Peace is the path to peace.

Via David Cameron: We can’t go on like this:

A decade of big government and blunt, bureaucratic control has undermined responsibility and made our social problems worse, not better.

We are determined to forge a new direction.

We will use the state to help remake society by encouraging people to take responsibility for themselves and for one another.

We will provide new opportunities for community groups, neighbourhood organisations, charities, social enterprises to help rebuild our civil society.

We will create incentives and use the best technology to encourage and enable people to come together, solve their problems together, make this society stronger together.

As we do this we will redistribute power from the political elite to the man and woman in the street.

Within months of a Conservative victory there would start the most radical decentralisation of power this country has seen for generations.

Government will enter a new era of transparency.

And a strong, unbroken line of democratic accountability will be restored between the people and those that make the decisions that affect their lives.

It is a future barely recognisable from the present, but this party is determined to take us there.

A Conservative Government will send the clearest possible signal to everyone in Britain…

…if you take responsibility, we will back you; if you aspire to a better life for you and your family, we will support you; if you play your part in building the big society, we will reward you.

I recommend the entire speech.

Via Labour has divided Britain into ‘two nations’ in poverty and crime, say Tories – Telegraph:

Britain has been divided by Labour into “two nations”, with deprived communities plagued by crime falling into “different worlds” from their wealthy neighbours, the Tories claim.

–

Gordon Brown has “let down the poor”, despite claiming that ending poverty was his defining purpose, Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, will say.

Mr Grayling will lead the Conservatives’ most aggressive raid so far on Labour’s core support, in a fresh campaign centring on fixing “Broken Britain”.

The election just can’t come soon enough.

Consider these news stories:

Pupils will no longer have to be taught the difference between “right and wrong” under draft plans put forward by England’s exams regulator.

via BBC NEWS | Education | ‘Right and wrong’ lessons to end.

Parents should avoid telling their children what is “right and wrong” when discussing sex education, according to a new government leaflet.

via Parents advised to stay away from ‘right or wrong’ in sex advice – Telegraph.

In the context of this moral relativism  and David Cameron’s determination to fix our broken society, Roche’s 1969 book “Education in America” is a fascinating insight into how education has come to fail to prepare individuals to choose freely within a fixed moral framework, to think and act for themselves. He explains, for example, that:

Traditionally, education has not been concerned so exclusively with the mere manipulation of the individual. The teacher found himself within a framework of values, within a situation faced in common by all men. To teach, therefore, did not mean to manipulate the young into some “socially acceptable” pattern. Instead, teaching meant sharing with the student the mystery of being human. Today’s scientistic approach promises to do away with the human condition entirely, putting its own goals and means in place of the individual human being and his feelings, aspirations, and qualifications. C.S. Lewis has predicted that such a change in our educational and social philosophy is a move toward “the abolition of man.”

Throughout history, many have understood that a good society requires both liberty and boundaries. Individuals need to be sufficiently educated to make responsible choices, but this is not our trajectory today: we deny standards of behaviour, of morality, of good and evil, and so deny the possibility of education in any meaningful sense.

A patron saint of the intellectual climate of twentieth century America was J. Allen Smith [...]. Smith, in a moment of reflection, apparently had misgivings about the course of events: “The trouble with us reformers is that we made reform a crusade against standards. Well, we smashed them all, and now neither we nor anyone else have anything left.” 

The experience of thousands of years of human history on which we stand is that this will not promote society’s healthy progress. It’s time to nurture responsibility, discipline and intellect: it’s time for change.

The more I learn about our broken society, the more heartbreaking the situation appears. We are not self-reliant pioneers conquering a new continent: we are the heirs to generations of ineffective government intervention. We have broken our society and the problem is growing:

[T]he size of the dysfunctional base in society is unacceptable and expanding, despite concerted and genuine efforts at local and national government level to reduce the numbers of those facing severe disadvantage. There is evidence that people in the dysfunctional base have their children earlier and faster than average, building up a massive social and financial problem unless it is addressed soon. Bruce Perry, Senior Fellow at the Child Trauma Institute in Houston, believes that US figures show the target group expanding from 10 per cent to 25 per cent of the population over four generations. If left unchecked, not only could we face a feral future on our streets but the public policy consequences will be massive and will come with a tax bill to bankrupt every taxpayer.

