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Good morning. Whatever one thinks of the details of the budget, the practice of making a statement about it to parliament enshrines a set of principles or values which are fundamental to our life together. There is the idea of being entrusted with something. The government has been entrusted with how it spends the nation’s money; taking responsibility for this, which is precisely what the government of the day does. Then there is accountability, so the budget is delivered to parliament and this leads on to evaluation, hence the debates now going on both there and in the press. These four principles, trust, responsibility, accountability and evaluation apply to the whole of life - to the way parents bring up their children, to the running of schools and businesses, to those who operate or use the social media. Yesterday, with the dedication of the memorial to those who died in the Afghan and Iraq wars we were reminded of our responsibility as a society to our armed forces. When I was in post as a Bishop I regarded myself as accountable to the Diocese and more widely to the church and society. I am no longer in post but perhaps I am still accountable for the life that is left to me? Taxi drivers, as we know, are the source of all wisdom and one I who drove me the other day was very keen to tell me that life was a gift. We come from nothing and we go to nothing he said and in between we have this gift and it matters how we use it. I hastened to agree with him and I think a lot of people feel the same, whether or not they think of themselves as religious. But given that life is a gift we hold in trust to whom are we accountable for the way we use it? I think in the first place we are accountable to one another certainly in the roles we occupy as parent, employer or employee, friend or neighbour but perhaps more widely still. There is a haunting theme running through Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov about taking responsibility for everything before everyone. As to evaluation the first tribunal here surely is our own conscience. We evaluate ourselves. The trouble is that I have known people riddled with guilt, blaming themselves far too harshly; and we have all known people full of self-deception who can endlessly justify themselves. It is interesting that St Paul did not think conscience had the last word. He wrote once “I have nothing on my conscience; but that does not prove me innocent. My judge is the Lord.” He had taken on board the great hope running through the Hebrew scriptures that, however difficult to believe sometimes, there is an ultimate fairness to life, a true evaluation beyond the skewed judgements of any human culture.