The only way is ethics

The latest to depart from the ongoing soap that is the running of St Paul’s is the Dean. There is increasing anxiety among the cathedral authorities that the Met will be violent (they do have form) and that will reflect badly on them. In this they are right. Their handling of the protest has been almost unanimously condemned. The backlash created by a violent clampdown will damage the church. Where the church should be seen to support the poor and the oppressed it will be seen to have nailed its colours to the flag of mammon. 

Even some bankers are not happy. It is worth repeating that, even some bankers are not happy! Ken Costa who is an immensely rich banker and who funded the Alpha Course wrote the following in the Financial Times.(29/10/11) “I have been in the City since before the Big Bang whose 25th anniversary came this week. I have been through several recessions but I cannot recall the underlying sustained anger across all social levels – from dinner parties to demonstrations – aimed at bankers and the market economy as a whole.”

"When such a wide range of people are singing a tune perhaps discordant to a City worker's ears but seemingly in tune with the global view that the market economy has failed to deliver growth, jobs and hope, we need to listen. The cure is not more legislation, or increased regulation. It is the pressing need to reconnect the financial with the ethical." (My emphasis)

As Andrew Brown concluded in a Guardian online article today,  "This need to reconnect the financial with the ethical is precisely the cause on which the protesters and the chapter of St Paul's are united, even when they disagree. It would be an act of insane folly if the Church of England were to disconnect them once again, and to take the side of money against ethics.” 

Insane folly indeed.