I thought I’d woken up to a bad dream this morning, when I heard on the radio that the Leader of the Opposition was accusing the governing party of “moral failure”, and thus implicitly blaming them of the brutal attack and attempted murder of two small boys in Edlington last year.
I wasn’t dreaming.
David Cameron’s speech today in which he accused Labour of “moral failure” is flawed on many levels.
Methodologically, extrapolating from a handful of case examples is a very weak way of evidentially supporting a thesis. Consider this example to show how absurd such reasoning is: David Cameron went to Eton, is a Conservative and on the evidence of today’s speech, is a bit of an idiot. Boris Johnson is a Conservative, went to Eton and makes a living being a buffoon. Therefore all Conservative party members went to Eton and are idiots. If only it were so…
As a matter of fact, Mr Cameron is wrong. The latest crime statistics show violent crime down, with a peak in 1995. See an FT leader from last July or the Guardian leader from today for more.
Logically, it is unclear what Mr Cameron is arguing – is he saying that it is the role of the state to ensure that no crime happens anywhere ever? And that the state should always be expected to prevent people from doing bad things to others? I am not sure that this is a credible argument if that is, indeed, what Mr Cameron meant. Surely the best we can hope for from the state is risk reduction to the maximum possible extent, not its elimination (which I would contend is impossible, even with unlimited resources). If Mr Cameron is actually committing the Conservative party to a social policy that eradicates crime, I’d like to hear more about it. If he believes that crime cannot be eradicated, then his argument is confused – we are always likely to have people who do bad things to good people and whose actions cannot be predicted nor prevented. I doubt there’s a social policy that can eradicate the human condition. If he is arguing that the state should do better at reducing this risk, then he should just say that, instead of blaming the government for attempted murder.
In terms of consistency, how do the Edlington attacks actually fit into Cameron’s “Broken Britain” canvas or broader policy agenda? The boys who committed that attack had two parents – £20 extra a week in marriage allowance wouldn’t have helped here. Maybe if the state had actually butted out the lives of their family and let third sector partners to government help them, things would have been ok instead? Maybe if only we’d spent less on Social Services in recent years – fixed the roof while the sun was shining – these boys would never have had an irrational compulsion to try and kill another human being? If only WHSmith hadn’t stocked chocolate eggs at their counters over the years, those boys would have turned out ok in the end? Others have highlighted such inconsistencies in message better than I. For example, The Economist columnist Bagehot recently asked in a blog post:
If you believe, as your speech at the Tory conference avowed, that “big government” lies behind many of Britain’s social problems, how can you at the same time want to extend the reach of government into the most private aspect of citizen’s lives—ie, personal relationships, via your plans for a tax break for marriage?
And strategically, I think Mr Cameron may come to regret making political capital out of attempted murder. It is crass for him to have done so and the victims of events such as those in Edlington deserve more respect than being mere pawns in a political battle. Moreover, he is labelling a not insignificant proportion of the electorate as delinquent, if not precisely defining who these people are. Presumably he believes he can manage without them at the election – they’re probably, in any event, too busy to vote, what with all that running around like Neanderthals shooting and stabbing each other.
Mr Cameron may think it is smart politics to invoke Baby P, the Edlington attacks, Ben Kinsella, Gary Newlove, Shannon Matthews and others to creative a narrative of decline – a “social recession”. But in reality, the only person guilty of moral failure is Mr Cameron himself for the shameless hijacking of a number of isolated tragedies for his own political gain.
I can only hope his moral failure leads to the electoral recession it deserves.
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