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.