A QUESTION from the Archbishop of York last week: "Is it ever right that I should have more when somebody else has nothing?"

Written from that poky hovel Bishopthorpe Palace, I suppose?

The rabid malcontents among our privileged bishops are once again berating the Government for failing to create heaven on earth. Funny how they never do this when Labour is in power. Our coalition government is not without its faults and for sure Dave and his gang have come in for some stick from me over the years. But they have provided 1.8 million more jobs at a time when unemployment has been rising throughout the rest of the EU. They have pumped further billions into the NHS, established successful schemes to encourage the long-term unemployed back into work and increased welfare benefits to a level not imagined when the C of E hierarchy made its last socialistic assault on the government with its report Faith in the City back in 1985.

If you listen to Welby, Sentamu and their gang, you would think that economic life in Britain today is capitalism red in tooth and claw. But here are some facts:

50 per cent of Britain’s GDP goes to the public sector. In communist China it is only 17 per cent. At the height of their totalitarian tyranny, the Soviets were only spending ten per cent more than we do today.

You are taxed on your wages. Then you pay 20 per cent VAT on nearly everything you buy with the money on which you have already been taxed.

Fuel taxes are at an outrageously high level. If we have a car we pay road tax.

If we drink or smoke, the price of our pints and fags is artificially inflated by taxation. Governments ask people to save, but the prudent who do save receive no interest. And with rates as they are, savers - especially among the elderly - are actually losing money by their thrift.

If we buy shares in British companies, we are taxed on our dividends. There are further taxes on share dealing. The state broadcasting propaganda department fiercely polices an annual tax called the TV licence. The industrial, commercial and financial companies which generate income for the country pay vastly in corporation tax and other business taxes.

And, in the form of inheritance tax, we have to pay up again even when we’re dead. British businesses which ought to be leading our economic recovery are prevented by labyrinthine corporate regulation.

Is this what the Archbishops call “capitalism”? These levels of taxation and regulation are combining to hinder economic recovery. And such taxes are required only because the Government needs them to pay for its massively expanded army of civil servants, its quango mountain, its legions of useless box-tickers and its lousy education system.

Then there are the Archbishops’ protests against “the cuts.” Cuts? But this Government will be borrowing and spending more when it leaves office than it did when it came in. Whatever economic and social system is currently being operated in our country, it is not by any shadow of meaning capitalist.

And yet the bishops and other senior clergy play adolescent politics and talk as if we are living at the height of the 18th Century industrial revolution, under Gradgrind and Bounderby with altar boys being shoved up chimneys and girls shipped off for the white slave trade. And so we see the nation’s largest wealth creator, the City of London’s business and finance houses traduced, the cloud cuckoo Occupy protesters in their tents idealised and the sentimental clergy making fools of themselves.