the corner office

Imagine you have two options:

• Option A: take two thousand pounds from taxpayers and give an out-of-work family a 3-bedroom home in a central London suburb for a month.

• Option B: say 'sod the family', take the two thousand quid and save the lives of 1000 starving Somalians instead.

I'm not a Christian but I think it would be very hard to take a self-professed Christian's views seriously if they said their "God of Love" favoured option A. Ever.

Which is why I think the Archbishop of Canterbury is a first-rate hypocrite.

You can argue about the merits and demerits of the welfare state all you like, but you cannot argue that is based on some form of superior morality. The poorest and neediest of Britons are usually still immensely better off than the majority of human beings on this planet. If you're in the business of caring about humanity (as opposed to being the business of caring about Britons, as politicians are), then what makes Britons more special than anyone else?

So much for Williams' 'deserving versus undeserving poor' moralising, too. Why does he think it's ok to be 'deserving' based on which side of an imaginary line on a map a person was born on?

And yet again, gentle reader, that is not a rhetorical question.