In Saturday’s post, the Sage highlighted David Cameron’s apparent ruthlessness in his plans for dealing with the louts and gangs that terrorised London’s streets this time last week.
Coming on a Friday night, the comments went largely unchallenged over the weekend. Today, as the prime ministerial rhetoric continued, the backlash began.
Potentially the most damaging divide for David Cameron is within the coalition itself.
Ranged on one side are some hard-line Conservatives, who see this as an opportunity to impose their tough love upon members of the state-dependent underclass – on whom they believe previous governments have been too soft.
Fighting to keep them in check are the Liberal Democrats, who fear the removal of morally-justified state cushioning without which the cycle of crime could become even more vicious.
It’s a powerful argument but one that is only currently happening at the fringes of the two parties. However, as a reflection of the coalition partners’ default attitude to the problems of society and how to deal with them, it threatens to turn into another split along lines of both policy and principle within the government – especially when Parliament returns next month.
Equally intriguing, though, are the relative positions staked out by Cameron and Ed Miliband. The former, not exactly known for interventionism, has been lecturing about the powerful messages that government can send to those it represents, and the responsibility it thus has to ensure that the example it sets and incentives it offers are positive ones.
Miliband, meanwhile, has attempted to spread the blame as widely and thinly as possible, talking of a broad collective responsibility for the society we not only live in but which we all help to shape. (It would be cynical of me to suspect that this argument is a tool to deflect attention from the failures of the government he served – cynical, but not necessarily wrong).
And so the two main leaders have temporarily switched their ideological positions. But while Miliband struggled to find traction in his meandering speech today, one sensed that Cameron saw recent events as vindication of the ‘broken society’ theme that defined much of his time in opposition but which failed to convince many observers or much of the electorate.
The Prime Minister therefore occupies something of a moral high ground – this clearly empowers him, but also increases the pressure to deliver one of his key messages.
It looks like he may find more consensus across the despatch box than on his own benches.
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