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The Glasgow Doctrine

Wednesday, 9th July 2008

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

In an unexpected plot twist, David Cameron and Gordon Brown are fighting over a woman: not, we hasten to add, as suitors, but as public moralists. The Prime Minister has long been a fan of Gertrude Himmelfarb, the American intellectual best known for her studies of the Victorian era. Now, Mr Cameron has paid homage to the great conservative sage too.

At the heart of the Tory leader’s fine speech in Glasgow on Monday was the declaration that ‘there is a danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralised society, where nobody will tell the truth any more about what is good and bad, right and wrong’. This — as Mr Brown will have grasped instantly — was a clear reference to Himmelfarb’s 1995 book of essays, The De-moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values.

Tony Blair’s claim to the Labour leadership in 1994 was largely founded on his success as shadow home secretary and his insistence — particularly after the horror of James Bulger’s murder — that the maintenance of the social fabric depended upon a clear notion of right and wrong, and that fashionable relativism was the route to perdition. From a senior Labour politician, these assertions were refreshing and electorally appealing.

For a Conservative leader, these are more perilous straits. The ghost of ‘Back to Basics’ still looms over the party. When John Major said in 1993 that ‘society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less’, he was taking issue with the pervasive idea that all bad behaviour is the product of adverse social conditions. But his (perfectly legitimate) remarks were widely mocked as the words of a weakened Tory PM posturing as a tough guy.

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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?