No great political point to this. Just I was really struck by the visual similarity of the Labour and UKIP election broadcasts. The messages are completely different of course, but the style is almost exactly the same.

Turn the sound off, start the two videos together, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a soft palette parade of a sympathetic Britain, all gently panning and zooming in and out their homes and farms and parks and beaches and supermarkets and restaurants, before the Leader looks us in square in the eye to explain what it all means.

Oh, and apparently nobody in Britain works in an office, or uses a computer. For anything.

There are some differences: UKIP have a lot more men, Labour uses a faster technique of cutting between phrases, rather have the real people speak to camera, and obviously we get a lot more of Ed Miliband than we do of Nigel Farage. Oh, and Labour don’t have a conservatory woman.

Actually, the two missed a trick. I sort of felt UKIP should have avoided the Taxi driver, while Labour probably needed one.

It’s clear the Tories are setting Labour a fiscal baseline trap. Labour seems to be debating which is the best way to jump in. I argue that the traps fatal flaw is that it stinks to high heaven, and so a much better approach is to high-mindedly push the Tories in.

(In the spirit this being a family blog, this is the clean version. How dull of me)

This morning’s Independent carried a report from Andrew Grice saying that Labour were preparing to “bet the house” on a pledge to spend more than the Tories after the next election. The story was hung on the work of the Fabian future spending choices commission and suggested that Labour’s top team had effectively accepted the argument made by those involved that limiting Labour to an acceptance of the Conservative’s spending baseline would be a political and economic mistake.

I’ve been tending to my day job, but as soon as I saw this, I thought “this story won’t be allowed to stand until lunchtime.”.

It took less time than that, with Ed Balls issuing a strong dismissal of the story on LBC, saying

“no that is not our policy that is not our position. And it would be totally irresponsible… …look, it may have been that somebody has spoken to Andy Grice, but not anybody to do with me or Ed Miliband that I know”

Whatever the truth of who briefed this particular story, It’s pretty clear that on both the left and right of the party, there’s  pressure on the Leadership to set out its likely future agenda.

(more…)

David Cameron’s ungainly attempt to declare the ideological victory of Thatcherism on the Today programme has produced the expected, and probably intended, irritation on the left.

I suspect that the Tories quite like it when the left and Labour party behaves in a way that is rather ungracious. It produces a sort of agreeable disgust, an assurance that the advocates for the rabble are aping the manners of the rabble, another reason to keep power in the hands of the Optimates.

Or perhaps I’ve just been reading too  much Cicero recently.

Anyway, to get back to the point, are we all Thatcherites now?

I grew up defining myself  against Margaret Thatcher.

In a hugely embarrassing interview with Radio 4 for a fantastic show about the Wyatt/Costello classic Shipbuilding.¹ I recently described myself as a teenager who got a New Statesman subscription for a birthday present, and was delighted.

I was a primary schoolboy who listened to the 1983 General Election in bed and got up to stare at the street lights of my home city in utter disbelief, and who, as I grew a little older, went on Youth CND marches. I missed my Geography GCSE because I was leafleting for the Labour party in the European Election.

I even remember having an outraged conversation with my dad when he tried to convince me that pre-privatisation British Telecom was a bit rubbish, and how he hated having to wait months for a phone line. I think I might have called him a fascist. Certainly, I felt he was a class traitor, especially because we’d done homemade anti-Thatcher posters for the 1983 election, complete with “Choose Foot, Kick Thatcher out” puns.

Oh, and I was hugely jealous of my french teacher, who got Red Wedge tickets, when I couldn’t go.

Naturally, I’ve got every Billy Bragg album, though my favourite song was, and is, the Saturday Boy, with the Boy Done Good as a sort of spiritual sequel, from an older, happier man.

Culturally, ideologically, politically, I grew up as an Anti-Thatcherite.

23 years later, so am I a Thatcherite now?

I certainly don’t define myself as against Thatcher any more. It’s why I’ve found the anti-Thatcher brigade tiresome this last week. I bought Costello’s Spike when it came out, and played Tramp the Dirt Down hundreds of times. But Spike came out when I was sixteen, and “Baby plays around” is a better song anyway.

What’s more, there are some things where Margaret Thatcher was clearly right and my teenage self was wrong. Soviet communism is probably the biggest one. I didn’t really understand Trade Unions growing up, but I think she was pretty much right about the need for secret ballots for strike action, and ending the closed shop. I think she was right about the Single European Market, and Sunday trading.

