Most social problems are caused by a lack of social conservatism. When normal, human institutions are replaced with militant individualism and the usual functions of individuals, family and community are replaced by government programmes, initiatives and diktats society inevitably crumbles.
To solve the problems of a crumbling society one must reapply the principles of social conservatism that one abandoned just prior to the creation of those problems. If one is reluctant to do such a thing then one must accept that the problems will arise in ever increasing numbers, their solution will prove increasingly intractable and so one’s measures for dealing with them will, by necessity, become increasingly draconian.
And when the forces of social depravity meet the anxieties of political desperation - with the depravity consistently having the whip-hand - the results are never going to be pretty. Tony Blair, highly tactical but deeply stupid, takes his eye off The War Against Terror (T.W.A.T.) and casts it, instead, on the appalling - but predicted - results of his own sub-human ideology. Unable to face up to the source of the problem - because he and his perverse political party is the source - he pretends the problems ‘just are’ and instead packages himself as the no-nonsense PM who will deal with them.
So Blair promises various measures to try to suppress the results of his failed social experiment but it’s the philosophy behind them, described in The Guardian, that reveals the man’s increasingly desperate need for these issues to just go away:
The prime minister confirmed yesterday that this “radical extension of summary police powers” will be hammered out in the next few weeks and published before the end of the year. It will put the rights of law-abiding people to live in safety before the need to protect the innocent from wrongful conviction if necessary.
But the innocent are the law-abiding. In this circular argument we are protecting the innocent from the crook but increasing his chances of being victimised by the state instead. Rewrite the above sentence like this and you’ll get my drift: It will put the rights of law-abiding people to live in safety before the need to protect the law-abiding from wrongful conviction if necessary.
“I will have meetings in the next few weeks on this issue. Whatever powers the police need to crack down on this, I will give them,” he said.
If the police are given a free hand to choose the rules by which they do their difficult - and, I imagine, sometimes intensely frustrating - job then they can hardly be blamed if they ignore the niceties of traditional British freedoms in favour of giving themselves a fighting chance of making an impression on the surge of anti-social behaviour coming their way.
Hence they have already barred a senior citizen from attending a conference discussion - for which he had a pass - by invoking the Terrorism Act.
Judges are concerned that an authoritarian policing system would conflict with New Labour’s other cherished ideological prize - human rights legislation:
Judges have already warned the Home Office that they are not happy with the idea of imposing restrictions on people’s liberty without a proper hearing. One district judge told Home Office researchers last year: “It would come under the human rights situation, wouldn’t it? Making orders without there being any evidence considered?”
In all likelihood, Blair has basically said ’stuff it’ to human rights on account of the fact that they are going to get in the way of his need to appear tough on crime. The lack of principle is breath-taking but, in its own perverse way, it makes sense. I have no reason to believe he wants a police state but his abject failures as a Prime Minister are pushing him towards one. His only alternatives to authoritarianism are unthinkable: admit that family is best and that its breakdown is one of the primary causes of our current woes or else just let the situation be.
When it’s put to him like that, a police state doesn’t seem quite so bad…
It always worry when I hear Conservatives talk about the family in this way. Close knit families are a product of a properly functioning society, not a cause. Families are breaking down because their function as the source of security and protection has been usurped by the welfare state. When Conservatives talk about promoting the family or family-friendly policies, they are usually talking about throwing money at the problem in the form of tax allowances or somesuch.
This will not solve the problem - as it did not solve it when the married couple’s allowance was in place.
To get close-knit families functioning again means reining in the welfare state. This is of course politically difficult, but until it happens society will continue to break down.
Comment by Bishop Hill — September 30, 2005 @ 1:19 pm
Tony Blair ASBO
Gary Monro rewrites Blair
Trackback by Rearranging the deckchairs — October 1, 2005 @ 9:48 am
Interesting observation Bishop Hill
Comment by AF — October 5, 2005 @ 1:01 pm
Mr Hill,
I have to say, I think it’s the other way round.
Families can’t be the result of society because they are society. What is society if it’s not the individuals, the families and the communities that constitute it?
The health of our society is the health of our families. A healthy society requires a more or less homogenous culture, adherence (more or less) to a set of accepted values, an understood - and shared - history and, most of all, married parents raising their own children into that society and passing to those children the values, rules and considerations the society shares. Such a society perpetuates itself altering gradually in response to a changing world.
One of the major drawbacks of large-scale immigration is that the cultural make-up of the towns and cities most settled by the myriad of incomers lose those cohesive features and instead take on a foreign - and hotch-potch - set of values that are not widely shared and not always able to co-exist peacefully. Immigrant families then pass down their own imported values to their children, reinforcing the cultural dysfunction.
I agree though that government can do little to promote family; the most it could do is acknowledge publicly that married family is the best environment in which to raise children - which is now a revolutionary thought, of course - and then ensure an advantage to the married state by favouring it in the tax system.
I have some small reservations with this because I think the government, once it gets its fingers into private lives, believes it has the right to be there and so expand its involvement. So I favour the government keeping the hell out of civil life. But the greater good is the promotion of family life so I’d say actively favouring it would be okay. (AKA discriminating against single parents to the liberal-left).
Comment by Gary Monro — October 5, 2005 @ 1:22 pm
“Such a society perpetuates itself altering gradually in response to a changing world.”
The evidence being that all such societies have vanished.
Also for the sake of clarity, when you wrote ‘own children’ in your previous comment, was that deliberate or just a figure of speech, i.e. did you really mean to exclude adoption?
Comment by Frank O'Dwyer — October 5, 2005 @ 9:37 pm