Where is the Scottish Sentamu?

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is an eloquent and passionate man. His attack on the Coalition Government – and big business – for ignoring the plight of millions of underpaid employees is perhaps ill-timed, as the politicians are about to depart on their long summer break, but his point is very well made. It has become impossible in many parts of the UK to live a decent life on the pitiful wages that so many receive for their hard and honest work.

The archbishop made the further point that as most of the very low-paid are women, the social consequences are devastating.

His intervention reminds us that it is not only the jobless who are impoverished. Many thousands, probably millions, are working long hours yet are still having to rely on food banks and charitable support to get by. And the state also steps in to support workers on low incomes, to the tune of between £4bn and £5bn a year. This means, as the archbishop noted, that the state is in effect subsidising both miserly, small scale employers, and big companies whose bosses are remunerated very generously indeed.

He asked for immediate implementation of the living wage, which is £7.45 an hour (£1.26 an hour more than the current minimum wage). Various politicians, including the Prime Minister, are in theory committed to the living wage. Implementing it is apparently another matter.

Until recently some employers have protested that they simply could not afford to pay the living wage; but as the economy picks up there is less credibility in this. Of course companies need to make profits to build their businesses and invest in the future; but the key investment is in people. Exploitation of labour is the worst kind of short termism.

What is particularly pleasing about the archbishop's intervention is that a leading cleric is showing that he sees it as part of his job to crash into the political arena, all guns blazing. Politics should have a spiritual dimension. After all the founder of the Labour Party, that great but almost forgotten Scot Keir Hardie, believed passionately that his socialism and his Christianity were essentially intertwined.

The Church of England, despite its many flaws and its established status, has a really good track record in speaking out. Away back in 1985, when Thatcherism was in its pomp, and the Labour Party seemed completely emasculated, the C of E stepped into the breach. It set up a special commission of clerics, businessmen, academics and trade unionists to produce a "shock report" on the English inner cities. The result was exceptional. Although Mrs Thatcher went on to win a third general election victory, those close to her said the report shocked and worried her, her critics in her own party found a new confidence, and her ideology was increasingly undermined. .

The report called, among much else, for immediate increased benefits and a vast building programme to create new social housing. It was heralded as "an action call to church and nation". At this time, the Scottish churches were strangely muted. I wondered why then, and I still wonder today.

So Archbishop Sentamu's intervention makes me ask once again about the continuing silence of so many senior clerics in Scotland.

Until the recent scandal that led to his resignation, the leading Catholic in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, regularly spoke out – but not on issues like low pay, and the flaws in the current system of benefits testing, which is if anything an even greater scandal. The Scottish churches can legitimately speak for hundreds of thousands of people. They can take the moral high ground.

They should be intervening, directly and loudly, on overtly political issues far more than they currently are. Where is the Scottish Sentamu?

I regard myself as marginally to the right of centre in political terms and in that context I genuinely think that it makes economic, as well as social, sense for employers to be more generous to their low-paid employees. But this is at heart a moral issue.