David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservatives, said Friday at a public meeting that the United Nations report this week “shows that our society is in deep trouble.”
He blamed the malaise of a society he depicted as too ready to forfeit family values in the face of economic pressures. “When you look at the people caught up in these events, what you see is a complete absence in many cases of fathers, and a complete presence of family breakdown,” he told a television interviewer. “That, I think, is what is at the heart of it.”
In political terms, Mr. Cameron’s words represented a marked shift away from the individualistic and materialistic values that underpinned Conservative thinking in the Thatcher era. “We used to stand for the individual,” he said. “Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood in a word, for society.”
Hmm. Well, I naturally sympathize with Cameron here, but I want to understand the context in which he's speaking. My understanding of British politics is limited. I'd been under the impression that Thatcherism was a reaction -- and a necessary, salutary one -- to statism. If it's the case that Cameron is saying that Thatcherite individualism is insufficient, then of course he's right. But in practice, what does that mean? How would the social and political vision of Cameron's Tory party differ from what Labour has to offer? How does Cameron propose reconstituting the Burkean little platoons?
Clive Davis, can you help me out here? Or anybody else with a better working knowledge of contemporary British politics?
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It's correct to say he has not yet spelled out many policies, either because he doesn't want to present a target or because he doesn't want Labout to nick them (something which has happened quite frequently). I like his green talk. He got my goat last week, and probably turned me into a UKIP voter. During the row over whether RC adoption agencies were to be made to accept anti-discrimination laws which will prevent all adoption agencies from giving children to gay couples, Cameron said of course he supported the law. "The multicultural experiment has not worked." I didn't know whether he meant that 1500 years of Christianity in Britain was part of this "multicultural experiment" which has "not worked", or whether he just meant the acceptance of RCs in public life since the passing of the great Reform Bill in 1832.
I've visted the UK twice in the past five years, after not having been there since I spent a summer there in the early 1990's. My impression is that -- socially -- the UK is reaching the point that much of the US had reached by the 1970's, when social order was breaking down in lots of places. Theodore Dalyrmple is hyperbolic, but basically correct in his assessment of things. The scariest thing for the British -- whom I wish all the best -- is that they have much less of a reservoir of traditional values left to draw upon as they try to reconstruct a social order than Americans do. Just to give two examples, formal religion has been almost entirely abandoned and there is much less of the patriotic feeling symbolizes social commitment and responsibility.
Revise that to read "much less of the patriotic feeling *that* sybolizes social commitment and responsibility."
To any British readers or Britannosapient readers - - If you have read them, what do you think of Scruton's England: An Elegy, or Peter Hitchens's The Abolition of Britain?
It may be that the Brits' best chance is to practice a kind of internal colonialism. By that I mean bringing law and civilization to the land, whether the savages want it or not. This takes a governing class with the self-confidence to impose its will on the willing and the unwilling. Now, I'm sure Islam would be happy to fill this role, but it's better that it be an agency rooted in Britain's Christain institutions and traditions. Not to mince words, a Cromwell, possibly from the Army. Or maybe there's a titled throwback to ruder days somewhere out there. So, yeah, you're reading me right: 1) a dictatorship, 2) a violent restoration of the old Britain, and 3) by implication, the removal of the useless and toothless elites who have been wrecking the nation for well on 50 years now. As Stalin showed, you can clear out whole swathes of them and the country will go on nicely. This is an brutal Rx, but so is Chemo. Whether you or I like these measures is entirely besides the point.
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