. He concedes that entrepreneurs must be allowed to create wealth but he argues that it is “a sort of fundamentalism” to say that this is the only way.

“Fundamentalism is a religious word, not inappropriate to the nature of the problem,” the Archbishop says “Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry.”