Turbulent priest of the people

DRAW a line across a map of England from the Severn to the Wash, cross it with another running north to south and you find Oxford, the node of middle England. Here it lies in the spring sunshine, honeyed stone glowing in the morning light rivers and canal encircling the city like a series of ornamental moats.

Heritage trails criss cross the city. Shopping malls vibrate to the music of ringing stills. Boutiques advertising "new season's ball gowns now available", remind you that this isn't Basildon or Bolton but one of the world's great seats of learning - although these days tourists who find their way behind the high walls to wander through ancient quadrangles are as likely to trip over beggars as bicycles.

These derelicts represent the only visible sign of Oxford's underbelly. You'll find no heritage trails to the acres of factories that straddle one of England's earliest ring roads, long abandoned yet still casting their shadow over the villages beyond the ring and the housing estates within. In the 1950s Oxford was the hub of the British motor industry. The Morris Minor and the Austin 7, Britain's answer to the Volkswagen, were driven off Cowley's production lines in their millions. British Leyland gave lorries and coaches to the world. In the 1960s came the Mini. Like England itself, Oxford was booming.

Then everything stopped. The housing estates beyond the water meadows, built for those workers, are now run down and vandalised. The most notorious is Blackbird Leys where a few years ago gangs of 13 year olds, their grandfathers love of cars still in their blood, turned "joy riding" into a nightly hell.

From heritage to housing, Oxford is a microcosm of England today. Its two MPs stand either side of the political divide. The local council is Labour run but only last week senior university figures hit the headlines with their recommendation that the university think seriously about privatisation - an appalling state of affairs for an institution that for 700 years has been open to anyone with ability. Town versus Gown or Man versus Mammon?

Across the Meadows the bells of Christ Church Chapel ring out, a jewel of a building which doubles as Oxford's cathedral. The Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, is a busy man. He, may have the smallest cathedral in Britain, but he has the largest diocese. This morning he has a housing association meeting to attend. He can only spare me half an hour. Housing is an issue that above all others makes him as near angry as a bishop is allowed to be. Not only is he chairman of the National Association of Housing Associations but the local situation in Oxford he describes as "dire".

The Right Rev Richard Harries does not mince his words. He was one of five Anglican bishops whose New Year messages published in the Guardian went well beyond the Archbishop of Canterbury's anodyne broadcast, interpreted as advising the clergy to steer clear of politics. All five were uncompromising and delivered a series of stinging rebukes on the moral failure of the government, though only the Bishop of Oxford explicitly endorsed the New Labour of Tony Blair.

"If Labour takes office," he wrote, "the time for a renewal of social responsibility will be more propitious than any other since the post war, Attlee government. Public policy and personal morality will no longer be seen as antithetical."

RELIGION in Oxford has always had a political edge. The city's position at the crossroads of England made it more worldly than Cambridge, stuck out in the eastern fens. Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was burnt at the stake in Oxford in 1556. Nineteenth century Oxford was the cradle of both the Anglo Catholic movement (Newman) and Methodism (Wesley), both in response to the torpor of the established church. It's where the Samaritans started and, of course, Oxfam.

Now, explains the bishop, Oxford has become a kind of magnet for a lot of homeless young people. Traditionally it has been on one of the crossroads of England. In Oxford we have a very major homelessness problem and a major housing problem." This misery he lays firmly at the door of the Tories.

"The government has frozen all money that local authorities are allowed to spend on local housing so there is virtually no social housing being built at all. Oxford for example has £20 million in the bank ready to spend on social housing and they are simply not allowed to spend it.

"The whole thrust of the government's policy has been to get people into the private rented sector. Now that in itself is not a bad thing, there is a lot of unused housing in the private rented sector. But the last Housing Bill said that local authorities only had a duty to rehouse people for six months at a time, and as most private landlords will only let out for six months at a time, there's an insecurity among a particularly vulnerable group of people which is worrying. Secondly, although the government was putting a lot of money into housing associations which I think is a very good way to do it, grants have been very drastically cut over the last three years."

Anglican bishops, together with the Law Lords, are automatically members of the" House of Lords. Over recent years they have become increasingly vociferous against the policies of the Tory government, on issues as diverse as housing, family law (divorce) asylum, prison reform and sentencing. These are indeed turbulent priests. Far from being anachronistic and powerless, the bishop believes that the role of the church has been particularly important during the last 18 years of Conservative party rule.

"There is still a parish priest in every parish in the country. If we take the inner city areas, one of the features of a priest - Anglican or Roman Catholic - is that we are there day and night, week in week out. Other people may work in the area but they don't live there.

"Particularly at the height of Mrs Thatcher's government when the Labour party was very weak in parliament, the church was able to voice the feelings of many people throughout the country, particularly with things like the miners' strike. It may be inevitable that the coal industry closed. But parish priests in north Durham and south Yorkshire knew the effect that this was having on people and could voice those concerns".