On many other issues though, she seems a figure from a distant, much less pleasant past. Her attitude to South Africa was wrong, as even if there was a case for engagement with the National Party not isolation, it should not have been made by post-imperial Britain. Her policies on gay rights were archaic and divisive. Her 79-82 economic policy was a needless self-inflicted injury. Mass unemployment should never have been acceptable.

Finally, there is the pervasive feeling that while in some sense needed, much of what she did, and the way that she did it, did not need to be so harsh.

That such harshness appeared to be the only way to make reforms says much about the failure of the left, which was as juvenile and embarrassing as I was back then, but with far less excuse. We were all so busy being against Thatcher, we forgot to decide what we were for, or how on earth we were going to make it happen.²

If we, as socialists, couldn’t address the social problems that Thatcher’s critique of Britain were intended to address (like my father, on the left, but wanting a telephone installed quickly) or even recognise that they were problems, what alternative could we provide?

None, it turned out, and it took us a long, painful time to learn that lesson.

Imagine a Kinnock government in 1987. Would it have been a success?

I don’t think it would, even though there would have been no Poll tax. At the very best, Kinnock would have been a Mitterrand, forced to adapt to tides pulling in the opposite direction. We would have had out own version of a ‘Turn to Rigour“. A “New” Labour would have been uncomfortably born in government, not in opposition. In 1992, it would have been better, but mostly thorough inaction, rather than following the Tory attempt to extend the Thatcher revolution into ever more uncomfortable policy spaces.

In some sense then, I am a Thatcherite. I feel no pull to the seventies.³ I don’t desire a society where much of industry is in state hands, or most utilities (except in unambiguous cases of regulatory and private failure). Nor do I want marginal tax rates to reach the levels they did, or a reversion to the industrial relations culture of the time. It wouldn’t work, anyway. The industrial base of Britain has changed too much. So has the global economy.

But while I prefer the more open, trading, economy Britain has now to a centrally planned or corporate one, though I believe there’s room for a strategic, enabling state that Thatcher missed, or undervalued, or lost in her wider argument about “withdrawal”. The state needed to withdraw, but there were some key salients that should have been held, and weren’t.

I’d have rather had a left government that understood how the world was changing, and changed with the grain of society, not against it. I’d have preferred an employment and industrial policy that did more so smooth the transition from corporate to enabling state.

We could have introduced rights to protect workers from exploitation at the same time as we changed Union roles, rather than a decade or so later.

We should have used Oil money better to invest for our future, and used receipts from council housing sales to fund more social housing building. There should never have been a poll tax, (though to be fair, local government funding is still a mess, two and a half decades later and no-one has a clue what to do about it)

There was much that was done wrong, as there always is.

A change in Britain in the eighties was probably inevitable. It could have been a better, fairer, kinder shift than Thatcher gave us, but I was too busy being a teenager to think about how the left might do something as awkward, and complex and imperfect as that.

Unfortunately, so were the grown ups. Because of that, it is Thatcher’s inheritance we struggle with, not our own.

To the extent that we are all Thatcherites now, it is our own fault. If we’d been smarter, we might have been Healeyites.

But we weren’t.

1. You can hear Wyatt’s “Stalin wasn’t Stalling” here, if you want an object lesson in the risks of agitprop music to counterbalance the beauty and grace of Shipbuilding [↩]
2. This critique doesn’t apply to the far left. They knew what they were for, but they were wrong, and couldn’t make it happen anyway, which is why the defining characteristic of far left in power was barely suppressed chaos as disaster after disaster mounted [↩]
3. Who else remembers the old student call for a return to 79 level of grants? [↩]

Honestly, I don’t mean to bang on about bloody Tony Blair. It’s just I saw this over coffee this morning and I thought it was interesting.  Hey ho.

Tony Blair’s view that he would have given David Cameron a closer race than Gordon Brown at the 2010 election led to a few raised eyebrows the other week.

Some questioned, reasonably enough, whether such a scenario was even plausible, while others, like Henry Manson at Political Betting, questioned whether Blair was really likely to be more popular than Brown.

