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The Glasgow Doctrine

Wednesday, 9th July 2008

The Spectator on David Cameron's speech on the need for morality.

Yet Mr Cameron’s speech has also been widely misrepresented since Monday as a gallery-pleasing ‘lurch to the right’ and a sharp shift away from the themes that he made his own in the first two years of his leadership. Having initially championed fraternity and neighbourliness, Mr Cameron is now alleged to have changed his tune entirely and embraced a pitiless form of rugged individualism.

In fact, a close reading of the speech rather than the headlines it generated shows that the Tory leader has not shifted an inch from his core belief in ‘social responsibility’. In Glasgow, he paid tribute to the ‘inspiring and ever-growing army of charities, community groups and social entrepreneurs who are bringing new ideas and new energy to some of our country’s toughest places and toughest problems’. He praised ‘social responsibility, common decency’, ‘social virtue’, and ‘respect for others’. He explicitly envisaged personal and social responsibility as complementary and mutually reinforcing, rather than two options from which we must choose one.

It was heartening to hear Mr Cameron describe the vote in Glasgow East on 24 July as ‘the Broken Society by-election’: as Fraser Nelson’s devastating analysis in last week’s magazine showed, this constituency’s social problems are breathtaking. And here there really is clear blue water between the Tories and Labour.

In the final analysis, Mr Brown believes that only the state can underwrite and ensure social progress. Mr Cameron, in sharp contrast, believes in the existence of society distinct from the state. He accepts that government must often take action, but believes that the experience of postwar Britain shows that government alone cannot cure all ills – and frequently compounds them.

His Glasgow speech was not an exercise in fatalism but a call to arms: a challenge to individuals, families, community groups, charities and voluntary organisations to rise to the task. If he means it, Mr Cameron is proposing nothing less than a revolution in how we govern ourselves.

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Dwight Vandryver

July 11th, 2008 1:43am

Wonderful: David Cameron aims to be to politics what Jeremy Kyle is to television. It doesn't work for Mr. Kyle and it won't work for Mr. Cameron. Cameron's target audience learns its "morality", or rather amorality, from the Soap Operas to be seen every evening, just as the middle classes get their behavioural cues from programmes like "Sex in the City". Morality as a concept has been debased to the extent that it is meaningless. There is no point in setting the goal posts so high that it becomes laughable. Just to achieve common courtesy and be tolerant of others would be exceptionally fine things. Tolerance is not on the political landscape, however: first it was smokers, then the overweight, and probably drinkers and motorists to come. To see how far intolerance has gone, the reader only needs to look at the first two paragraphs of Rod Liddle's article in these pages. "Setting fire to the fat hag with his Zippo lighter" was what he was minded to do. What was the moral imperative that prevented him from actually doing it? Probably none: more likely to be the vision of being pilloried in the press. So, is this the "social responsibility" to which Cameron referred?

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