Target Failing Families Or More Responsibility - Road to the Middle Class

IN BRITAIN’S Daily Telegraph recently Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted that his policies on crime and social breakdown hadn’t worked. Although things had really improved and crime rates had gone down during his premiership (a claim that many dispute) there was still more to be done.

[T]he proper answer is to add to the ASB laws measures that target failing and dysfunctional families early, and place those families within a proper, structured, disciplined framework of help and insistence on proper behaviour.

Well, sorry Prime Minister, but that didn’t go down too well in the comment section. As in:

“Utter drivel.”
“The problem is, you have not been tough on crime - you just say you have.”
“This man’s capacity for delusional thinking knows no limits.”

The Telegraph thoughtfully produced an op-ed by Leader of the Opposition David Cameron two days later. Cameron was able to expand upon the theme he articulated upon his election to Conservative Party leadership over 18 months ago. Society is not the same thing as the state.

(Try that concept on a liberal friend. Chances are that they won’t get it.)

In criticizing Blair’s proposal for a government program to target the tiny minority of dysfunctional families Cameron writes:

Only a Labour politician would think that you can pump billions of pounds into public services and expect crime to fall and social wellbeing to rise in direct consequence...
Labour’s intentions may have been good, but its approach failed because its only instruments were taxpayers’ money and mechanical central control.

Labour’s government solution to crime and incivility is wrong. What is needed is “Not more control. Not more money. But more responsibility.”

That is what I mean when I say that ’’there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state’’. When Labour politicians talk of ’’society as a whole’’, they mean the state. For me, ’’society’’ is more plural and unstructured. It is composed of all the institutions and associations that individuals form for business, pleasure and social action. It is here that the real answers to crime and incivility lie.

For Cameron the comments section was more diverse, as we postmoderns say.

More piffle and tosh...
“I believe that this is a reasonable and well thought article. Changing behaviours takes a generation, so this is not a simple subject to tackle.”
“Well said Mr. Cameron. What’s lacking today is peer pressure from society[.]”

There were plenty of complaints like “piffle and tosh.” There were demands for specific policies. But there was also genuine approval.

What Cameron does not say, and what his readers do say is that if the “institutions and associations” are to get bigger then the state has to get smaller. There’s no getting away from that. It is the power of the state that has decimated the little platoons. To recruit and re-form the little platoons we need to stop the state from controlling them and bossing them around.

As Arthur C. Brooks writes in Who Really Cares, when government spends an extra dollar on social services it crowds out a little less than 50 cents in charitable assistance. If you figure that private charity is about twice as productive as government then you are backing out private effort dollar for dollar.

Is this all we have achieved after a century of the welfare state?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

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