Mending the broken society: Cameron’s mendacious and disgraceful speech

Today, responding to the disorder that swept through many of Britain’s cities a little over a week ago, David Cameron set out his response in a speech at a youth centre in his Witney constituency.  It’s an important event – it provided an opportunity for Britain’s Prime Minster to set out a considered response to the deep problems underlying the rioting.

What emerged was no more than a set of prejudices, unsupported by evidence, analysis or imagination, that told us almost nothing of the world in which the large majority of people live in Britain.  For most of us, that’s a world of complexities, ambiguities and of conflicts of interest, of huge diversity and the widest range of experiences.  Instead of analysis and serious consideration, instead of humility and an open mind seeking understanding, Cameron offered slogans culled from the collected editorials of the Daily Mail, the repeated ramblings of a pub bore.  If this is the best that Eton and Oxford have to offer, thank God for comprehensive education.

It takes a certain type of self-deception to make a speech decrying the evils of modern British society without using the word “greed”, except once, in passing, near the end.  Yet so warped, so partial is Cameron’s view of the problems we face that he has managed it.

Many of the themes were familiar.  This was about criminality, not poverty or about Government cuts.  Yes, we’re cutting police budgets but there will always be enough police on the streets (Really? you can’t suck police from rural areas into the inner cities indefinitely).

The speech really gets into its full mendacious stride when he asks the rhetorical question about whether politicians should be delivering lectures.  But instead of talking about a culture of milking public funds to buy duck houses, repair moats and resurface tennis courts he launches into an extraordinary passage about what we apparently can and cannot say – his speechwriter has the good taste not to use the words “political correctness gone mad”, but this is what it is about:

But politicians shying away from speaking the truth about behaviour, about morality…

…this has actually helped to cause the social problems we see around us.

We have been too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong.

We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said – about everything from
marriage to welfare to common courtesy.

Sometimes the reasons for that are noble – we don’t want to insult or hurt people.

Sometimes they’re ideological – we don’t feel it’s the job of the state to try and pass judgement on people’s behaviour or engineer personal morality.

And sometimes they’re just human – we’re not perfect beings ourselves and we don’t want to look like hypocrites.

So you can’t say that marriage and commitment are good things – for fear of alienating single mothers.

You don’t deal properly with children who repeatedly fail in school – because you’re worried about being accused of stigmatising them.

You’re wary of talking about those who have never worked and never want to work – in case you’re charged with not getting it, being middle class and out of touch.

In this risk-free ground of moral neutrality there are no bad choices, just different lifestyles.

People aren’t the architects of their own problems, they are victims of circumstance.

‘Live and let live’ becomes ‘do what you please.’

Well actually, what last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism – it’s not going to cut it any more.

There’s just one problem with all this -  it’s just not true.  Of course those things can be and are being said – they’re being said by politicians and the media the whole time.  They’re being said in the Daily Mail every day. Cameron is tilting at a small army of straw men. He’s invoking an extraordinary and wholly imaginary world, in which the guardians of so-called political correctness inhibit free speech.  Some of what he condemns is actually is about recognising that there are standards of courtesy which mean you exercise some responsibility for the feelings and situations of those around you.  A lot of people don’t like this, because they’re lazy or because they are made uneasy by the fact that people have different backgrounds and outlooks to their own.  But actually, being part of a community means that you make the effort to do that. Does Cameron really want to return to a world where the old hate-words for people with coloured skins or with disabilities are socially acceptable?  And this is not somebody holding forth in the pub or on an internet message board – this is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, who has a responsibility and a duty to take a bigger view.

He goes on:

Our security fightback must be matched by a social fightback.

We must fight back against the attitudes and assumptions that have brought parts of our society to this shocking state.

We know what’s gone wrong: the question is, do we have the determination to put it right?

Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?

Irresponsibility.  Selfishness.  Behaving as if your choices have no consequences.

Children without fathers.  Schools without discipline.  Reward without effort.

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

Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged – sometimes even incentivised – by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally de-moralised.

Again, we need to look at the assumptions at work here.  Again, much of this simply isn’t true.  Crime without punishment – in a society that imprisons more people than ever before, and than elsewhere in Europe, without any appreciable difference in crime?  Schools without discipline – yes, there are (and always have been) disciplinary problems in schools, but where’s the evidence? Hard evidence – most notably from OFSTED – shows that discipline in most schools is good and improving.

