For example, the full name of the Commission on which Justin Welby and I sat was the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards; and "standards" referred to standards of behaviour, a cultural and ethical matter which was at the heart of the banking meltdown of 2008 and which had had such disastrous economic consequences. As I wrote in the updated version of my memoirs some five years ago, "While New Labour's system of bank supervision and regulation was a disaster, that is in no way to deny that the root cause of the crisis lay in the greed and folly of all too many bankers, in the broadest sense of the term."

This is certainly a difficult area. The ability of politicians and governments in a free society to influence human behaviour and promote ethical standards is limited. And it is significant that the great Adam Smith, author of both The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an analysis of man as a moral being, and The Wealth of Nations, an analysis of man as an economic being, spent most of the rest of his days vainly trying to write a synthesis of the two.

But the claim that "we" believe that by "fixing" the economy we can "fix" human beings, and that this alleged belief has anything whatsoever to do with the problems that face us, is absurd and unhelpful. Archbishop Welby may well have a point when he complains that "our greatly secularised society seems to agree on only one, quite un-Christian principle: that it's every person for themselves"; but that clearly doesn't apply to the political class. Unlike in some other countries, few in Britain enter politics in order to enrich themselves, nor (unless they become Prime Minister) do they do so.

As I have observed elsewhere, there has indeed been a damaging cultural change, which has undoubtedly made a contribution to the banking disaster in particular. In the old days, bankers' greed and folly was to a considerable extent kept in check by the fear of loss of reputation if things went wrong: a powerful spur to banking prudence and rectitude. But we now appear to live in an age in which the acquisition of wealth counts for more than reputation. The archbishops would have done better to have addressed themselves to how this might be reversed. But then that would have been much harder.