Well, well, well. Who said “there are deep problems in our society that have been growing for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a growing sense that individual rights come before anything else”? Cameron. And where does he think the selfishness and fixation on individualism came from, if not from Thatcher who claimed society never really existed and made selfishness and greed the cardinal aims of life? Yet still he insists that the problem was “criminality, pure and simple” and obsesses about the “moral decline of Britain” as though society and economy were not the issue, only the misbehaviour of individuals.

Blair is equally muddle-headed when he puts the riots down to alienated, disaffected youth outside the social mainstream and argues there’s no social or moral decline, only a need for intense family intervention and dealing with anti-social behaviour and gangs, as though the social and economic structures he championed had nothing to do with creating the alienation and disaffection in the first place. Continue reading →