Ignoring the obvious bizarreness of the letter more generally (why did Cameron feel the need to justify his policies to the Pope in the first place?), I wanted to comment on this section from "Cranmer" himself:
"Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who can’t take care of themselves, people who need help," US Vice-President Joe Biden explained last year. For him, it's all about social justice. For his then opponent, Paul Ryan, the preferential option for the poor remains one of the primary tenets of social teaching, but it means you 'don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life'. Roman Catholic social doctrine compassionately sustains poverty - it fails the poorest. David Cameron wants the poor to take responsibility for their indolence and inaction.I've been thinking more and more about what it is that gets the Tory party known as the "nasty party" when it, to some extent, embodies policies many conservative Christians would strongly support, and I wonder whether this is close to that.
What I mean by "this" is essentially the last bit - the wholesale dismissal of any kind of social policy whatsoever as "failing the poor". If we give them benefits, they become dependent on the state and hence never stop being poor.
Now of course the point is that people are still poor, and were 50-100 years ago hence such "liberal" interventionist policies in the form of various social insurance schemes, hence clearly there's some failure here.
I'm not convinced though, of course. Yes, some will abuse any system that pays out benefits - but does that mean it's failed the poor? Is it the same people that are poor in each generation? Has work been done to look at this, in particular at inter-generational social mobility?
Why is it not the case that a welfare system providing insurance for the poor that they otherwise could not obtain has enabled many to launch themselves out of poverty and on to better things?
Fundamentally, the empirical success of the welfare state is something we as human cannot ever hope to know about - the data just does not exist for us to do proper appraisals. The positions people such as "Cranmer" thus take are based on prejudice and extrapolation and not on evidence, and hence come across badly particularly to those who benefit from those systems and who take an opposite (usually also prejudiced) position - as nasty, in fact.
