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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.

In this, he is rightly deferring to the wisdom of the former home secretary to whom he was special adviser. Michael Howard was the first holder of that office to insist that ministers could not treat the Home Office as a managerial department: the Home Secretary must instead address the public’s growing frustration with the criminal justice system. Mr Howard dared to say that ‘prison works’, grasping that the principal purpose of jail was to incarcerate the relatively small number of individuals who commit the majority of serious crimes. In four years, Mr Howard presided over an 18 per cent fall in crime.

Third, Mr Cameron now proposes to graft this tough approach on to the strategies which he has already been developing. Some may balk at the grandiosity of his proposed ‘social covenant’, but it is really no more than an adaptation of the age-old Tory objective to nurture the institutions and ethos of responsibility that lie between the individual and the state. Burke spoke of ‘little platoons’, Iain Macleod, Angus Maude and Enoch Powell rallied under the ‘One Nation’ banner, and David Willetts in the 1990s wrote compellingly of ‘civic conservatism’.

Mr Cameron’s variation on this traditional theme is to speak of the need to ‘re-civilise society’ and, more specifically, to devolve as much power as possible to police officers and citizens themselves.

Closely aligned to this is his promise of a ‘tax and benefit system to support families’. The perverse incentives within the welfare system for couples with children to live apart must be removed, as a matter of urgency. How fatuous is Labour’s mantra in response: namely, that children must be supported, not marriage. The best way of supporting children is to nurture the very social institution that gives them the best start in life.

Mr Cameron was right in his first months as leader to address new issues, and to show that the Conservative party’s range of priorities extended beyond those that preoccupy its ‘core vote’. But law and order was never, as some modernisers claimed, a ‘core vote’ issue. Indeed, it is one of the themes that unite the nation in anxiety and frustration at the ineptitude of government. An uncompromising position on crime is not remotely reactionary, but an essential part of the armoury of any modern politician who seeks high office.

When voters cite ‘crime’ as their main concern, they refer not only to technical breaches of the law: they use the word as shorthand for the bleak sense of a decline in civility, and a continuum of antisocial behaviour that stretches from street-level abuse, via gang conflict, to horrific events such as the murder of Rhys Jones. It is mysterious that so astute a strategist as Gordon Brown denies that we live in a ‘broken society’. But, since he does so, it is good news for the country that David Cameron is addressing the challenge so vigorously.

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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

Charles Moore

‘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.