When Politics Gets In The Way of Reform

Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to fight the “the wrong-headed ideas, bureaucratic nonsense and destructive culture” that led to riots across England earlier this month. David Cameron said a sense of personal responsibility had been eroded over many years by a welfare system that reduces incentive to work and “the twisting and misrepresentation of human rights.”

“The former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair responded saying the “muddled-head analysis” of the riots risks producing the wrong policy prescriptions. He dismissed the argument that Britain is in the grip of a “moral decline,” saying that problems lie with individuals and communities rather than society as a whole.

Critics of the Cameron Conservative coalition government argue that they want to introduce policies to reverse the welfare system.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, a British journalist and author wrote:

"For the left, and for liberal papers like Guardian, the culprit was the Tory-led government and its “cuts,” the program of rigorous reduction in public spending in response to unprecedented public debt. But it’s hard to see what effect these cuts can really have made in the little more than 15 months since the coalition government took office under David Cameron.

A more telling (if not quite logical) response is the good old tu quoque: look who’s talking. How can the poor be condemned for looting household goods while bankers and financiers have been looting from the public on a far vaster scale than any teenage gangsta could dream of? This is a variant of Brecht’s “What is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of owning one?” and it must be admitted that in the age of AIG, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and Madoff, most of us have our Brechtian moments. And all of us here bridle when anyone is upbraided for greed and dishonesty by our Members of Parliament, who turn out to have been pilfering the taxpayer for years with their fraudulent expenses. "

The state has to punish those who break the law- whether they are looters on the street or greedy officials who robbed public finance or made money out of decisions which have had a profoundly damaging impact on innocent people.


The IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research, - the UK’s leading progressive thinktank gives an analysis of the ideological differences and outlines the case of the present coalition government's assault to cut the universal benefits and services.