Most of all, reward without effort.  Cameron, like most of his cabinet, is the recipient of vast inherited wealth.  Irresponsibility? Selfishness? Behaving as if your choices have no consequences?  Cameron is a friend and advocate of bankers.  How dare this man whose friends and classmates have gambled Britain into the worst economic crisis for eighty years lecture working people on reward without effort, and irresponsibility and selfishness.  And, unsurprisingly, there is no mention at all of corporate tax evasion.

What follows on welfare is standard Tory stuff, about encouraging work and stopping people living lives in which the state will always bail them out.  It needs no more than a comment that a Government of millionaires and a Parliament of people drawn from a political class that has almost no contact with the daily lives of people on benefits is in no position to comment.

But then we come to something really extraordinary:

As we consider these questions of attitude and behaviour, the signals that government sends, and the incentives it creates…

…we inevitably come to the question of the Human Rights Act and the culture associated with it.

Let me be clear: in this country we are proud to stand up for human rights, at home and abroad.  It is part of the British tradition.

But what is alien to our tradition – and now exerting such a corrosive influence on behaviour and morality…

…is the twisting and misrepresenting of human rights in a way that has undermined personal responsibility.

We are attacking this problem from both sides.

We’re working to develop a way through the morass by looking at creating our own British Bill of Rights.

And we will be using our current chairmanship of the Council of Europe to seek agreement to important operational changes to the European Convention on Human Rights.

But this is all frustratingly slow.

The truth is, the interpretation of human rights legislation has exerted a chilling effect on public sector organisations, leading them to act in ways that fly in the face of common sense, offend our sense of right and wrong, and undermine responsibility.

It is exactly the same with health and safety – where regulations have often been twisted out of all recognition into a culture where the words ‘health and safety’ are lazily trotted out to justify all sorts of actions and regulations that damage our social fabric.

So I want to make something very clear: I get it.  This stuff matters.

And as we urgently review the work we’re doing on the broken society, judging whether it’s ambitious enough – I want to make it clear that there will be no holds barred…

…and that most definitely includes the human rights and health and safety culture.

Let’s just read that again.  Because, once again, it simply isn’t true.  We hear a lot of rhetoric about the Human Rights Act – usually from newspaper journalists who love to run stories about some enemy of society or other insisting on their human rights as a means to avoid their just deserts.  But the European Convention of Human Rights has been a part of our culture for generations – all the Human Rights Act did was make it applicable in Britain’s courts.  Nothing in substance has changed.  It’s a huge mythology – and Cameron knows that perfectly well.  If he was honest, he’d be challenging, not parroting, the tabloid rhetoric.

And health and safety.  Cameron and his family have lived lives of extreme privilege and have no direct experience of working in dangerous conditions for low pay.  He probably cannot understand that health and safety legislation has immeasurably improved the lives of millions of ordinary working people, by ensuring that they do not have to work in fear for their lives or their health.  It’s not surprising to anyone that Cameron regards profit as more important.  I’d defy him to find any real example of health and safety regulations damaging our social fabric – it’s just one of those fancy phrases that Tories and tabloids use when they lie.  But the real dishonesty here is that what we think of as the health and safety culture has nothing to do with health and safety legislation and everything to do with the fear of being sued.  It’s not health and safety legislation, but the privatisation of redress.  Cameron and the Tories look to the short term, without realising that rolling back health and safety legislation will simply make the litigation culture worse.  And more and more people will be told that they can’t do things because of health and safety, when what they really mean is because of the insurance, and a culture of litigation which looks awfully like the sort of irresponsibility that Cameron attacks elsewhere.

I mentioned that greed gets no more than a passing mention.  There’s another word that’s missing – “sorry”.  This is not a speech in which Cameron is willing to recognise the failures of our political system.  I’d argue that Britain may not be broken, but our political class most certainly is. No recognition of a political class that is increasingly remote from the people it governs; whose relationship with the media – especially the Murdoch press – is endemically corrupt; no recognition that the corruption is also endemic in the police service.  No recognition that Britain is a democracy in which three established parties offer variations on the same economic policies, and in which dissent and a real desire for change is swept into the margins; no recognition that increasing numbers of people are giving up on democracy to the point where they won’t turn out to vote, in elections where the composition of Parliament bears little more than a passing resemblance to how people voted. No recognition that while parts of London burned, our Prime Minister’s principal occupation appeared to be arranging a photo-opportunity with an Italian waitress.  And no recognition that a man who belonged to the Bullingdon Club, that Oxford society in which the uber-privileged indulged in recreational criminal damage is not best placed to read moral lectures to the poor.

