Already a subscriber? Log in
The Prime Minister does not have the answers to violent crime and the surge in antisocial behaviour. But he is well aware of popular feeling on these issues. In May he said that the criminal justice system was ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. Last month, in a speech in Bristol, Mr Blair warned of ‘the gap between what the public expects and what the public sees’ and declared that ‘the public are anxious for a perfectly good reason: they think they play fair and play by the rules and they see too many people who don’t getting away with it’. After nine years in government, the Prime Minister is in no position to lecture anyone on this failure, which is his own. But his observation was correct.
If Mr Cameron aspires to enter No. 10 in, say, 2009, he needs a sharp sense of the public’s priorities in this area of policy. Poll after poll shows that crime and antisocial behaviour are high on voters’ lists of concerns. The voters believe — correctly — that the causes of crime are criminals. Their priority is not ‘rehabilitation’ or analysis of the ‘circumstances’ that bring young people to behave in a threatening manner, or criminals to offend. What the public wants is a police service that detects crime, a prosecution service that secures convictions, a sentencing policy that keeps the small number of persistent re-offenders behind bars, new prison capacity to meet this demand, and a probation service that is more than a bureaucracy enshrining discredited 1960s ideology. This is plenty to be getting on with: let Mr Cameron address these pressing tasks — the work of a generation — before he indulges his sociological whims.
The Tory leader has enjoyed considerable success in the past seven months, both in the opinion polls and in the local elections. He has ‘decontaminated’ the Tory brand so that voters, when asked, no longer suspect Conservative motives as they did a year ago. This is a great achievement — a precondition of winning an election — and one that is underappreciated by those who sneer at his methods.
Thus it is all the more disquieting that Mr Cameron should make such an error. The Conservatives already have a substantial poll lead on law and order and, in David Davis, a shadow home secretary who communicates an intelligent toughness that serves the party admirably. There was, in other words, no need for a (heavily trailed) speech of the sort that the Tory leader made this week. It is true that, in the past, the Conservative party has been considered by some (wrongly) to be greedy, xenophobic, sectarian and mean-spirited. But the Tories have lost no votes because they are tough on crime; quite the opposite.
Mr Cameron’s speech looked like a botched attempt to import George W. Bush’s brand of ‘compassionate conservatism’ to this country. His call for more ‘love’ carried strong echoes of the President’s rhetoric when he was governor of Texas. In a speech in July 1999, for instance, Mr Bush said that ‘there is no substitute for unconditional love and personal contact’. He called on his fellow citizens to say to those in need, ‘I love you …I’m in your corner.’
But the future president did so in a radically different political context. His speeches were full of religious meaning — he spoke of ‘the boundless grace of God’ — and used the word ‘love’ as a conservative Christian, rather than as a child of the 1960s. ‘This is demanding love,’ said Mr Bush, ‘at times, a severe mercy.’ This approach, hugely effective in America, is not easily imported to our secular political culture.
Mr Cameron would do better to remember Hayek’s warning in The Constitution of Liberty: ‘Responsibility …often evokes the outright hostility of men who have been taught that it is nothing but circumstances over which they have no control that has determined their position in life or even their actions. The denial of responsibility is, however, commonly due to a fear of responsibility, a fear that necessarily becomes a fear of freedom.’
It is not too late for Mr Cameron to correct this error of judgment, and show himself truly to be a man of his times. The Tory party is the party of individual responsibility or it is nothing; and hoodies are as responsible for their behaviour as the rest of us are.
Also in Politics
Also by The Spectator
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in