Commentators drew parallels between David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher last week after the Conservative leader launched his party’s campaign for the Glasgow East by-election with a grandstanding speech about personal responsibility and the dangers of ‘moral neutrality’. Speaking in Glasgow’s Gallowgate district, notorious for drugs, unemployment and short life expectancy, Cameron pointed out that much of what goes wrong in people’s lives – obesity, drug and alcohol dependency – is self-inflicted.
It’s good that Cameron’s worrying about our social problems, but there’s still a lack of policies to back the rhetoric up, says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. Because if his party were really serious about teaching people the difference between right and wrong, it wouldn’t still be wedded to shadow chancellor George Osborne’s “ridiculous notion that Labour’s spending plans should be adhered to for the first four years of a Tory administration”. Will Labour’s profligacy be continued to “finance the very welfare state that his leader so rightly condemned in Glasgow”? That’s not fair, say Jonathan Oliver and Isabel Oakeshott in The Sunday Times – there is plenty of meat on the Tory party’s plans for what it will do in office. Chris Grayling, the work and pensions spokesman, is planning a system of ‘workfare’ that will make it tougher for the jobless to stay on the dole and George Osborne is hoping to restructure the tax system to reward parents who stay together.
After a decade of “big-brother government”, Cameron’s talk of personal responsibility was courageous and refreshing, says Anthony Browne in the Daily Mail. You can have “all the laws and punishments you like”, but teaching people right from wrong is far more effective. If the Government looks after your elderly parents or protects you from financial privation, you learn that you are not responsible for such things. Such a system “infantilises us all”. Teachers and parents must be emboldened to impress upon children that the right to benefits must be matched by the responsibility to do some work. Personal responsibility and shared morality are, of course, essential to a good society, says Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times. But “neither can be had just by whistling for them”. Both depend on an instinctive sense of a social contract. Morality isn’t just a matter of learning right from wrong, it depends on having something to lose. The argument – I respect your property and person because I want you to respect mine – carries no weight for those who have nothing whatsoever to gain by good behaviour. Sadly, there are many people in this country so neglected as children, or “led astray by delinquent parenting”, that they are “incapable of living an orderly life or holding down a job”.
Cameron should “be a bit careful about lecturing us”, says Jon Cruddas in The Sunday Mirror. He has no real experience of generational poverty or poor public services, of the “numbing effects of a chronic lack of social mobility and real opportunity”. The Tory view is that you fend for yourself and if you fall down, it’s sad, but it’s your fault. I believe we’re stronger when we work together. It’s the principle behind local community groups, trade unions and, “ultimately, it’s what the government is for too”.