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Leading article

The right mission

Wednesday, 29th August 2007

Tony Blair — remember him? — was better at diagnosis than cure. ‘I think most
people would say that in virtually every aspect of their life things are better than they were 30 or 40 years ago,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph in November 2005.

This week David Cameron showed that while he grasps this grim trend no less than the former prime minister, he is capable of being much more than ‘the heir to Blair’. In a short document on Conservative plans to tackle crime entitled ‘It’s Time To Fight Back’, the Tory leader at last answered the charge that he is long on spin and short on substance. He also signalled his intention to present ‘joined-up’ policy rather than ‘eye-catching initiatives’ or knee-jerk legislation — New Labour’s most wearying trademark. The fact that the document was launched by David Davis, the shadow home secretary, and Nick Herbert, the shadow justice secretary, as well as Mr Cameron himself, shows that the Tory leader grasps that his own modernising project must be more than a cult of personality.

In his response to the murder of Rhys Jones, Mr Cameron spoke with a simple abhorrence that matched the mood of the nation. But a prospective Prime Minister must deliver much more than emotional intelligence: if the Blair years were a laboratory experiment, one of its many findings was that empathy is no guarantee of sound strategy.

Instead, Mr Cameron offers an approach which represents the welcome convergence of three strands in modern Conservative thinking. The first is the recognition that crime and antisocial behaviour in the early 21st century present unprecedented challenges. We live in an age in which, to borrow the phrase made famous by a 1993 Wall Street Journal editorial, there are ‘no guardrails’: no boundaries of behaviour for large sections of the population, sired by promiscuous fathers, reared by single mothers paid by the welfare state to live alone, consigned to neighbourhoods in which schools are, at best, crèches, and in which the only form of collective solidarity is to be found in teen gangs. Drugs, guns and knives are rife. Aspiration is limited to the control of territory. This is a new context, and it requires a new response. ‘The task of social change,’ as the Tory leader says, ‘is a generational one.’

Second, Mr Cameron has laid to rest the ghost of his so-called ‘hug a hoodie’ speech. ‘With young people you need to hit them where it hurts,’ he now says, proposing that offenders have their driving licences removed or delayed. He wants magistrates to impose sentences of up to 12 months. He demands ‘honesty in sentencing’. Above all he promises, unambiguously, that ‘a Conservative government will build more prison places’.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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The Spectator's Notes

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‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.