Give us back our Big Idea, Mr Cameron

Liam Byrne — tipped for Cabinet promotion in the reshuffle — says that when Cameroons advocate ‘fraternity’ they are repackaging the Conservative case for the shrinking of the state The idea that we might have a fight about ‘fraternity’ at the next election shows just how far the centre ground of politics has moved. Not so long ago, people would have laughed if you suggested the Tories might have a stab at a row about feelings of solidarity. Indeed among Conservatives the very concept may still be a specialist taste. But a casual glance at David Cameron’s recent speeches reveals a pretty clear direction of travel.

Having put his cards on the table and professed ‘there is more to life than money’ (David Cameron is worth some £3.2 million according to the News of the World), the Tory leader recently concluded in a speech to Relate that ‘the causes of our broken society lie not just in government but in our national culture’. A litany of social ills was then appended as evidence, from violent crime to unemployment.

On closer inspection it appears this ‘talking point’ has been some time in the making. For a couple of years now, Tories like Danny Kruger have been polishing an argument last seen in the hands of David Willetts ten years ago. Their aim is to seize the language, agenda and policies of fraternity from the Labour party.

Good luck. The Conservatives are utterly misguided, both philosophically and in the policy they profess to offer by way of substance. Why? Because David Cameron is cooking up nothing more than a fresh excuse to try and roll back the state.

When Mr Cameron talks about ‘rolling forward society’, he is trying to shoehorn a tried and trusted ‘New Right’ argument into the space created by a sensitivity in Britain that amidst today’s diversity there is a need for stronger shared standards and values to reinforce the ‘ties that bind us’.

Thus, Danny Kruger argues: ‘[a Tory fraternity] does mean a certain scepticism about the efficacy of state action... David Cameron emphasises exhortation rather than instruction.’ In his speeches, Cameron quickly gives himself away. Within a few paragraphs we tend to hear the tired call for a return to ‘traditional institutions’, starting with the family.

Labour too believes the family needs supporting in modern Britain. But Cameron is simply echoing American neoconservative writers like Glazer, Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Glenn Loury and Charles Murray, who have co-opted the ideas of the 19th-century philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville and his emphasis on the ‘art of association’ as the basis for an attack on the modern welfare state by posing a little more ‘self-help’ as an alternative to active government.

So Cameron presents an analysis that is different to Mrs Thatcher’s. But he reaches the same conclusion: less government. James Purnell is right. Cameron’s problem is not that he is a radical; it is that he is a conservative.

This ‘new gloss on an old philosophy’, as Ed Miliband once described it, is Cameron’s Achilles’ heel. When the world is moving on apace, a puritanical reliance on ‘traditional institutions’ alone is frankly difficult when those very ‘institutions’ are under pressure. No one in their right mind wants to see those institutions put in the bin. Far from it. We simply need more for the modern world. What are we supposed to do when, as Matthew d’Ancona incisively argues, public trust in ‘traditional institutions’ is fast evaporating? Or when some ‘traditional institutions’ — like the nuclear family — do not accommodate the 40 per cent of today’s children born outside marriage?

In the media Cameron has made some progress with his argument because he is tapping into a sensation that is very much alive in Britain today. At the end of last year I travelled all over the country talking to hundreds of people about immigration and Britishness and what we need to do together to strengthen the things we have in common. People feel we are a much more diverse place today. Not just because of migration (inward and outward), but because we live and work and raise families differently. In America, Robert Putnam found at least 11 big changes that created this sensation: ‘busyness’ and time pressure, movement of women into the labour force, residential mobility, suburbanisation, TV, changes to marriage, the welfare state, and the Sixties (Vietnam, Watergate and the cultural revolution against authority). Similar forces are at work in Britain.

On the one hand these changes give us all the freedom to live life as we see fit. Yet they come with the risk of our national life breaking up into a cultural archipelago of ever smaller islands further and further apart. We don’t want this. We want to live in a stronger society.

New Labour has always taken this very seriously. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown talked about the way individuals do better in strong communities. That truth has not changed. But it requires that alongside new measures to empower individuals, we need new measures to strengthen what ties individuals together, renewing the rules of mutual respect for a 21stcentury British society.

This is why the debate about Britishness is so important and so relevant today. Britishness is quite simply one of the most important associations that we have; it is a code, shaped by our history, that defines so much of the way we look at the world. But our work to reinforce national identity must be part of a much wider effort to refresh fraternity in modern Britain. To renew the social contract that links us all. To link a civic and cultural agenda to economic reform and a fresh assault on inequality in Britain’s poor places.

The Statement, or Bill, of British Rights and Duties is perhaps the most constitutionally prominent opportunity to set out a picture of the contract that binds us together. The London Olympics will be an extraordinary stage on which to set out our national story. Renewed investment in our history and the sites, landmarks, monuments and markers of our shared heritage all help. I have made the argument elsewhere for a national day to celebrate what we like best about our country. Nationally, we must argue with new vigour our defence of the Union. And in towns and cities we must use the huge programme of regeneration — new homes, schools and health centres — as an opportunity to renew both civic fabric and civic pride.

In my conversations around Britain, I met an especially eloquent lady in Edgbaston. She said, ‘We can learn to live together, if we only put our minds to it.’ I think she is right. And I think we should approach this task with an air of great confidence. Preparing a speech recently, I came across Laurie Lee’s extraordinary description of the end of his village (as he put it) in the 1930s. ‘Fragmentation, free thought and new excitements,’ he said, ‘came now to perplex and intrigue us.’ And of course he was right. Over a century and a half ago, huge change swept millions from the countryside to the cities.

Yet our reaction as a nation was not reactionary, or chauvinistic. Rather, our approach was inventive. In cities like mine, politicians like Chamberlain wrote a new civic gospel. Philanthropists like the Cadburys pioneered, in Bournville, new designs for communities. Political movements, like the National Education League, were founded to run national campaigns. A huge constellation of workingclass organisations were born. We invented sports clubs like Aston Villa, Birmingham City, and Warwickshire County Cricket Club. The Boys’ Brigade, the Scouts, the Girls’ Union, and the Boys’ Club were all started.

My point is that if we did it then, we can do it again. Britain is not broken. We live in a country where we are quite capable of finding new ways of ‘refreshing fraternity’, but not, as David Cameron suggests, with a retreat to traditional conservatism. We must be radical, imaginative and inventive.