And no recognition that for all but the very richest children, the prospect of a university education is becoming increasingly difficult; that the political class has committed Britain to illegal and futile wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; no recognition that Cameron is paving the way for the NHS when he said explicity at the election that he did not do so; that the burden of dealing with our banker-generated economic problems falls increasingly on the poor and vulnerable, while the wealthy regard paying tax as one of life’s optional extras.

Parts of our society are in deep trouble.  Contented societies do not see rioting and looting of the sort we saw in England ten days ago.  Aspects of our society certainly need fixing – as anyone on the left will agree; we wouldn’t be on the left if we didn’t believe that things were badly wrong.  But for me it’s our political system that is broken.  And Cameron’s speech – the speech of a weak, scared man trying to look strong by hunkering down into an ideological bunker – provides all the evidence I need.

The Coalition’s vicious assault on single mothers

Last weekend, in an opinion piece in the Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron attacked fathers who fail to face up to their responsibilities while commenting that many single mothers did a heroic job.  I commented at the time that, coming from the Tories, this latter comment was something of a step forward.  I spoke too soon: a report issued today by the Fawcett Society shows that Cameron’s words hid a vicious assault on the living standards of single mothers and the children they care for.

The Fawcett Society’s conclusions are horrifying.  While they show that living standards for all groups in society will fall, those of single parents – who of course are mostly (but far from entirely) women – will fall by an extraordinary 8.5% per year to 2015 as a result of coalition policies.  More than a month’s income – just imagine the effect of being told you won’t get paid at the end of one month a year.  That is what the Coalition has determined should happen to many of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society – amounting to about 10% of all families.  The major causes include cuts to housing benefits, Sure Start maternity benefits, the childcare element of tax credit and the freezing of child benefit.  And, as the report points out, the context is getting harder and harder – more pressure to find a job when there are fewer available and soaring childcare costs.

The most staggering figure is that if you convert the cost of loss of public services into cash, lone parents stand to lose 18.5% of their annual income – more than a sixth, and far higher than any other social group.

It’s horrifying.  Remember these are the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.

But it’s no accident.  These numbers come at a time when there is growing evidence that the Government is quite systematically demonising the disabled, and leaking misleading information to the media about the nature of the benefits that disabled people recieve,  most notably to the effect that disabled people are being handed out BMWs on the state (a repeat of a particularly pernicious lie about immigrants from days gone by that they were handed a brand new car on arrival – there’s nothing really original in the latest outbreak of bigotry). Ian Duncan-Smith claims that the disabled contribute nothing to society; Philip Davies MP introduces a Private Member’s Bill abolishing the minimum wage for people with disabilities.  I’ve written before about the Tory culture of bullying – what we are witnessing now looks like a sustained and wholly vicious campaign to vilify, injure and demonise those in society who are less fortunate.  We appear to be heading towards something almost like a social apartheid system in which only those who conform to Daily Mail-like stereotypes of normality are allowed the status of legitimate citizens.

Let’s stop using polite language.  The coalition are behaving like bigoted bullies.  The face of coalition government is the malicious sneer of the Bullingdon boy breaking up furniture in an Oxford restaurant – the same overweening sense of entitlement, the same contempt for the poor, the vulnerable, for those who are excluded from the same privileges – and, above all, for women.

Of course, there is a silver lining.  The bankers are still getting their bonuses.

England’s dreaming – narratives of nationhood

Royal Wedding day, and a lot of mixed emotions for this lefty republican – fury and boredom at the hype in the weeks leading up to it; ironic reflection at the way those two old English revolutionaries, John Milton and William Blake, had their words appropriated by the Royal pageantry (while the designer of Ms Middleton’s dress sought to channel William Morris); as an ex-chorister, excitement at the thrill of the musical performance in the Abbey; horrified by the misreading of history and the witless cliches as BBC presenters describe Victorian propagandist rituals as the products of a thousand years of history; as a socialist, repelled and fascinated by the interaction between people, media and monarchy; as a Green, touched by the conflict between the appropriateness and the absurdity of the trees in the Abbey.

