THE authorities at St Paul’s Cathedral are certainly having trouble making up their minds. A week last Saturday, Canon Giles Fraser, that great champion of the proletariat, invited the protesters into the cathedral and asked the police to move on.

A few days later, however, when the cathedral authorities noticed how much money they were losing through the catastrophic decline in tourism and the huge drop in takings from their shop and restaurant, they changed their tune and asked the protesters to move on.

Now it is well-known that the campers are protesting about capitalism. One of their banners reads CAPITALISM IS CRISIS. I think the Dean and Chapter should design and display a banner of their own proclaiming WE ARE ALL CAPITALISTS NOW. For, while it is also well known that the trendy modern clergy are anti-capitalistic to the marrow of their bones, this is somehow hard to square with the fact that they charge visitors £14.50 to enter the church for a look around and they earn from this and other commercial dealings £22,500 every day.

No wonder they are dismayed now that the cathedral is closed. And how is it to be imagined that the very large cathedral staff are paid their wages except out of money that the authorities hold in investments? They are certainly not paid out of some utopian socialist state fund.

This is not all. The anti-capitalist clerics at St Paul’s receive huge sums in donations from wealthy individuals, many of whom must have made their income out of entrepreneurial enterprises: capitalism, in fact.

Why do the words “kettle”, “pot” and the colour “black” spring so readily to my mind?

In fact, St Paul’s Cathedral is a bastion of privilege, paid for out of the capitalist enterprise they pretend to despise. Compare then the affluence of the cathedral with the predicament of the parish churches, very few of which are fortunate to receive large donations from wealthy individuals. The upkeep of our parish churches is achieved largely by the hard work and sacrificial giving of their congregations who are generally by no means well off.

And then the parish churches are obliged to raise tens of thousands each year to pay the diocesan tax. Much of this money goes to pay the stipends of the ordinary parish clergy and towards their pension funds. But, until about 40 years ago, when, by the way, there were many more parochial clergy, all these costs were met by the Church Commissioners.

Unfortunately for the clergy and the parishes they serve, the Commissioners became very inefficient. At a conservative estimate they lost £800m through poor investments and, far worse, they sold off most of the beautiful old vicarages at the bottom of the property market.

So now, when you see a sign saying The Old Vicarage, don’t imagine it is occupied by an old vicar. These houses are now usually inhabited by wealthy antique dealers or rich dentists. Meanwhile, the real vicar lives down the road in a square box of modern construction, built 30 or 40 years ago and rapidly becoming dilapidated and difficult to maintain. Also, ironically, some of the annual tax paid by the hard-pressed parishes actually goes to pay the wages of the everburgeoning secular diocesan staff, superfluous advisors and the like. My two churches together pay £75,000pa in diocesan taxes.