contribute to the recession – yet they are hung out to dry. Some on the Right have gone so far as to suggest that civil servants played a part in the public-spending crisis because of the rise in public-sector recruitment. It’s true, but it conveniently ignores the other reason for the yawning hole – the decline in tax receipts. Grandstanding politicians who like to have a go at the public sector also fail to pay due heed to the uncomfortable reality of Britain in 2011: we are an overcrowded island nation that is becoming more crowded all the time. The demands on the public services – on wel- fare, education and health, in particular – are immense. Swathes of the public sector were already under-resourced long before this cur- rent crisis.
Listen to some politicians and one could be forgiven for thinking that the public sector need only comprise doctors, nurses, teachers, police officers and soldiers, such is the focus heaped upon them, and that the rest are super- fluous. Indeed, it is easy to poke fun at some job titles in the government service, though once they are dissected it becomes clear that there is a serious role being undertaken that would be missed. This is a lesson that the Coalition Government had to absorb when it purged quangos. After promising a “bonfire” of these bodies, it has had to transfer people and their functions elsewhere to Whitehall departments or outsource them. Hardly any of their roles have disappeared. There is a frustration, too, that civil servants
are being forced to carry the can for the failings of others. With inordinate focus placed on MPs and their earnings, thanks to some of them fiddling their expenses and being caught, there has been a drive to halt the entire gov- ernment-funded gravy train. It has been declared unacceptable by Number 10 that any recipient of the public purse is paid more than the Prime Minister – this, regardless of the fact that many in private employment earn sums far higher than the PM’s.
be understandable, a collapse in public services would be a blow to Britain, both in terms of the damage to its fragile recovery and its rep- utation abroad. The responsibility for a strike call lies with union leaders. But the Chancellor needs to consider his approach too. George Osborne needs to rid himself of that glint in his eye and the hard expression he adopts whenever the public sector is mentioned. He must tem- per his language and his instincts, and be more appreciative, understanding and accom- modating. That is a hard task for an ambitious Chancellor with little room for manoeuvre. He can criticise the bankers as much as he likes but he can’t hit them where it hurts most – in their pockets. The stage is set for unrest and conflict. Both sides have to pull back before it is too late.
W
■Chris Blackhurst is City editor of the London Evening Standard.
hile the disgruntlement of the public sector, faced with con- tinual criticism, job losses and a declining quality of life, might
PETER STANFORD
‘The Rosminian order presented Kit as something it knew him not to be’
Sometimes I look at our wedding photos, tucked away on a shelf in my office at home, after one of those silly rows we have when the domestic detail and drudgery get on top of one or other of us. They redirect my focus to something more important and enduring. Lately, though, I’ve been taking the album out instead to puzzle over those particular pictures that include the priest who married us (and later baptised our son, his namesake, and who was a trusted friend for two decades). For TV viewers, news that Fr Kit Cunningham, there in the album, had confessed at the very end of his life in 2010 to sexually abusing youngsters he taught at a Rosminian school in Tanzania in the 1960s, came on Tuesday evening with the broadcast on BBC1 of a documentary by Olenka Frenkiel. Others had heard about it via a story in The Tablet last week and various articles in the previous Sunday’s papers, including one I wrote previewing the programme. For all concerned, as far as I can judge, it came as the most profound and appalling shock. Fr Kit had many friends and admirers. Most – or those who have contacted me after the article – had imagined, like me, that they knew his weaknesses. He liked a drink and he was close to his parish secretary, Jenny, who had died in 2006. But these were set against his work for the poor and needy on the margins of the City of London, where his church, St Etheldreda’s, stood, and against his high-profile but unofficial chaplaincy to Fleet Street, which used to run nearby, and to the Catholic press. By chance, I had learnt about the dark side of Fr Kit in January of this year. I’d written a fond obituary of him for The Guardian and I wrote as I found. A week later, out of the blue, I received an email. It was from one of the boys, now a professional middle-aged man, who Kit had abused. He labelled him a “deviated creep”. To my shame, I wondered for a moment after that had popped into my in-box if my correspondent was mistaken. Surely not my genial Fr Kit! But he’d given
me a way of checking out his claim. Fr Kit, he said, had returned his MBE to Buckingham Palace shortly before his death. This turned out to be true and soon I was furnished with the full details of the crimes he’d perpetrated, along with three other Rosminian priests, against powerless, defenceless pupils at St Michael’s School, Soni. I was given too a copy of his letter of apology to them, written in February 2010. For his friends, the process of
trying to reconcile his past perverted crimes with our memories of him is just beginning. That journey, I must stress,
however, is no more than a footstep compared with the lifelong journey of pain, depression, anxiety, broken relationships and suicide attempts recorded by those Fr Kit and his fellow priests preyed on at Soni, as revealed in the BBC film. And it is the victims who must be uppermost in our minds. I wish they had been uppermost in the mind of the Rosminian order when it arranged a memorial service for Fr Kit weeks after his death. It knew the truth, yet it went through a charade that presented Kit as something it knew him not to be. And I wish I felt confident that the victims of abusive priests were, are and will always be uppermost in the minds of our church leaders. Yes, I know safeguarding is now
better than it has ever been. Seminaries make all students confront their sexuality. The Pope has repeatedly publicly apologised. But I can’t help feeling that what this latest revelation reveals is the leadership of our Church still failing truly to own the issue of sexual abuse by clergy. Contrast Benedict’s words, for instance, with the Rosminians’ refusal to pay compensation to men they accept are victims on what they insultingly call “moral” grounds. And so, like many other Catholics, I wait, hoping the next scandal to emerge will not be so painfully close to home. And I wait for one of our church leaders to make the sort of act of atonement that will finally convince me they have got it, and that true forgiveness can therefore be sought. For forgiveness requires genuine acknowledgement with no caveats or talk of “if I had known then what I know now…”. Some of the perpetrators of abuse
have been jailed, but I still wait for one of the bishops or heads of religious orders who covered up their crimes for so long to hold their hands up, say to victims, “I got it so very wrong”, and resign.
25 June 2011 | THE TABLET | 7
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