Broken Society

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): OK's Tom Griffin has a piece up on Comment is Free reflecting on last night's Guardian-Soundings sponsored debate which asked "Is the future Conservative?" If you do the electoral arithmetic the answer is almost certainly, Yes. But as last night's panel - ably chaired by Jonathan Freedland - recognised, if the party is to achieve any kind of ideological ascendancy it must develop a new political economy that rejects the disastrous neo-liberal thinking that lies behind the current crisis. Not easy when, as Tom notes, Cameron's entire "broken society" pitch is based on the premise that Thatcher fixed the "broken economy"!

I sat through last night's debate with Tom and I think he's right when he says there wasn't much evidence of any new economic thinking from the largely Tory panel. There were a lot platitudes offered about the restoration of civil society and Jesse Norman made the quite remarkable claim that only the Right can provide answers to the current crisis, as they alone have "moved beyond the debate between the individual and the state" (more "Third Way" anyone?).

As Tom says, the most adventurous was Theologian Philip Blond, whose recent attack on the failings of the liberal state was published here on OK. I was surprised to find myself in agreement on some issues with the self-described "communitarian" Blond. One questioner in the audience summed up my reasons well when he joked that Sarah Palin is perhaps the personification of the communitarian critique of liberalism. Beware of attacks on "individualism" from both Right and Left: they have some pedigree.

LibCon's Laurie Penny got the biggest laugh from the left-leaning audience when she asked if we'd be witnessing a public display of contrition from the Tories now that they recognise the damage their failed policies have wrought.  She might have asked the same of New Labour too of course. Alternatives may now have become thinkable, but in the case of both parties, and judging by last night's evidence: don't hold your breath.

Marta Cooper (London, oD): 90 murders have occurred in London this year, 23 victims of which have been teenagers. It seems not a day passes without news of another fatality reaching us. But is knife crime really on the increase, or is this just what we're being led to believe by excessive media hype? Conflicting statistics make this a difficult question to answer: in mid-July the British Crime Survey claimed overall knife crime fell by 25% between 2006 and 2008. But the Department of Health reported 14,000 people treated for stab wounds in 2007, showing an increase of 20% since 2006; whilst there was a reported 72% rise in prosecutions of those possessing knives since Labour came to power in 1997.

Whichever set of statistics you believe, it is clear that the media hype around the issue is not helping - a view shared by youth workers and children at Dalgarno Community Centre in north Kensington, whom I interviewed about stop and search policy this month. "Media hype causes young people hype," as one worker said. "We are made to believe that everyone is carrying a knife and we will get killed if we don't carry one," added the Youth Area Worker. A reduced media focus on knife crime would, therefore, help to solve the issue.

The Government's response, meanwhile, has been draconian and will likely prove counter-productive.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK):  Over at the Spectator James Forsyth argues that today's speech by Cameron in Glasgow will shift the ground on personal responsibility and public morality. I think people should take responsibility for their actions and their families. The wider public morality can't function without this. But I can't help feeling that Cameron doesn't do it for me and that he is playing to the dark side of our regime. If you want to see a speech that addresses the need for personal responsibility in a deep way, without flinching, then Obama's fathers day address does it. In contrast, there is a punative rather than forcefully educational tone to Cameron's rhetoric. It is also one-sided. He says that he has decided to stop being "sensitive" in his use of words, and we all know that politicians circumlocute most dreadfully. But this is what he says to  business:

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have been very busy writing a chapter for a book on Charter 88 (while attending the brilliant and enjoyable seminar about it on Friday and Saturday). There is lots to catch up on. But today, I had to go past the spot where Ben Kinsella died of his stab wounds a week ago. I stopped to pay my respects. The pub where the fight began was one my younger daughter used when she was a student. The sweeping bank of flowers and candles, cards and toys, on the corner of North Road and York Way, recalled the response to Diana, although in this case many genuinely knew the victim personally. There was a large English flag and some Arsenal scarves. A small cluster of unopened beer bottles suggested an offering to the gods. New to me was the amount of writing on the pavement, with often quite long magic marker messages. "You have gone to a better place" was a shorter, unsigned statement. "The good die young and the bad still stand", observed another. The main facebook group is here. The official website with an appeal for a campaign to stop knife crime is here.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Over on his Diary Iain Dale gave me a good thumping for daring to suggest that Thatcherism could be one of the root causes of the epidemic of violence among young people in our country. In the comments Dizzy kicked in too. Perhaps the cruellest of Iain’s barbs is his description of me as “normally rather sensible”.

Jon Bright (London, OK): CentreForum have released a pamphlet today by Jesse Norman (opens pdf), former director of Barclays bank and author of David Cameron's compassionate conservatism agenda (he also signed the Power petition). He writes on the theme of broken society and the thinning of the public sphere that is becoming a very familiar refrain - a 'social recession', he calls it, caused by excessive reliance on state intervention.

Guy Aitchison (Bristol, OK): The perennially gloomy Peter Hitchens posted a longish “manifesto” in yesterday's Mail lamenting everything wrong with modern Britain and calling for the remedies needed. He hopes these will be delivered by whatever right-wing party takes over when Cameron’s “Tories at last shuffle off their mortal coil”.

Sunny Hundal (London, Pickled Politics): Last week Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst did the blogging equivalent of carpet bombing - letting loose a hail of shells at a multitude of culprits and problems. New Labour and the Conservatives alike were guilty of bad managerialism, destroying the family, aborting British values, perpetuating civic disintegration through multiculturalism, economic insecurity and more. Michael Keith has already suggested that their's is a "melancholic narrative bordering on bigotry". Listing a whole litany of problems is easy: it's more difficult to argue they are all related and a simple solution is readily available.

Moderator: This is a response to a post by Adrian Pabst and Phillip Blond.

Michael Keith (London, Goldsmiths): Nostalgia is clearly not what it used to be. In their slightly bizarre lament, Blond and Pabst appear to have caricatured both state and market in an elision of the contradictions between the sentimental and the rational organisation of social policy programmes in contemporary Britain.

Phillip Blond (Lancaster, University of Cumbria) & Adrian Pabst (Nottingham, University of Nottingham): Iain Duncan Smith's visionary report on Breakdown Britain demonstrates that both Brown and Cameron are failing to grasp the nature and extent of Britain's social crisis.