And with the possible election of a Labour government, the bishop believes the religious, dimension to be a growing force, though it will be hidden. ("Because the British don't like that kind of thing. They don't like a lot of overt religion.")

Tony Blair has made his religion, if not a corner stone to public policy, the mortar of his personal life. And it goes further. "The fact is that half the members of the shadow cabinet are members of the Christian Socialists Society. John Smith, as we know, was a practising Christian, so is Tony Blair. My own view is that it has recovered the fundamental moral basis of the Labour party which has always been its strength as opposed to the Marxist element which although minimal got more prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. Against all the odds this has now suddenly come forward, not so much in a Methodist form but actually in an Anglican form a Christian socialist form, rather than a secular form.

"When John Major launched his Back to Basics it very quickly foundered because he was so badly let down by his colleagues, both the sexual scandals and the financial scandals, so he had absolutely no credibility. My own view is that the Labour party have much more chance of bringing personal morality onto the agenda. Not in a very overt way, but almost as implicit in an emphasis upon personal responsibility. Tory policies are always open to the Marxist critique that they're interested in personal morality because they don't really want to face the wider social and political issues. That criticism can't be directed at the Labour party.

"The Labour party are interested in political policies which actually change society for the better. And I think myself that at the same time they will emphasise personal responsibility. There is a change beginning to take place, people have been wanting a change to take place, and under a Labour party I think we will see a significant change to a greater sense of personal responsibility."

The Bishop of Oxford is also chairman of the church's Board of Social Responsibility, the vehicle for articulating the social conscience of the church and he is well aware that not all recent ills can be laid at the door of the Tory party, neither does he believe that an incoming Labour government would be any kind of magic wand.

The key issue is the question of work and unemployment. Although the figures appear to have come down, there are still over two million unemployed. And no political party and no pundit seems to have the answer to long term unemployment, particularly all these school leavers who have no real chance in certain areas of finding employment at all. That is the greatest social malaise in my view.

"The breakdown of the family is not just simply a moral matter because there have been such huge social changes. The most obvious one has been a much greater respect for the independence of women; the fact that women can earn their living independently and therefore if they find their marriage intolerable they can get out of it, whereas of course in the past they couldn't.

"THE fact that we're all living longer is perhaps the most significant social fact. The average life of a marriage now is actually longer than it was in Victorian times. Because in Victorian times people died. The mother would die in childbirth after the fourth or fifth child so the average length of a marriage was only about 14 1/2 years. It's a bit more than that now," the bishop says.

"We're all living longer so that where in those days people might have expected to live together for 20 years or so, now it's 60 years. For better or for worse: the prospect of surviving 60 years together with all the changes the human personality undergoes in that time - it's a very, very major change. Plus the whole much more libertarian attitude to sex generally, the wariness of people about marriage because of their parents' bad experience. We are in the grip of huge social changes and the tide is not going to be pushed back easily.

"And yet the church still stands for a lifetime of faithful relationship and it still stands by that fundamentally - theologically because it springs from our whole understanding of the faithfulness of God towards us and marriage is to reflect that ultimate faithfulness.

In spite of these perceived difficulties he believes "it is through that kind of steadfast faithfulness that people really develop and emerge as themselves. But it is very difficult to get that message across in a society which is geared up to self fulfilment and short term view of things. It's not going to be an easy matter."

The recent drop in church attendance does not worry him unduly. His own diocese even showed an increase.

It is not an ultimate criterion as to whether the church is doing its business or not. Our times have been characterised as a time of believing and not belonging. Political party membership, trade union membership, even football attendance, all show a massive decline. Compared with these the decline in church attendance has been much smaller. People are reluctant to belong to things but there is a great deal of residual faith around. Opinion polls show that 75 people believe in a god of some kind."

Education is clearly central to any improvement in employment prospects for the country's young people and the bishop is worried about how this can be achieved.

"I worry about the Labour party. I don't see how we can have adequately resourced schools, adequately resourced hospitals, without more money coming from somewhere and where is that money going to come from?

"A lot of the things that Mrs Thatcher: stood for have now been accepted willy nilly" across the political spectrum. However much Mrs Thatcher might be vilified in some quarters there's no doubt about it she had to shake things up, for example the internal market in the National Health Service, they're not going to fundamentally reverse that. Similarly there cannot be unlimited spending on the social services.

"My own view is that the Labour party have gone too far in setting their hearts against taxes in order to get elected. But in my view taxes are a proper expression of social responsibility and we shouldn't always regard them as simply as a burden. They are one of the ways that society holds together."

We shake hands and the bishop rushes off to the Housing Association meeting. As I chat to his jeans clad chaplain I notice an A4 sheet of paper tacked on the wall, the sort that in other offices says "you don't have to be mad to work here but it helps".

"Never forget" it reads "the church is at its most effective when it's on its knees".