The Archbishop of Canterbury has blamed the public for the crisis in the country's economy.

Dr Rowan Williams said it was the fault of "all of us" for voting in successive governments which pushed for growth without always addressing poverty.

In an interview with Muslim News, the Archbishop refrained from pinning the blame for the current financial crisis on the bankers.

He said: "I would blame all of us for having repeatedly voted for governments since the 1980s that have pushed for growth that doesn't always deal with poverty.

"If I want to narrow it down, one of the problems in the last round of crisis is that we have lost any sense of trust and relationship.

"Transactions of financial speculators in recent years have gone so far away from any face-to-face relationships, any real calculation of whether somebody is credit-worthy has become abstract.

"So that sense of personal responsibility to one another has been lost, and behind that is the sense of personal responsibility to God that has been lost."