Well, yesterday’s YouGov poll gives us an intriguing hint. It asks voters whether various former Prime Ministers were good or bad PMs. Intriguingly, it breaks this out by their 2010 voting habits, so we can see what 2010 voters of different parties think((note, I’ve edited this post, because it occurred to me that my original use of tenses was wrong: I’d said that people “thought” Brown and Blair were good and back, but of course they’re being asked now, so it’s whatthey currently think. It may have changed between the last election and today, so I’ve changed my tenses accordingly!)) of Blair and Brown.

The results are below:

We can see that Blair scored well among 2010 Labour voters, perhaps unsurprisingly, while a reasonable segment, 16%, of 2010 Tory voters think Blair was a good PM, with just 2% of 2010 Tories saying the same about Brown.

Perhaps the most surprising bit of data relates to 2010 Lib Dem voters.

Among many analysts, the assumption is that 2010 Lib Dem voters are broadly hostile to Blair, thanks to issues like Iraq, civil liberties and so on. Many may well have been, but the data suggests that 2010 Lib Dem voters are almost equally divided on Blair with a third thinking him a good PM, a third a bad PM and a third “average”.

For Brown, on the other hand, only 8% of LibDem voters think he was a good PM, while 58% thought he was a bad PM.  Even among Labour voters, Brown is rated poorly, with 37% saying he was a bad PM, indicating perhaps he was a drag on Labour support.

Now, we’ve got to be careful about such data.

After all, we don’t know how Tony Blair’s reputation would have suffered during an economic crash. It’s quite possible that voters merely look back fondly at the Blair era as a boom time, and his ratings would be quite different if he had been PM during the crash, as Brown was, and it’s certainly true that we don’t know how fratricidal Labour under Blair would have been 2007-10 (Could we have been even more internally focused, weak and divided than we were? It’s amazing to think it’s even possible, but it is!).

That said, this data does suggest that many more Labour voters rate Blair highly than do Brown, while an electorally significant minority of both Tory and Lib Dem voters think Tony Blair was a ‘good” PM and Gordon Brown was not.

Would these voters have moved if Blair had been Labour’s leader? Obviously it’s impossible to say, there are far too many other variables. But this data suggests that all else being equal, Blair might indeed have been able to make a more convincing argument to some 2010 Tory and LD voters than his successor was able to do.

I shall reflect upon Tony Blair’s contribution to the New Statesman later, but right now I just want to express my deep outrage that the bugger has stolen my argument. Lock stock and barrel.

Look, a chap puts in a lot of effort building a reputation as a hard-nosed, fiscally realistic social democrat, interested in concrete, deliverable policy solutions not the childish anger of protest politics or the grand insubstantialities of the soft left (or being a desiccated calculated machine with no sense of ambition or hope, delete as suits).

This takes time. You have to write articles like this, and this and this and this and this You have to spend time arguing people on the internet. You even *shudder* have to reply to comments on the Guardian. It’s hard, grinding work, and everyone looks at you funny and edges away from you at parties.

But then bloody Tony Blair comes along, says exactly the same stuff, and everyone’s all “ooh, Tony Blair, he’s issued a coded rebuke”, and “ooh, Tony Blair, we’re moving on in our own way” and ooh, Tony Blair has identified a new way forward for the centre left”;.

Well sod you, Tony Blair. Being a post crash left-wing deficit hawk, a zero based spending review guy, a solutions focused pragmatist who rejects the soft comforts of angry rhetoric for the hard politics of practical solutions was my idea, and you can’t have it.

Listen, if anyone’s going to be lambasted as cold, soulless  traitor to the Labour movement, it’s going to be me. You’ve had your turn.

Now clear off,  and leave me to the vital work being utterly ignored by the party machine until things go wrong.

I’ve long been a keen observer of North Korea, as a rare example of contemporary tyranny¹.

I’ve developed a few rules about reading North Korea. My first rule excludes as an idiot anyone who suffers from “Pyongyang syndrome”: I define this as seeking any possible reason to praise North Korea, from the clean streets of Pyongyang to the People’s Republic unusual freedom from advertising, while being harshly critical of any ally of the United States of America (Usually, but not always, Israel).

George Galloway is a typical exponent of this sort of nonsense. It tells you all you need to know about Mr Galloway that he is willing to visit North Korea and be paid by Iranian state media, but will not even share a room with an Israeli.

