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.
Stress 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 evaluate 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 mentioned on Tuesday that Smyth’s victims had been “failed very, very badly”. He wouldn’t remark straight on whether or not Welby ought to give up.
Chatting with reporters from the Cop29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Starmer mentioned: “Let me be clear: of what I do know of the allegations, they’re clearly horrific in relation to this specific case, each of their scale and their content material. My ideas, as they’re in all of those points, are with the victims right here who’ve clearly been failed very, very badly.
“It’s a matter, in the long run, for the church, however I’m not going to draw back from the very fact of claiming that these are horrific allegations and that my ideas 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 Faculty, Hampshire, mentioned Welby ought to resign in solidarity with abuse victims. He informed BBC Radio 4’s Right now programme on Tuesday that Welby’s admission he had not finished sufficient since 2013 “is sufficient in my thoughts to verify that Justin Welby together with numerous different Anglican church members had been a part of a cover-up in regards to the abuse”.
Stephen Cherry, the dean of chapel at King’s Faculty, Cambridge and a former canon of Durham Cathedral, informed the BBC: “I believe he actually must now tender his resignation and permit there to be important change.”
On Monday, Helen-Ann Hartley, the bishop of Newcastle, mentioned Welby’s place was untenable and he ought to give up and {that a} line wanted to be drawn.
Welby mentioned final week he had thought-about resigning over his “shameful” determination to not act on experiences of abuse by Smyth, a strong and charismatic barrister who abused personal schoolboys at evangelical Christian vacation camps, when he was informed about them in 2013. Smyth died in 2018.
Lambeth Palace mentioned on Monday that Welby had “apologised profoundly each for his personal failures and omissions, and for the wickedness, concealment and abuse by the church extra broadly” however the archbishop didn’t intend to resign.