Cameron gets warning from both sides

LONDON â€" It may not be every day, or in every land, that the practitioners of the state religion and the national security agencies issue parallel warnings to the prime minister about their handling of the economy, but that is what is happening to David Cameron.

In an address Monday night, the Right Rev. Justin Welby, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, offered a somber assessment of the country’s economic woes following the banking crisis and said it would take “something very, very major” to shed them.

“Historically the great failures in banking have led to very, very long periods of recession at best,” said the archbishop, a former oil company executive. “I would argue that what we are in at the moment is not a recession but essentially some kind of depression. It therefore takes something very, very major to get us out of it in the same way as it took something very major to get us into it.”

The analysis is unlikely to be received with much enthusiasm by Mr. Cameron, who, as I write in my latest Page Two article in the IHT, is already facing challenges to his hopes for kick-starting one part of the moribund economy - the building trade.

But, according to a report in The Times of London on Tuesday, builders may be the least of his worries. Britain’s spies, too, are fretting at the austerity measures imposed by George Osborne, Mr. Cameron’s chancellor of the Exchequer and close ally.

Both the domestic security service, MI5, and the overseas intelligence agency, MI6, have warned Mr. Osborne that “public safety will be put at risk if spending on the security services is cut any further” in efforts to save money, The Times said, “and Britain would be more vulnerable to a terrorist attack if they have to find additional savings.”

The timing of the story, eight days after the Boston bombing and just hours after Canada warned of a terrorist plot directed at a train between Toronto and New York, underlines the nervousness of the security services almost eight years after the London bombings of July 7, 2005.

Referring to the nation’s spies, a government minister was quoted as saying: “Their argument is that there has not, since 7/7, been a major outrage in this country but that’s not because people haven’t been trying. They are saying, ‘You will put safety at risk if you cut our budget.’”