The Glasgow Doctrine
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.
Mr Cameron was well aware of the risk he was taking in marching on to this terrain. But — as he said in his speech — the very fact that politicians are so nervous of doing so is the heart of the matter. ‘We as a society have been far too sensitive,’ he said. ‘In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said.’ Indeed: tact has become more important than honesty in most public discourse.
As Rod Liddle observes on page 16, Mr Cameron was more explicit than he has ever been about the need for greater personal responsibility. Not every predicament is a form of victimhood — obesity, for example, is usually caused by eating too much rather than genetic misfortune — and any society that strips free will and the recognition of blame out of its public policy is asking for trouble.
The Left has been the principal culprit since the war, enforcing this orthodoxy in town halls, professional bodies and quangos. But the Conservative party, to its shame, has often joined in: it was a Tory home secretary, Reggie Maudling, who most overtly described criminal behaviour as a curable affliction. ‘If it is possible by treatment to cure criminal tendencies,’ he mused, ‘how can you distinguish between crime and an illness?’ It was not until Michael Howard went to the Home Office in 1993 that the party began to atone properly for its craven complicity.
Mr Cameron’s attack on ‘moral neutrality’ is very welcome and will strike most voters as mere common sense. It is mysterious to the vast majority of people that the scourge of knife crime cannot be dealt with by the various agencies of the state with a clear sense of moral purpose, urgency, coordination and uncompromising leadership. It was predictable that the Tory leader would unveil a ‘Knife Crime Action Plan’ on Monday. Much more impressive was the robust manner in which he did so: the sense he communicated that, as Prime Minister, he would not just announce ‘action plans’ but might actually ensure that they were implemented.
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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