Galloway has Pyongyang syndrome in its most virulent form, so is easily dismissed, but others have milder versions, where it is argued that the Pyongyang regime may be vile and authoritarian, but the only way forward is through understanding, engagement and diplomacy with this, too often misunderstood, nation.

This is a milder form, because naturally, there is some value in engaging with North Korea, it is just simply that the question is engage about what, and on what terms, and at what price. Engaging with a totalitarian dictatorship does not come without cost. Even dialogue sends a signal.

Another variant is the isolation paradox, which holds that due to North Korea’s isolation, it is the inability of outside forces to prevent North Korean atrocities that is the problem and that it is here that blame and disgust should be directed. This is like blaming the police for not stopping a siege. It’s right to look at any failures, but it sort of misses the point.

The next rule follows from this: that there are no good options. Every possible choice is plagued by problems. China’s worries about a regime collapse are real. The South Korea and the West’s fears of sustained aggression and terrorism are real. The suffering of the Korean people are real. All of these risks must be balanced against each other, an the least damaging route selected.

Of course, the question that arises is least damaging to whom.

The final rule about North Korea is that enunciated  by William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything“. The behaviour and relationships of those at the top of the regime are opaque. The tensions and inter-relationships between Army, Government and Civil society (such as the latter exists).

Those who leave North Korea, even from senior positions, like Hwang- Jang Yop, can only give us a gauzy, mysterious view of the motivations of the North Korean regime, where major events can be interpreted through internal politics. What’s more, how it must affect the views of all those who depart North Korea to know that their entire family will be held accountable for their behaviour, being shipped to Labour camps.

Having an amateur interest in North Korea is much like studying Ancient Greece or Rome, where you have to pay as much attention to funerary inscriptions and pottery shards as the great speeches if you want to know what was going on.

When considering today’s rhetoric, it’s important to remember that Kim Jong Il regularly used external rhetoric to both manage internal crisis and difficulties (such as the famine) and to seek some external advantage. What North Koreas seeks now is unclear.

So as a small counterweight to the many worrying stories about North Korea, here are some reasons why things might not be as bad as they seem, at least for those of us who are unaffected by the misery of living in a totalitarian police state, and are only threatened when internal suffering creates external instability.

First, the new North Korean Prime Minister, Pak-Pong-Ju, is reputedly to be close to Jang Sung-Taek and has a reputation as an economic reformer, with a focus on allowing markets to operate internally.

Second, reports from inside North Korea suggest that in advance of the farming season, much of the North Korean military reserve has returned to food production and farming, while internal propaganda posters focus on economic issues, not military ones.

Third, while North Korean rhetoric in the last months has been disturbing (to put it mildly!), it is, in context, relatively calm.

After all, this is a country that has regularly attempted assassination of foreign Heads of state, kidnapped civilians, blown up planes, and (allegedly) sunk South Korean Navy ships. In that context, talking aggressively might actually be seen as a step forward. Further, even some of the rhetoric isn’t new.

As the Daily NK website argues:

“No matter what the North Korean media may say about simultaneously developing weapons and the economy, the so-called ‘byungjin line’, the country has chosen a path of regime maintenance through asymmetrical warfare across three spheres: missile launches, nuclear tests and cyber warfare.

It is a realistic approach for them, one that allows for displays of strength without inciting armed conflict as outright physical provocations are now bound to do. The Kim Jong Eun regime needs to expand the leader’s power base, and has concluded that the only effective way to do so in safety is through these means.”

If we make the basic assumption that the core regime aim is self preservation, at any cost and that they will be rational in pursuing that aim, it requires the regime to appear all-powerful internally, secure protection from external intervention, while making internal economic changes that would otherwise be seen as a recognition of weakness and open the regime up to internal threats and dissent in the short term while securing their long term future.

As one North Korean defector says “when I would see news about the rocket and missile launches, I always thought, “our technicians have done a great job and no powerful country can do anything to us because we have the newest and greatest weapons”. Yes, I believed the rocket and satellite made my country more powerful.”

It is certainly possible that North Korea’s objectives are to use aggressive rhetoric, nuclear tests and cyberwarfare to gain concessions and ‘space’ from the international community, while doing nothing that would actually invite a military response or endanger food aid.

