Archbishop Tells of Government Failure to Support "Indigenous Population"

|PIC1|The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has spoken out against a rise in popularity of anti-immigration political parties. Holding the second-most senior position in the worldwide Anglican Communion, Dr Sentamu blamed the problem on a perceived failure to support the “indigenous population”.

In particular, the Archbishop highlighted that some local government policies seemingly gave the impression that migrants were being favoured over people of native British origin.

Despite pointing this out, he also told how he knew all too well that the issue was far more “complicated”.

Dr Sentamu made history by becoming the Church of England’s first black Archbishop. He said, “Some local politics has not been very good at actually supporting the indigenous population, that must be acknowledged.

|TOP|“If you go in some areas that I've worked in, it looks sometimes from the outside that what has actually gone on is migrants sometimes have appeared to be getting the things which the indigenous population is not getting. Superficially that may be the case, but again I want to encourage people: do not simply look outwardly what is going on in your area. Things are very complicated,” he told BBC Radio Four's Today programme.

With some commentators coming out in the run-up to the local elections earlier this month, saying that Britain would be a better place without immigrants, Dr Sentamu responded by saying, “They actually don't realise that at the end of the Second World War, for example, the British government invited people from the Caribbean because they could not carry out their bus driving, their work in hospitals, their cleaning jobs.

“People came here in order to actually help this great nation,” he told BBC.

Archbishop Sentamu said parties such as the British National Party (BNP), which doubled its number of counsellors in England last week, had adopted the “politics of fear”.

The BNP simply dismissed these comments by saying Christian clergy should only worry about filling churches.