David Cameron delivered an excellent speech on social justice earlier this week which received next to no media coverage. In it he set out some very interesting and potentially far-reaching ideas which pressed many of the right buttons. Thus he criticised the

top-down, centralised approach

to the delivery of public services, and saw no limits to what the

voluntary sector, social enterprises and community groups can do

to alleviate poverty and spring people from disadvantage. But does he mean it? He has, after all, just committed himself to the Treasury-funded and therefore inevitably top-down model for health and education. He also said:

More and more evidence shows that family breakdown causes poverty and poverty causes family breakdown. Our prisons are full of people whose homes broke up and they ended up in care. The problems of substance abuse and poor educational achievement are rooted in the fact they never knew the constant love of a parent.

I have said that the tax and benefits system should encourage families to come together and stay together, and to support marriage. I invite this group to examine how that might best be done. I also hope the working group will examine the potential of relationship education in preventing family breakdown. No couple starts a relationship wanting it to fail. But many need help.

The average taxpayer now contributes at least £570 every year to the direct costs of family breakdown, but only 21p is spent on trying to save troubled relationships. Paltry sums are invested in helping couples build healthy relationships in the first place…Everyone should be given the best opportunities to form stable, healthy relationships and, especially where children are planned, to develop happy, healthy marriages.

But does he mean it? Or will this eventually translate into talking up both marriage and anti-marriage simultaneously under the rubric of ‘relationships’ and ‘lifestyle choice’?

Because if he really means all this, a lot of people who he has encouraged to believe that he is lining the Tories up instead with socially suicidal libertinism are going to start jabbing fingers and crying foul. Real social justice means drawing moral lines in the sand, the very position he seems to be trying to persuade us the Tories have now abandoned. But if he doesn’t mean it, then Iain Duncan Smith, his Centre for Social Justice and all the voluntary groups who are daring to hope that maybe in David Cameron they have finally found a politician who will indeed start to move sclerotic, self-centred, amoral, fragmented Britain from welfare state to welfare society will have been taken for the mother and father of a ride.

Posted by melanie at January 20, 2006