And yet it seems to me that there are two narratives in play here. One is the officially sanctioned one – the pomp and pageantry, the rhetoric of nationhood, the belief that we are all in this together and that we are somehow empowered as a nation by the opportunity to wave flags and hold street parties. The other – one that is just as much part of British and more specifically English history – is that of an overweening state, in which we are subjects of the Crown and not citizens, and in which the police (or perhaps their political masters) sanction the arrest and detention of people who they think might want to protest against the established order. even while the ceremony is under way, Cameron’s government announces a further set of cuts to the NHS. And all this, without irony, in the same breath as we talk about British freedoms.

It’s not new. Christopher Hill in his great history of the English revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, reports the case of a woman who was hanged for declaring that she “would not give a fart for his grace of Canterbury”; now, a professor of anthropology is arrested for the grievous offence of planning dissenting street theatre;

Thirty years ago, when William Windsor’s parents married, I was an undergraduate at an ancient university, the first member of my family to have the chance of a university education, paid for entirely by the state. Now, university is a luxury for those who can afford to pay, or who are prepared to contemplate a life mired in debt. In a corner of my ancient university lurked the Bullingdon Club, mocked by me and my contemporaries as a decadent adolescent irritation staffed by a class in decline; now their network is at the heart of the political and economic establishment, taking the jobs, services and benefits of the most vulnerable to pay for the failures of their chums in the city.

In the ensuing years, divisions in society have got vastly wider, which is why the establishment needs this narrative of social unity and is so determined to clamp down on dissent that threatens it. In 1981 the anger was against Thatcher; the anger now is against a corrupt, overweening system with Royalty – perhaps surpising itself in the process – at its apex.

The patriotic, one-nation narrative is seductive in a world where uncertainties mount by the day. But it’s false, and a true patriot – one who eschews flag-waving and the repetition of stale monarchist formulae – must believe that Britain deserves better than this. This is the rhetoric of a failed society, one that is afraid to look itself in the mirror and relies on nostalgia for a society that never really existed; we’re being drawn back into a past in which rights we take for granted were yet to be won, and we need to wake up and stop the dreaming now.

There is an alternative English narrative; one of struggle for democracy and political rights, one to which those arrested on suspicion that they might think republican thoughts clearly belong, as do the activists who occupy banks and turn them into creches. Dreamers, perhaps, but more honest and closer to reality than those who dose their despair with gorgeous pageantry.

Cameron’s vicious and dishonest attack on public servants

I discovered yesterday afternoon that, as an ex-civil servant, I spent more than twenty years of my life as an enemy of enterprise.  In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in Cardiff yesterday afternoon, David Cameron – aristocrat, old Etonian, Bullingdon Club, PR Executive, arms salesman and sometime Prime Minister – decided to give us his views on usefulness in society, and launched a vicious and dishonest attack on public servants whom he describes as “enemies of enterprise”.  The Guardian’s Martin Rowson’s take seems entirely appropriate.

His speech contained the following widely-reported passage:

So I can announce today that we are taking on the enemies of enterprise.

The bureaucrats in government departments who concoct those ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible, particularly for small firms.

The town hall officials who take forever with those planning decisions that can be make or break for a business – and the investment and jobs that go with it.

The public sector procurement managers who think that the answer to everything is a big contract with a big business and who shut out millions of Britain’s small and medium sized companies from a massive potential market.

So you want to know my strategy for growth?

When people say ‘spend lots more money’ I say forget it – Labour spent it all.

There’s only one strategy for growth we can have now…

…and that is rolling up our sleeves and doing everything possible to make it easier for people to start a business to grow a businesses.

Back small firms. Boost enterprise. Be on the side of everyone in this country who wants to create jobs, and wealth and opportunity.

I know there’s an enterprise culture in this country.

I know that we’ve got the people, the ideas, the talent, the energy to make things great.

And I’m going to make sure this government does everything it takes.

So I can tell you today, the Budget in a few weeks time will tear down the barriers of enterprise and be the most pro-growth Budget this government, this country has seen for a generation.

