20. Unemployment in mid 1991 now affects over 2,000,000 people and has been rising at the rate of up to 80,000 per month. 6.5 per cent of the workforce are in receipt of benefit.
The danger of simply regurgitating these lists of economic statistics is that you could easily fall back on to the failed economic analyses of what is wrong with Britain and what needs to be done. Nor is it a case of trying to produce a levelised, supposedly equal, society. We all know where that takes us. What is surely needed is a vision of a fairer Britain and one which is more conscious of the underside. That is the value of these statistics. Behind every 'repossession' or cut supply is a family or a single person in a mess. Poor people will not be helped by breastbeating or by encouraging resentment. Privilege and wealth should be seen as tools by those who are fortunate enough to have them. They should be encouraged to use them wisely in creating a fairer society.
Some Solutions
What sort of policies should therefore be pursued? In his Transforming Economics3 the Christian economist, Alan Storkey, called for both a new coalition of politicians and policies: 'the old orthodoxies in economic policy are crumbling ... this is matched politically' and he called for 'a new paradigm based on relationism rather than materialism: Our economic life is fundamentally relational.'4 I would argue that market economics should be replaced by a Community Economy. There are key principles by which Christians can steer their response to economic issues. Storkey puts it like this:
The first is a recognition of the centrality of our relationship with God in economic life. God's blessings, care providence, creation, requirements and mandates are the context for our economic life. We are stewards of God's creation and dependent on its goodness. This means that economic life cannot be considered in a separate compartment (there is no economic man), but is part of our response to our creator.