The Archbishop of Canterbury put himself at odds with the Government today when he questioned the morality of Gordon Brown's fiscal stimulus package, likening it to "the addict returning to the drug".

In an outspoken interview with the BBC, Dr Rowan Williams said that the credit crunch was a welcome “reality check” for a society that had become driven by unsustainable greed.

And although he admitted that it would be "suicidally silly" for a prelate to give advice to economists, he dismissed the suggestion that Britain should try to spend its way out of recession. "I hope that people would understand that spending itself is about need before it is about saving the economy," he said.

Dr Williams's intervention came as official figures showed another sharp deterioration in the UK's public finances. Net borrowing soared to a record £16 billion in November, bringing it up to £56.1 billion in the first eight months of the financial year - although it is officially forecast to reach double that figure next year.

The archbishop told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the country had been “going in the wrong direction” for decades by relying on financial speculation to generate wealth quickly rather than “making things”. The downturn, he added, might force people to rediscover the need for patience if they want to build sustainable wealth.

Asked whether that meant the global financial crisis wracking the economy had been beneficial, Dr Williams replied: “It is a sort of a reality check, isn’t it - which is always good for us. A reminder that what I think some people have called fairy gold is just that - that sooner or later you have to ask: ’What are we making or what are we assembling or accumulating wealth for?’.”

He went on: “I would like to think that in this sort of crisis people would be reflecting more on how you develop a volunteer culture, how you develop a culture of people willing to put their services at the needs of others so that there can be a more active, a more vital civil society.”

The archbishop called on the Government to give more of a lead on “how the civil society is created” and expressed concerns over the Prime Minister’s stimulus package, which included cutting VAT to get the public spending again.

Questioned on whether increased spending was the right way to tackle the downturn, he said: “It seems a little bit like the addict returning to the drug. When the Bible uses the word ’repentance’, it doesn’t just mean beating your breast, it means getting a new perspective, and that is perhaps what we are shrinking away from.”

He added: “It is about what is sustainable in the long term, and if this is going to drive us back into the same spin, I do not think that is going to help us.”

Dr Williams admitted that he was likely to face criticism for giving economists “advice” on how to tackle the crisis. “It’s suicidally silly, I think, because I am not an economist by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. "But I want to ask where these moral questions are in the economic discourse.”

Although he did not stray too far into that discourse, the archbishop's remarks might prove uncomfortable for Mr Brown, whose economic rescue plan was dismissed last week by no less than the German finance minister as "crass Keynesianism".

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