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Forum: In Parliament, 2019-2024

Richard Chapman

The 2019-2024 Parliament saw the relationship between church
and governing party tested, while some backbench MPs explored
parliamentary means to influence the direction of church policy.
In his 2022 Easter Sunday sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury
expressed concern about a new government policy to send asylum
seekers to Rwanda:
The principle must stand the judgement of God and it cannot…
And it cannot carry the weight of our national responsibility as
a country formed by Christian values, because sub-contracting
out our responsibilities, even to a country that seeks to do well
like Rwanda, is the opposite of the nature of God who himself
took responsibility for our failures.1
The Archbishop went on to explain later, in the Lords:
We cannot separate the policy from the moral arguments. The
government did not do this when they announced the policy
in Holy Week this year – the most sacred week of the Christian
calendar. The Prime Minister of the time gave a speech in which
he used the word ‘compassion’ six times and described the
policy as ‘the morally right thing to do’. 2
The Archbishop set out alternatives,3 and in a very rare joint
statement, all the Lords Spiritual, the Church of England diocesan
bishops who serve in the Lords, condemned ‘evil trafficking’, noting
‘many churches are involved in fighting this evil’. The Rwanda plan
was an ‘immoral policy’ that ‘shames Britain’, they concluded. 4
Summoned by the monarch to the Lords as 26 independent
members, the bishops are Lords of Parliament, not Peers, who sit
only by virtue of the office they hold. They attend to the pastoral
and spiritual needs of Members, including reading prayers at the
start of each sitting day, but otherwise have the same rights and
duties as Peers. They are not a party and do not follow a whip. They
take their duties as members of a revising chamber seriously and
if they vote they do not do so for party advantage, but to improve

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