Cameron's Cognitive Dissonance

The best parts of David Cameron’s speech this morning were those passages spent defending the government’s plans for police reform and secondary education in England. This should not be a surprise: whether you agree with them or not, these are relatively coherent policies that have enjoyed the benefit of long gestation.

The rest of the speech, alas, was a humdrum tour of long-familiar bromides (families are good!), items pulled from discount bins (‘elf and safety!) and impossible promises just vague enough to escape obvious ridicule (“a clear ambition that within the lifetime of this Parliament we will turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in the country”).

Perhaps it has to be this way. Or rather, perhaps we shouldn’t have expected his speech to be better – that is, more specific – than it was. Social responsibility is a perfectly good theme (though interestingly the words “Big Society” never passed the Prime Minister’s lips) but it is, perhaps unavoidably, something easy to favour but harder to incubate.

Then there was this apparent contradiction:

Government cannot legislate to change behaviour, but it is wrong to think the State is a bystander.

[…] More than that, we’ve got to get out there and make a positive difference to the way families work, the way people bring up their children and we’ve got to be less sensitive to the charge that this is about interfering or nannying.

[…] We need a sense of social responsibility at the heart of every community. Yet the truth is that for too long the big bossy bureaucratic state has drained it away.

So which is it? Good nanny or Bad, bossy bureaucrat? (And aren’t nanies also always bossy?) Answer: it kind of depends. Sometimes a little of this and sometimes a little of that but never too much of anything, thank you. That’s a perfectly reasonable position for a One-Nation Tory paternalist to take, even if, by necessity and inclination, it lacks a certain clarity. It means that Nudging (and Shoving) is back on the agenda, even if that once-trendy notion was also left unmentioned.

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Meanwhile, the Prime Minister indulged his appetite for empty, Blairish slogans with this grim triple-whammy diagnosis of the problems facing Britain:

Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control.

Fair enough. But one could easily counter this with the valid observation that, actually, the reverse if often also true: Punishment without crime (eg, many drug offences), Responsibilities (to the state) without rights (to decent government-run services), Control without communities (because, in part, of government-sponsored dependency).

So there’s that too.