It might also be  that this apparently aggressive attitude is part of an internal debate which also involves an economic opening up and a focus on the material standards of North Koreans (who must be increasingly aware of the gulf in living standards between North Korea and China, black markets being excellent transmittors of information, as well as of goods) and so represent a danger to the regime as expectations and communication networks increase.

In other words, the aggressive rhetoric might provide the sort of ‘cover’ the new regime both needs to stabilise control over the machinery of Government and manage whatever economic reforms they deem acceptable.

Unfortunately, this is where the good news stops.

North Korea expert Andrei Lankov argues that the strategic aim of the North Korean regime is “to die peacefully in their beds”. He also argues that the only regime to have voluntarily given up a nuclear weapons programme, Libya, is now no longer in existence.

This implies that nuclear weapons become a strategic necessity for North Korea.

If this is achieved, then two things follow. First, North Korea’s room for physical provocation becomes greater, as the dangers of a confrontation spiral become significantly greater for the international community, but remain the same for the regime (destruction).

Perhaps even more seriously, a nuclear North Korea might be able to sustain its oppression for much longer, because the heads of the regime dying in their beds mean many thousands dying in Labour camps. A nuclear North Korea will both be feared abroad and appear more powerful at home.

In such a case, sustained oppression might well prove an acceptable price for quietude.

This is the issue we really face.

If the best news we can think of is that the suffering of the North Korean people continues, only does not extend beyond the border of North Korea, in what sense is this even good news at all?

1. I even did a brief reading list here [↩]

“It seems to have been the heritage of Westminster, by the force of custom, after the institution of the Sanctuary and the formation of its ‘Thieves’ Lane,’ to become the shelter and resort of lawless characters, who find a fitting home in the dirty, narrow, uncleansed streets,- its miserable, undrained, dilapidated courts and alleys, reproduced and rebuilt time after time with the determinate purpose of receiving only the degraded and outcast of the population”

From “The Rookeries of London”.

When you enter the palace of Westminster by St Stephen’s entrance there a map on your left hand side, which imposes the “New Palace” onto the streets and buildings of the pre-1834 fire old palace of Westminster.

I was looking at this map with my sister, who was visiting London this week, when we noticed that three buildings in the old palace were labelled “Heaven”, “Hell” and “Purgatory”. It turns out they were taverns, and fairly rough taverns at that with the latter two based in former prisons. Apparently Pepys used to frequent Heaven, though. There was also a street marvelously called “Dirty Lane”, which is where Abingdon Street is now.I think “getting to parliament via Dirty Lane” should be some sort of code.

Anyway, I didn’t know anything about these places, so I thought I’d have a look to find out more, and I came up with this wonderful quote, which is surely designed to snugly fit into some searing article against the corrupting influence of Westminster.

I worked for the Labour party when Gordon Brown used the case of Whitley Bay schoolgirl Laura Spence to attack Oxford’s admissions system.

To Labour supporters like me, Gordon Brown was using the example of Laura Spence to put a human face on the important issue of widening access to Higher Education. To his critics, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was distorting an individual case in order to score a political point against a politically convenient opponent (An ‘elitist’ Oxford College).

At the time, Brown’s advisers, leftish journalists, and Labour MPs all defended the Chancellor for using an individual case to highlight an important national issue, while Conservative politicians and commentators said that the Chancellor had demeaned his office by seeking to create a political row over an individual case, which was far more complex than he suggested.

Fast forward 13 years (how depressing!) and we find a Chancellor using a newsworthy individual case to highlight an issue he regards as significant.

This time Conservative MPs and commentators are defending the Chancellor for using a newsworthy case to raise an important issue, while the former advisers to the previous Chancellor, Labour MPs and Left wing commentators are criticising the Chancellor has demeaned his office by distorting the details of an individual case to make a cheap political point against a politically convenient target.

So it goes.

The deaths of six children in a fire. This is where the Philpott story ends and begins. In death, in misery, in heartbreak.

It’s not the only such story. Christopher Foster shot his wife and child, then set a fire and died too. Search the internet, and you find a small stream of such horrors. An American man burns down his house and kills his children to collect their life insurance.   Another American man kills himself and his children in an explosion, while a suspect in the investigation of the disappearance of his wife, and again, life insurance may be a factor.

