INEQUALITIES in Britain are more extreme than ever, with the salaries paid to footballers among the worst examples, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said yesterday.

Launching Faithful Cities, a report that described the gap between rich and poor as “offensive to the Christian Gospel”, Dr Sentamu contrasted the £131 a week earned by a Belfast porter with the amount paid to footballers. Michael Ballack has just signed to Chelsea for £130,000 a week.

Dr Sentamu said that it was “fine” to earn such sums, but they should be taxed more fairly. He said he did not think that higher taxes would make more footballers play abroad, and quoted Thierry Henry as saying that England was the best place to play football.

The Archbishop, who supports Manchester United, also criticised the World Cup send-off party thrown by the Beckhams for creating impossible expectations among the young.

He said he was in favour of economic wealth creation, but it had to be justly distributed. Acknowledging that the profits from the party were going to charity, he was still concerned that the £50,000 paid for one ticket would be the wages for some people for four to five years. “You have got to say something is not right,” he said.

More than 350 celebrities paid £2,000 each to attend the party at “Beckingham Palace”, the Beckhams’ Hertfordshire home, but one bidder paid more than £100,000 for a pair of tickets in a charity auction for the NSPCC.

A good party could be enjoyed for far less, as his own recent enthronement in York Minster illustrated, he said. While guests of the Beckhams dined on dishes created by Gordon Ramsay, worshippers at Dr Sentamu’s enthronement ate chicken “wrap” from Marks & Spencer. “For one person to spend £50,000 on an evening out while another earns £131 a week is just not right,” the Archbishop said. “Is that a fair and just society? I do not think so.”

Dr Sentamu, vice-chairman of the commission that produced the report, said that faith communities wanted to be involved in regeneration. He pledged that grants would not be spent on hymn books. “Unlike a commercial organisation, we keep going in non-profitable areas because we judge success in non-commercial ways,” he said.

Faithful Cities was published 21 years after the Faith in the City report, which attacked the policies of the Conservative government and was itself attacked as Marxist by Norman Tebbit, then a Tory minister.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said: “Why is it that, 21 years on, there are still some things we have not been able to tackle? What is it that has paralysed progress?” He accepted that the Government did not lack the will, and that mechanisms such as the New Deal had been put in place. “But we have also had this constant experience of frustration. People feel it does not give them more control, it somehow gives them less.” Dr Williams, a Welshman who prefers rugby to football, declined to be drawn into the debate over footballers’ salaries.

When the archbishops visited a market in Camden, North London, they stopped to buy pineapples from Dean Cole, who asked them to pray that Wayne Rooney’s foot heals in time for the World Cup.

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