Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says bankers have failed to show repentance PA

THE Archbishop of Canterbury says the City has shown no "repentance" for the excesses which led to the economic collapse.

Dr Rowan Williams fears the City is returning to business as usual, and said there was a feeling of "diffused resentment" that bankers had failed to accept their responsibility for the crisis.

He said the Government should have acted to cap bonuses and warned that the gap between rich and poor would lead to an increasingly "dysfunctional" society.

Dr Williams told BBC 2's Newsnight: "There hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year.

"There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance. We haven't heard people saying 'well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty'."

Asked whether he thought the City was returning to "business as usual" Dr Williams said: "I worry. I feel that's precisely what I call the 'lack of closure' coming home to roost.

"There hasn't been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance"

"It's a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year 'idolatry', that projecting (of) reality and substance onto things that don't have them."

The crisis was a lesson that "economics is too important to be left to economists" and there was a role for "awkward amateurs" in examining the way the City works.

Asked whether bonuses should have been capped, the Archbishop said: "I would have said yes.

"I think that's one of those things that feeds the ... diffused resentment; that people are somehow getting away with a culture in which the connection between the worth of what you do and the reward you get becomes more obscure."

There was a sense of "bafflement" and "muted anger" at the bonus culture, Dr Williams said.

He added: "What we are looking at is the possibility of a society getting more and more dysfunctional if the levels of inequality that we have seen in the last couple of decades are not challenged."