POLITICIANS should quit tinkering and offer real alternatives to our failed system, brazen bishops blasted yesterday.

In an unprecedented “pastoral letter” to congregation members ahead of the general election, the Church of England’s House of Bishops warned against “scapegoating” benefit claimants and avoiding a proper debate over nuclear weapons.

Campaigners welcomed the intervention but embattled Tories accused the posse of padres of left-wing bias.

The letter argued that Britons “feel detached” from politics and slammed our “retail politics” for acting as “an extension of consumerism.”

Calling for a more communitarian politics, it suggested avoiding “placing excessive faith in state intervention
on the one hand or the free market on the other.”

Insisting that there is a place for discussing the impact of immigration on communities, it urged politicians to move on from the “ugly undercurrent of racism” around the subject.

And describing benefit recipients “in terms that imply they are undeserving (and) dependent … deters others from offering the informal neighbourly support which could ease some of the burden of the welfare state,” they preached.

After commentators read this as a criticism of the Con-Dem government’s savage benefit cuts, Mr Cameron said he hoped the clergy “would welcome” his welfare reforms “because work does bring dignity, does bring self-reliance, it does enable people to provide for their families, it creates a stronger society as well as a stronger economy.”

CND hailed the church’s call for a “re-examining” of Trident, which they said was only justifiable in the context of the cold war.

“The British public wants to see a fully functioning NHS, living wages and the end of ‘foodbank Britain’ — not a backward-looking political Establishment that thinks peace and prosperity is won down the barrel of a gun,” CND general secretary Kate Hudson said.

On BBC Radio 4 Bishop of Norwich Graham James said discussion of voter apathy should not be limited to those who advocate abstention, despite the church not having “the sex appeal of Russell Brand.”

He also rejected suggestions from Tory MP Nadine Dorries that the letter exhorted a “very definite left-wing leaning,” saying: “The only manifesto the church is signed up to is the teaching of Jesus.”

conradlandin@peoples-press.com