Such tragedies remind us to focus on the horror first, before seeking to spread culpability. Is capitalism to blame for the death of Jill and Kirstie Foster? Were insurance companies responsible for the death of Allen Jeffrey and Joseph Wand? Was the Mormonism of Josh Powell a cause for the death of his children? The offensive idiocy of these questions tells us all we need to know about any debate about whether “Welfare” was responsible for the deaths of six children in a fire, set deliberately.

To generalise from such an act and draw conclusions about a moral and social system is both idiotic and offensive, and that some politicians and newspapers have chosen to degrade the essential tragedy of the Philpott children’s death in a fire set by their father with observations about the welfare state has produced a furious response from those who love and seek to defend the welfare state.

Yet to leave a horror there, as the act of a man with “no moral compass”, as Mrs Justice Thirlwell rightly described Michael Philpott, also seems insufficient. Doubly so when a debate about welfare obscures the tragedy itself.

If any explanation of use is to be found, it is on the particulars of the horror that we should focus our attention, however painful it seems.

It might feel easier, or more politically convenient to use divert ourselves from this family, to generalise instead about a political concern, one that seems tangentially related to the horror, but it is a mistake to have such a debate, not least because it allows us the slip to the comfortable embrace of our pre-existing certainties.

The pain of each tragedy demands of us, that we at least focus on that family, on that situation, on the deaths of six children in a fire, set deliberately, by their father.

If we do this, what we will find will be uncomfortable, whatever your ideology or temperament. How could it be otherwise?

How did a man with a conviction for repeatedly stabbing his partner and her mother, who had recently cautioned for beating his wife, who was facing a court case for a violent road rage attack, whose partner had recently left him and who was trying to manipulate the police into arresting her face, so far as we know, no family intervention, so long as the children went to school and did not appear mistreated? It is not as if the control, violence and obsessiveness that marked Michael Philpott’s relationship with women were hidden from society. They were displayed in plain sight, on national TV, his record known in newspapers, and yet we, collectively, did little but stare and sneer.

These are huge failings.

They are a failing of our welfare and social systems, of our compassion and concern for women who were in such a position that Michael Philpott, a violent and abusive egotist, seemed like a preferable option to their previous lives and obvious alternatives.

They are a failing of our criminal justice and social work systems, that such a case did not result in a concerted attempt to understand the dynamics of this family, and how it came to be so abusive and bizarre. There is much for those who regard the state as the final safety net for the vulnerable to concern themselves with here. The safety net manifestly failed with the deaths of six children in a house fire, set deliberately, by their father, a violent and abusive man.

So when those on the political right say that we must look beyond the moral culpability of Michael Philpott for his own actions, look towards something larger than his evil, search for a wider culpability if we are to prevent such horrors, they have a real point. Yet when we examine the lives of that family, it is a to a welfare, justice and social culture that stands by during abuse, during violence, during manipulation and deceit that should first draw our attention.

The welfare state is no more responsible for Michael Philpott’s actions than the business problems of Christopher Foster were responsible for his murders. Yet that is not enough, not for anyone who believes that government should be a force for good in the lives of the vulnerable.

Should we examine our welfare system? Yes, but we should examine our police, social work, family intervention and domestic violence responses too.

The money intended by society to feed, house and clothe the Philpott children was apparently used by Michael Philpott as another instrument to enable his desired total control of his family, Did the state, however indirectly, thus enable his mania for control and limit the freedom and choices of his partners? Did it fail those children by not offering an alternative to his control? I don’t know, but it certainly seems worth asking.

Why did our welfare state not notice that Michael Philpott’s wife, partner and children were apparently used as his ‘chattels’? Why did his record of abuse not trigger concerns when he started making allegations about his partner? Why did there seem to be no link between prison records, recent arrests, welfare and housing budgets, family services and police?¹

What’s more, there’s every reason to look at our welfare policies again in the light of this horror. For example, what will be the impact of paying Universal Credit to a single account nominated by the couple be in abusive, controlling relationships²? Will the Universal Credit payment method and benefit cap make life harder for those who leave abusive homes and seek refuge?

Finally, there’s the ultimate question. How can we better prevent such abuses in the future, whether through intervention, probation, mandatory counselling and support for domestic violence cases? How are these managed and funded, and how good are they at their interventions? Would it be better to invest more in services like this, either as a complement too existing welfare spending, or even as part of a review of the our overall welfare budget. Why do intensive services for the vulnerable seem a low spending priority when so much is spent on child and housing benefit?

