Tony Blair has dropped in to write an article on the social context to the recent riots. It’s insightful, especially as a testament of his
failings in government. At the close of his premiership, he says, he’d realised that the acute social problems in Britain’s inner cities were “specific” and could
not be solved with “conventional policy”. So much for ‘education, education, education’, Blair’s favoured solution was a mixture of early intervention on a
family by family basis to militate against the “profoundly dysfunctional” upbringings these young people endure and a draconian response to antisocial behaviour. Alas, he was
forced from office for before implementing the plan.
The present government has adopted Blair’s solution to gangs and gone much further, as you can see by reading our interview with Iain Duncan Smith. But Blair warns that David Cameron’s general prescriptions for curing Britain’s ‘sick society’ are insufficiently specific. Talking of moral decline and Broken Britain may be good politics, but it’s bad policy and Blair hints that Cameron can expect vast opposition. Again, the former PM relates his experience. There was a “constant backdrop of opposition, left and right, on civil liberty grounds and on the basis we were “stigmatising” young people.” David Cameron is already fighting those same forces and, writing in the Sunday Express, he vows to defeat them by reforming the Human Rights Act. His attempts to do so have apparently stalled, thanks to coalition politics and administrative inertia.
In no sense does Blair concede that the looters were his “children”, as Harriet Sergeant argued in a recent edition of the Spectator. He does not mention the benefits trap or how it has served to break-up families and kill aspiration in deprived communities, alienating people from mainstream society. He does not acknowledge that people who feel they cannot belong to society are extremely unlikely to respect it.
Jenni Russell has written a typically humane article on these matters in the Sunday Times (£) and she
praises Prince Charles for saying that joining a gang was a “cry for help“. She goes on to say that education inspires aspiration, and education begins in the home, as does
morality. Put simply, many of those out on the streets a fortnight ago do not have a home in the traditional sense. Russell writes: ‘Tony Wilkinson, a worker for the Kids Company charity,
who has been working with gang members for two years, says even a single-parent family looks like a desirable fantasy to the teenagers he has come across. Of the half-dozen he interviewed in depth
for his research, only one had known such continuity. None had a father figure and five out of six had spent their childhoods being passed around aunts, grandmothers, neighbours and friends without
anyone caring for them.’
Families would still breakdown even if the state absolved married couples from paying all taxes; that is the nature of some relationships. But David Cameron is yet to turn his impassioned rhetoric
on the family and marriage into action.
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