For those who are instinctively wary of intervention, or indeed, instinctively wary of the market, I thoroughly recommend the report Early Intervention from The Centre for Social Justice and the Smith Institute:

Our parents are the chief sculptors of our futures. As the academic Ray Arthur’s research found, ‘Children from deprived backgrounds who avoided a criminal record had tended to enjoy good parental care and supervision in a less crowded home. The statistical connection between socioeconomic status and children’s early offending behaviour was entirely mediated by family management practices.’ This is not a new conclusion: it emerged as far back as 1815 from the first public body to investigate youth offending, ‘The Committee for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis’. The Committee’s evidence was taken from interviews of children who were already imprisoned, and it concluded that among the main causes of juvenile offending in a rapidly expanding London were ‘the improper conduct of parents and the want of education’. The causes of crime were found to be firmly rooted in both the quality of care provided by the parents and in educational failure.

Believers in compulsion and the state; believers in freedom and responsibility: all have a generation of work ahead to secure a bright future for anyone and everyone. Better answers are emerging to our social problems and we must see them through.

If anyone still doubts whether British society is broken, they should read the reports of the Centre for Social Justice. When we consider family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness and addictions, the human and financial cost of decades of top-down bureaucratic control becomes heart-breaking. And let’s not forget that, these days, the poor pay tax to support the very services which fail them.

The sheer scale and quality of the work of the Centre shines through their reports and there can be no doubt that those on the centre right have the best interests of the poorest in our country close to their hearts. As Iain Duncan Smith writes:

Our interim report Breakdown Britain charted the extent of the problem in extensive detail. Britain tops the ‘league tables’ when it comes to spiraling levels of drug addiction, single parenting, poor education and debt. Many people told us that the quality of their communities had deteriorated, maintaining that the crime levels were much higher than those reported to the police. The recent rise in gang warfare, which resulted in a spate of teenage stabbings and shootings in our cities, is a savage illustration of the deep fractures in so many of our inner city communities. A recent UNICEF Report concluded that we have the lowest levels of child well being in Europe. A further report has shown how young people in Britain are more likely to be unemployed and out of education than in almost any other country in Europe.

IDS names some of the inspirational people who have personally set out to serve their fellows, and goes on:

These inspirational people showed me that things could be much better if politicians learnt from them ‘what worked’ and ‘what didn’t work’. Government action, though filled with good intentions, can often exacerbate existing problems or create new ones. I was reminded that communities need strong families to bind them together and that families were vulnerable to a society that no longer valued the institution of marriage. I was shown by them what happens when family life breaks down and when the only male role model for a boy is the drug dealer or the gang leader. I saw first hand how drug addiction is destroying families and how parental addiction is too often repeated by their children. Too many of our children are growing up in sad communities where failed education is hereditary and worklessness is a way of life.

And so the Centre sets out to provide practical policies to mend our broken society. Thankfully, the Conservatives are heading in this direction together. As David Cameron has said:

We know we have a shared responsibility; that we’re all in this together; that there is such a thing as society – it’s just not the same as the State.

But it is not just business which is suffering from Government intervention:

Gordon Brown on Tuesday set out a raft of measures designed to stop British society fracturing during the recession, ranging from curbs on immigration and a crackdown on benefit cheats to restrictions on betting and cheap alcohol, writes George Parker.

The prime minister believes an agenda of “fair rules in a fair society” will help reassure people the government is on their side, even as they start to lose their jobs and homes over the next 12 months.

read more | digg story

A Guardian journalist supports David Cameron:

A few months ago I might have disagreed with [Cameron]; I might have argued that he was quite simply scaremongering, that the country is at heart, just as Gordon Brown has said, basically “decent and compassionate”. But that was before this week. A week when three separate events showed the depths to which this society has finally sunk.

Again, I find I ask if it is time for a change of heart. Again, I find that this problem goes to the core of political debate.

Should we rely on an increase in state power to fix a society broken by a lack of responsibility and morality or is it the state that devours liberty, prosperity and virtue?

I reflect on what I have read, on the present seemingly boundless intervention of the state and on what my East European colleagues have told me about post-Communist societies, and I am determined that the state is the cause of this problem, not its solution.

The solution is individual people, en masse, deciding to take responsibility for restoring a civil society “of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values.” Hegel was wrong: state supervision has failed to maintain civility in society.

read more | digg story