Keir Starmer has refused to again the archbishop of Canterbury, who has confronted rising calls for to resign over his dealing with of an abuse scandal.
Pressure on Justin Welby has been intensifying for the reason that publication final week of a damning report on the church’s cover-up of John Smyth’s abuse within the UK within the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties, and later in Zimbabwe and South Africa. About 130 boys are believed to have been victims.
The unbiased evaluation into the abuse concluded that Smyth could have been dropped at justice had the archbishop formally reported it to police a decade in the past.
The prime minister stated on Tuesday that Smyth’s victims had been “failed very, very badly”. He wouldn’t remark immediately on whether or not Welby ought to stop.
Speaking to reporters from the Cop29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Starmer stated: “Let me be clear: of what I know of the allegations, they are clearly horrific in relation to this particular case, both in their scale and their content. My thoughts, as they are in all of these issues, are with the victims here who have obviously been failed very, very badly.
“It’s a matter, in the end, for the church, but I’m not going to shy away from the fact of saying that these are horrific allegations and that my thoughts are with the victims in relation to it.”
His feedback got here as Welby confronted calls to resign from Smyth’s victims and the clergy, together with the bishop of Newcastle.
One sufferer, Andrew Morse, who encountered Smyth whereas a pupil at Winchester College, Hampshire, stated Welby ought to resign in solidarity with abuse victims. He instructed BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday that Welby’s admission he had not completed sufficient since 2013 “is enough in my mind to confirm that Justin Welby along with countless other Anglican church members were part of a cover-up about the abuse”.
Stephen Cherry, the dean of chapel at King’s College, Cambridge and a former canon of Durham Cathedral, instructed the BBC: “I think he really needs to now tender his resignation and allow there to be significant change.”
On Monday, Helen-Ann Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, stated Welby’s place was untenable and he ought to stop and {that a} line wanted to be drawn.
Welby stated final week he had thought-about resigning over his “shameful” determination to not act on reviews of abuse by Smyth, a robust and charismatic barrister who abused non-public schoolboys at evangelical Christian vacation camps, when he was instructed about them in 2013. Smyth died in 2018.
Lambeth Palace stated on Monday that Welby had “apologised profoundly both for his own failures and omissions, and for the wickedness, concealment and abuse by the church more widely” however the archbishop didn’t intend to resign.
