Fortis Ut Mors Dilectio

But that is no reason to test it thereunto.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols is a formidable man. Just ask Alan Johnson or Ed Balls. And he is of course quite right about New Labour's (it was certainly not Old Labour's) hostility towards volunteering in general and church-based volunteering in particular. A consequence of having been formed by campus Marxism rather than by trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, local government, Methodist chapels and Catholic parishes.

His Grace, a contributor to Edward Leigh and Alex Haydon's The Nation That Forgot God, seems, like the Cardinal and several other bishops in Scotland, to be in much the position of someone like the late Alan Watkins in the 1980s: a despairing traditional Labourite who has become a fellow-traveller with the Right in spite of himself, and who remains deeply critical of it in very many ways, but who cannot tolerate what student Trots who refuse to grow up have done to his natural political home. The think tank and other connections of Frank Field, Kate Hoey and the now-Independent Lord Stoddart say very much the same thing about them. (Of course, there is the Right and there is the Right, as was also the case a generation ago. For example, traditional Labour more than echoes the anti-capitalist and anti-globalist streaks in Peterhouse, as was, and in Peter Hitchens, as is.)

But we should all be wring to set too much store by the rhetoric of the Big Society. The volunteers with which politicians are most familiar are, or at any rate always used to be, their own respective party's activists. Blair and his court loathed us, for I was then one. Today, Cameron has demonstrated similar disdain by letting it be known that he intends to replace the volunteer local chairmen of Conservative Associations with paid appointees of the centre.

In any case, numerous of the Church's services and facilities would collapse if public funding were withdrawn. Voluntary donations of time and money are vital parts of the mix. But what would happen to those who depend on these services and facilities if no one volunteered?