Source

It’s an ignorant and ideologically-motivated picture, obviously designed to appeal to an ignorant and ideologically-motivated audience.  Bureaucrats in Government departments simply do not concoct rules and regulations – all new regulation is carefully assessed for costs and benefits.  The benefits may not accrue to the people for whom Cameron speaks, but the assessment is there and public.  And, crucially, all regulation is agreed by ministers and laid before Parliament where they are scrutinised – in other words, they’re political decisions. Of course, if he’s saying that the Conservative MPs in opposition were too idle, stupid or too busy in the day job to scrutinisine secondary legislation properly, that’s a different matter.  But to claim that regulation is produced by unaccountable bureaucrats is simply untrue.

Town Hall planning officers are already working with one hand tied behind their back – witness the problems they encounter in dealing with big supermarkets damaging diversity in the high street – and are often dealing with difficult political decisions.  Of course Cameron sees such decisions as being entirely about business, not about communities – of such things is the Big Society made.

The passage about bidding for government contracts is an outright lie.  All government contracts of any significant value have to be advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union, and are open to competition throughout the Community

And he has nothing to say about the bankers who have tanked the economy in an unregulated free-for-all, or in particular about the ambulance-chasing lawyers who have made billions out of developing the compensation culture – whose results are all too often laid at public servants’ doors.  If Cameron is serious about dealing with enemies of enterprise, let’s hear a bit more about these groups.

An admission of defeat

The Coalition’s economic strategy is all about the private sector creating jobs to outstrip the job losses in the public sector.  It’s a piece of economic nonsense – no peace-time economy has ever sustained that rate of job creation, let alone one that has taken £80bn out of the economy in public expenditure cuts.  This speech looks to me like a recognition that it’s not going to happen; the Tories are getting their scapegoating in early.

And of course none of the bureaucrats slandered by Cameron can answer back. It’s the old trick of the powerful trying to lay the responsibility for the failings of power on the powerless.  It’s a classic Tory tactic, none the less shabby for being dressed in a Bullingdon waistcoat.

Lessons from Ireland

The Republic of Ireland has recently introduced an emergency budget to address the effects of the economic downturn.  It’s the latest in a set of measures in an economy which, to an even greater extent than Britain, has been dependent on speculation and booming property prices.  The contraction of the Irish economy has been savage – official estimates suggest it will be 8% in 2009.  The rhetoric is about stabilising the public finances in order to bring a huge deficit under control, to restore confidence in the Irish economy.

The Irish policy response is interesting because it reflects quite closely the sort of policy framework that David Cameron and George Osborne have been setting out for the UK, in opposition to Gordon Brown’s stimulus package.  So it’s a useful exercise to unpack it to assess what Conservative policy could mean for the UK.

There’s an interesting analysis at Though Cowards Flinch which demonstrates how, despite the rhetoric that those who earn the most should pay the most, some of the changes in the tax regime actually bear down hardest on those least able to pay, by reducing income tax thresholds.

But this follows on from the announcement earlier this year of the Pensions Levy, which is in effect a swingeing pay cut for public sector workers.  The justification is simple; public sector workers enjoy substantially better pension provision than those in the public sector, and should therefore pay more for it.  Understandably it has provoked fury and mass resistance in Ireland, and the recent budget package modified it so that that it did not apply to lower-paid workers.

It’s a measure that fits closely with the rhetoric coming from the British Tory Party and its supporters in the Press.  In particular, the Daily Mail has been banging the drum about featherbedded public servants and their gold-plated pension provision, and individual Tory spokesmen have been making guarded comments on the subject (ever mindful of the fact that there are 600,000 voters in the public sector who have to be convinced somehow that voting Conservative is in their interests).  Others, like London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, have been much more outspoken.

The truth, of course, is totally different.  Mailwatch dissects the poisonous rhetoric about public sector pay here better than I could and some of the specific lies about public sector pensions are nailed by the Secretary General of the PCS, Mark Serwotka, in a radio interview in December last year.  Mailwatch points to the fact that public sector workers – who are overwhelmingly among the lower-paid in our society – have enjoyed years of below-inflation pay increases, while the private sector has forged ahead.  It however forbears to comment on the spectacle of Cameron and Osborne – both of whom sit on piles of vast inherited wealth -denouncing as bloated the average public sector pension of £7000 p.a. – barely enought to equip a member of the Bullingdon Club with tails and waistcoat.

The official Conservative line is that nothing has been ruled in or out.  But if the Tories win the next election, watch for the assault on the public sector.