David Cameron, Justin Welby and the Manchester Police – please just do the jobs you’re paid to do

Before his enthronement, the Archbishop of Canterbury supported 43 Anglican bishops who sent a letter to the Telegraph protesting against cuts to welfare payments. Then the Manchester Police announced that they’d decided - arbitrarily - to treat attacks on goths, punks and emos as “hate crimes”. Then the child care minister Liz Truss seemed to suggest that stay-at-home mothers should get off their backsides and find a job in order to boost GDP. Finally, David Cameron decided to weigh into the controversy surrounding Liverpool forward Luis Suarez’s dental attack on a Chelsea opponent.

These are all examples of an individual or a body meddling in something that is absolutely none of their business.

Justin Welby’s job isn’t to involve himself in the minutiae of government welfare policy. As an Anglican, I look to him for spiritual – not political – guidance. By publicly supporting Labour’s utterly incoherent policy on spending by claiming that “cuts” will mean an extra 200,000 children dropping below the “poverty line” (a meaningless concept), the Archbishop of Canterbury is essentially ordering Anglicans to vote Labour.

Why doesn’t he just go the whole hog and inform right-wing believers that our political views are immoral and that we’re no longer welcome in the church he leads? (I suspect there aren't, in any case, many of us left.)

As for the Manchester Police – since when did they get the right to reclassify categories of crime? Their job is to catch people who have attacked other people, not to decide whereabouts on the victimhood charts the victims appear (“Fresh in at No. 8, Goths, while Gays drop three places to seven. Normal people who’ve been assaulted have yet again failed to chart”).

Given the overwhelming evidence that the children of stay-at-home mothers end up, on average, as better-behaved and more productive citizens than the children of working mothers, you’d have thought ministers might have been encouraging more women to stay at home and look after their kids. Liz Truss’s job isn’t to separate mothers from their  children, surely? Shouldn’t she be promoting stable family life rather than trying to disrupt it? And what’s the point of blaming non-working mums for the dire state of the economy when there are already two and a half million people out of work?

If a mother (or non-working father) isn’t receiving unemployment benefit and has a partner capable and willing to support them, and when it’s clear that non-working mothers generally improve society, why are their working arrangements any concern of the government's?

Liz Truss should learn to mind her own business.

As for David Cameron pontificating about how seriously the football authorities should view an attack by one foreign footballer on another foreign footballer – do me a favour! Unless Liverpool FC is receiving government subsidies, what’s it got to do with the Prime Minister? Doesn’t he have other slightly more pressing matters to deal with?

During my working years I rapidly learned that, when the jobs people were paid to perform proved too arduous for them, they’d often start frittering their energy away meddling in non-critical tasks that they weren’t actually responsible for. And I was simply astonished by the number of executives whose own departments were failing to meet their objectives who nevertheless wanted to take over mine – which was doing just fine, thank you.

One of my neighbours has a rather noisy dog which really annoys me. I wonder if I should ask David Cameron to pronounce on the matter. Or perhaps I should ask Luis Suarez to come round and have a word with the little blighter.