David Cameron has laudable aims – but he’s no Beveridge

Richard Robinson‘s Speech Bubble

This week, David Cameron has again sought to draw our attention to what he sees as his party’s central task: to fix our “broken society”. He referred to:

“the crime, the disorder, the drug addiction, the alcohol abuse, the family breakdown, the entrenched poverty, the educational failure, the sink estates, all those things that make life for too many in Britain, far too grim”.

In fact, David Cameron is so sure we need to get this message, he’s made it his personal Unique Selling Point; something to set apart the Tories from Labour in the run up to the Election.

So how would he fix David Cameron’s “broken society”? Well, there are four areas he wants to tackle urgently: fixing the criminal justice system; school reform; strengthening families; and stimulating social action in our communities. He argues that four in ten children leave primary school unable to read, write and add up properly.

Hold on though: we all know there are huge challenges in education but why doesn’t he recognise genuine success? Ten years ago just 35% of children left school with five good GCSEs including English and Maths. Now it’s 48.9%. The last thing we need are detractors doing down the achievements of our children, parents and teachers.

He also wants to give headteachers greater powers. I’m a school governor so I’ll go with that and I’m sure my head would, too.

Just a minute though: cast your mind back to 1979 to 1997, a time of Tory governance in which market principles were advanced at the same time as central authority was strengthened. Never was more power taken away from local people and centralised: abolition of the GLC, compulsory competitive tendering and the poll tax. Not exactly a track record of devolution to be proud about.

But is society really broken? The argument is just too simplistic a statement: it pays no attention to the complexities of the world we live in; it ignores the fact that we are healthier and live longer than ever, and that we have access to incredible technology and understand the human mind, nature and sciences as never before.

Yet at the same time, depending on where we find ourselves on the social scale, our lives can be blighted by poverty. In 1942, Beveridge famously outlined the abolition of five great giants: want, ignorance, disease, squalor and idleness. The subsequent Attlee Government between 1945 and 1951 – despite a war-ruined economy – set about a systematic assault on each of these giants.

We are now faced by new unprecedented giants in the wake of the worst financial crisis for more than half a century. But David Cameron is a million miles away from offering a vision containing anything of similar substance.