Douglas Alexander, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has so far been more cautious in his criticisms of new coalition plans for "workfare" than has Archbishop Rowan Williams. Which reaction is politically the wiser and the more ethical?
To answer this, it is useful to put in question the typical modern attitude to poverty. This can be summed up as the poor are not us. For the neoliberal right the poor are either inevitable sacrifices to market logic, or else they are a bunch of lazy misfits who need to pull themselves together. For the statist left they are passive victims of systematic economic injustice.
This contrasts with an older and more Christian attitude. For this view, the poor are us. Like all human beings they are subject to the vagaries of fortune, only in their case to an extreme degree. The outcome of fortune is a compound of circumstance, inheritance of wealth and talent plus the exercise of effort and virtue. Those who are unfortunate remain part of us: they are our neighbours, and so they need to be included within local society.
That means helping them in every way possible, both to meet their needs and to develop their ability to help themselves. In turn, poorer people may be expected to make what contribution to the community they can, because to ask for this is to respect their continued dignity as human beings.
This twin response stems from the equally dual Christian view of poverty. On the one hand, it can lead to unacceptable material suffering, besides spiritual degradation and temptation – even though the spiritual dangers of wealth are far greater. On the other hand, being poor does not destroy one's capacity to act humanly in the most important ways: to love, to rejoice, to mourn, to show sympathy.
If the poor are in this way "part of us", how does it leave one feeling about workfare? The answer is: ambivalent. Therefore the Labour party is right to suspend its judgment. For workfare could mean including the poor in local structures of reciprocity, rather than marginalising them either as mere victims, or as supposed social parasites. It could mean that the unemployed and their communities work out between them new creative tasks that the unemployed might usefully help with – for example new projects of environmental improvement. Such involvement can assist the unemployed to return to the habit of work. And while Douglas Alexander is correct to say that this may not lead to jobs if there are no jobs available, we need again to overcome either a pseudo-radical fatalism about this circumstance or a neoliberal view that it is merely "up to individuals". Instead we need to foment the idea that local co-operation can lead to the creation of new enterprises.
However, the archbishop is also right to fear that "workfare" could come to mean a continuation of a centralised attempt to discipline and corral the poor as though they were social lepers. This reached its acme with the Victorian workhouse, but has been going on ever since Henry VIII seized control of parish structures from the power of voluntary fraternities.
Let us hope that workfare will mean a return to the mutualist, "big society" spirit of such organisations and will not be a draconian neoliberal palliative. Nor should it mean denying our duty to meet basic material human needs even of the utterly recalcitrant. This must include the provision of housing in one's local area, as Williams demands. Because excessive levels of housing benefit nonetheless cannot be justified, this problem needs to be a dealt with in terms of increased levels of housing supply and the securing, by whatever means, of fair levels of rent.
But if money given to the poor must sometimes require that they give something in return, then this rule must apply also to the rest of us. For if the poor are us, then we are also the poor, at bottom entirely dependent on the bounty of nature and the gifts of other human beings.
It follows that the wealthier should also receive as reward, in terms of salaries, bonuses and state benefits, only what can be justified in terms of both their needs and their social contribution.
Thus while Williams is right to worry, Alexander is still more right to hesitate, because if workfare invokes mutual fairness then this implies that such a principle should be applied all the way up.
And that would be both radical and Christian.