LAST week the Right Reverend Geoff Annas, Bishop of Stafford, wrote in a pastoral letter: “Alcohol abuse is one of the major sins of our time. One definition of sin is anything that comes between us and God and makes us less than the person God created us to be.” Well said, Bishop. An uncomfortable home truth squarely faced up to.

But then he goes and spoils it by adding: “Alcohol abuse is one of the major sins of our time – and it is one that governments do very little to prevent.”

Why this absurd leap from sin – something which is a matter of personal responsibility and the individual conscience – to the policies of government? If the Government is supposed to have a duty to do something about heavy boozing, does it also have a duty to help prevent other sins – adultery, for example?

Might we expect to see warning slogans appear on women’s foreheads: “Keep off: this can seriously damage your marriage.”

And if it’s the job of the Government to help us avoid the sin of alcohol abuse, will it also try to reduce our tendency to commit the sins of envy, hatred and malice?

The governance of Britain since the Second World War has been overwhelmingly to pursue a policy of managed decline. And the main feature of this policy is vastly increased government involvement in the life of the individual, the belief that the alleviation of personal and social ills is the Government’s responsibility. In other words, the creation of the nanny state. But this shifting of personal responsibility from the individual to the state only undermines that individual responsibility.

The result is a pathetic decline in the moral character of the population. A concomitant laziness occurs and with it an apathetic reliance on state provision as a large proportion of the population shifts the blame for their problems on to central authorities.

These central authorities, quangos and the like, become ever more vast and the individual character degenerates, until it is even more feeble and drone-like.

IT HAS been quite a week for bishops sounding off. The Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, gave his opinion of Shakespeare at the Hay Literary Festival: “He wasn’t a very nice man in many ways. It’s always very shocking that the late Shakespeare was hoarding grain and buying up property in Stratford.

It was not terribly attractive.” Ah, I see what you mean Archbishop when you say Shakespeare wasn’t very attractive – you mean he wasn’t a socialist.

The worst thing about Rowan Williams’ judgement on Shakespeare is that it comes from a Prince of the Church, a privileged paragon of the Establishment, a man who lives in a grace and favour palace and is paid a generous stipend with equally generous expenses. He doesn’t have to consider buying property or hoarding grain. He lives a life best described as “all found”.

Pots, kettles and the colour black spring to mind. I find it worrying when nearly all the bishops in the Church of England share the same fashionable soft-left mindset in which governments are expected to take over the job traditionally reserved for the individual conscience and personal responsibility.

So Rowan thinks that Shakespeare “wasn’t a very nice man in many ways”. I’d love to know what Shakespeare’s judgement on our dear Archbishop of Canterbury might be.