Society

One of, if not, the key theme of David Cameron’s leadership has been generational change. Back in his 2005 conference speech Cameron told the hall “We can be that new generation”, in his first PMQs he told Tony Blair that he “was the future once” and responding to the Budget in 2006 he derided Gordon Brown as an “analogue politician in a digital age.” It was, though, far harder to wield this weapon against Tony Blair than it is with Gordon Brown. (Sometimes the execution was also too self-satisfied, NB Cameron’s reference to being “bunched” at PMQs). Blair always seemed to have a sure touch for the zeitgeist, I can’t

Barack Obama should learn a little more history before his next visit – history about America, that is, not Britain. “Our founding institutions were profoundly shaped by the English tradition,” he said outside No10 today. Not quite. It was profoundly shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment (see here for more) – and one of the great ironies of history is that America was moulded along Adam Smith’s lines while Scotland imported the disastrous ideas of the French Enlightenment which continue to dominate discourse today. The “answers” to society, argued Scots such as Smith, Adam Ferguson and Francis Hutcheson, are held by mankind in general – not by any elite purporting to

A few months ago I wrote a Spectator article suggesting that the government  spends far too little money and time on advertising and persuasion, despite the (to me, at any rate) obvious observation that changing behaviour using information or even subtle persuasion is always preferable – on both economic and philosophical grounds – to the threat of punishment. It still seems bizarre to me that the government spends vastly more on punishing drunk drivers than it spends on persuading people not to drive drunk. Rather as though, when my children misbehaved, my first reaction were to hit them with a large stick, only using verbal persuasion as a last resort.