These are all important questions, but we reach them, not by generalising about a culture of welfare dependency, but by examining in unflinching detail all that we can about the dysfunctional life of a specific family that led them to the point that six children were killed in a fire, set deliberately, by their father, a violent and abusive man, who manipulated and controlled those around him.

Not every problem has a solution, not every solution works, and any solution will be imperfect and partial. However, the chances of finding a better solution are greater if we conduct an unflinching autopsy of a tragedy, rather than distracting ourselves in trading insults about welfare systems.

Six children died in a fire, set deliberately, by their father, a violent and abusive man, who manipulated and controlled those around him, helped by their mother, and we did not prevent it.

1. I confess, at this point that I am going solely by the media reports. I don’t know what might have been happening behind the scenes [↩]
2. the regulations suggest that UC payments will be split only in exceptional domestic violence cases where the couple choose to remain together. I have no idea how this would work in abusive, controlling relationships [↩]

Politicians and journalists make dreadful moralisers.

When Tony Blair highlighted the tragic death of James Bulger at the hands of child murderers to make the case that British society was becoming unworthy of the name, he was both wrong and foolish.

He was wrong because, as he later said, the tragedy demonstrated no such thing. Child murderers were no new post Thatcherite phenomena, nor was the horror of that single, awful murder a sign of a decaying society. Look at stories of Victorian baby farms, if you want evidence of utter moral decrepitude.

Blair was also foolish, because the moral power and genuine passion of his case had negative policy consequences, as he later admitted.

The same goes a dozen times over for John Major, who declared that we should “condemn a little more, understand a little less“, a slogan of such powerfully depressing populist stupidity that it has become the unheralded rallying cry of the rising profession of media idiots of both left and right.

And so we come to the Daily Mail, who have reacted with a kind of giddy glee to this tragedy.

It is depressing, and demeaning and obviously untrue to argue that it is the Welfare State that causes a man to father seventeen children, have multiple partners, and to tragically cause their death in a house fire set for personal gain. Would such a crime have been possible without a welfare state? Of course. You only have to look at a Hogarth etching, or read the case of Amelia Dyer to realise that our forebears were sharply aware of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity.

Look into such horrors, and you see so many possible social causes for sallow cruelty that the crime itself can be obscured. Is it misogyny that makes a man treat his partners as these women were? ? Is it indifference to family parameters to father so many children? Is it a neglectful society that gawps dumbly at such a man for entertainment?  Hogarth thought it was want of industry, or a streak of cruelty. The Victorians reacted with disgust, executed the sinners and legislated,  ineffectively at first, then increasingly effectively, in order to protect the life of the unwanted child. Perhaps this was the true beginning of the “nanny State.”?

However, they did not think to address the ultimate cause, the social and financial cost of being the unwed mother of an illegitimate baby. That took many more generations.

Yet for all the contempt I have for the easy morality of the Mail, I find the lefts reaction almost equally depressing. Yes, railing against the Mail’s coverage is worthy, but even if we should not blame the “Welfare state” for this tragedy, the deaths of those six children are a stark reminder of other failures in our society.

This family was dysfunctional, its patriarch abusive and violent, and the response of the state to this seemed to be to do little, or close to little, other than ensure that the family could feed, and clothe and house its children, and ensure they attended school.

At the same time, the reaction of our media was to use the family as a sort of shorthand symbol of fecklessness, seemingly indifferent to, or uncaring about, any pain and suffering that might have led young women to regard Mick Philpott’s home as a better alternative to what they had endured before.

I don’t know precisely how Britain failed the six children who died in Derby that night. But fail them we did, and in families across Britain, we are probably still failing them today.

Our reaction to such horror must surely be a belief that we must change our society, probably in a way which is complex, imperfect and gradual, perhaps something involving an understanding of the lives of vulnerable young women, and the motivations of controlling, parasitic, insecure men, and possible solutions for both.

If we don’t feel that something must change, then whatever our reason for sharing a sense of moral superiority today,  Whether it is a condemnatory superiority over the” feckless”, or our righteous condemnations of the haters of the feckless, then we will have learnt nothing, achieved nothing, changed nothing.

Condemn a little more? We certainly do that in spades.

Understand a little less? We still seem to be doing that.

Please, can we change course, at least in this one small thing. It would perhaps be a small beginning.