Richard Tice blasts Justin Welby over Church scandal | Politics | News | EUROtoday

An MP who attended at the least one of many Christian camps at which serial abuser John Smyth groomed victims has warned that confidence within the Church of England has “collapsed at every level”.

Reform UK deputy chief Richard Tice described Justin Welby, who stop as Archbishop of Canterbury this week, because the “worst Archbishop in living memory”.

The Archbishop introduced he would step down final week following outrage at a scathing report which detailed how the abuse of greater than 100 kids and younger males was lined up inside Anglican circles.

Reform UK deputy chief Richard Tice confirmed that he attended at the least one of many Dorset camps within the late Seventies. Smyth was a number one determine on the camps and would brutally lash his victims with a backyard cane in a backyard shed at his dwelling close to Winchester.

Mr Tice described how the camps lacked fashionable safeguarding practices, saying: “There was a very, very high degree of trust without the checks and balances. In all walks of life, that’s great 95% of the time but it can really bite you when someone breaches that trust and those are the lessons that regrettably we have to learn.”

As one of many campers, he was not conscious of anybody being groomed and he has no reminiscence of Smyth, who died in South Africa in 2018. But he mentioned that points of the camps have been probably “a bit creepy”.

“We were always freezing cold,” he mentioned. “They were austere, cold extensions of boarding school.”

He remembers doing “a lot of sailing” and mentioned a key purpose of the occasions was constructing “resilience and confidence”.

But, he warned, “if your trust is misplaced then things can go badly wrong very quickly”.

Mr Tice desires safeguarding to be the highest precedence for the Church of England. He additionally desires its management to spend much less time intervening in politics.

The current Archbishop famously denounced Conservative plans to ship migrants to Rwanda as an “immoral policy”.

“Confidence in the Church of England has collapsed at every level,” Mr Tice mentioned. “Welby was the worst Archbishop in living memory.”

The MP mentioned individuals felt “the leadership of the Church of England in the UK has lost the plot”.

He suggested: “Focus on running a church. Stop focusing on politics – it’s not your job and it’s not what your congregation expect you to do, so just focus on your core product basically, which is Christianity.”