THE Church of England's latest report Faithful Cities is just one more socialist rant after the style of the 1985 report Faith in the City.

I cannot understand the church's obsession with unreconstructed socialism dressed up as Christianity - unless it has something to do with the politics of envy.

How many more times do the bishops and synodsmen, apparatchiks all, have to be told the economic facts of life? They are constantly preaching "more equality" but a country where there is equality is one in which the people are equally poor.

You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. Self-interest is condemned in the report but, as every competent economist since Adam Smith has pointed out, it is self-interest which powers the economic system and provides the goods and services which people need and provides them more affordably.

Divided Berlin used to be the blatant example of economic reality: on the east side there was socialism in spades and all-pervading poverty, drabness, misery and slavery; on the west side there was capitalism bringing colour, life, energy, prosperity and freedom. If the socialist east was so superior, why wasn't there a queue trying to go east over the Berlin Wall? On the contrary, socialism was so bad that annually thousands of East Berliners risked their lives to escape to the capitalist west.

Did they write this report with their eyes shut? If they had kept their eyes open, they would have seen a nation where the people are living longer than ever before, where there are more people in work than ever and where disposable income for the purchase of all those goods and services is at an all time high.

The report's green-eyed accusations of selfishness are frankly an insult to the thousands of well-off people who give their money away.

This country has one of the best records of any country in the world when it comes to charitable giving. Here in the City of London - the centre of the great capitalist Satan - charity abounds.

I am chaplain to several livery companies which are far more than dining clubs for rich men who like dressing up. The livery companies spend about two per cent of their money on wining and dining, but endless hours in boring committees deciding how to give the bulk of their money away.

There is a way in which the church can alleviate poverty and deprivation and we have marvellous examples of just how well it works.

In some South American and Latin American countries where the churches are teaching traditional Christian morality, the lives of the poorest have been transformed. Where respect and self-respect - not "self-esteem" - are cultivated, there drug-taking and prostitution are reduced and with it the criminal activity which is one of the greatest causes of true poverty.

Capitalism works with rather than against the grain of human nature, acknowledging original sin and greed and trying to mitigate these things through charity. Socialism is unrealistic, especially when linked to phoney piety. It is sentimental rhetoric. Socialism is a form of cheap grace, a mixture of childishness and crime.

It's time the bishops and the synodsmen grew out of it.