The Tory leader's brand of 'progressive conservatism' has not proved easy to explain, writes MARK HENNESSY
CONSERVATIVE LEADER David Cameron knows what he means by his "Big Society" idea, but he has struggled to explain it to British voters during the election campaign. Yesterday, former Eastendersactor Brooke Kinsella and Jonathan Bartley, a father fighting for the education he wants for his son, managed to do better.
Cameron had brought along Kinsella, whose 16-year-old brother Ben was knifed to death, to the Oasis Trust charity south London to put more flesh on his idea that governments cannot solve all problems and that people in local communities must work together to change daily life.
“Government is a big part of the problem – its size has now reached a point where it is actually making our social problems worse. By trying to do too much, it has drained the lifeblood of a strong society – personal and social responsibility. And the biggest victims are those at the bottom,” Mr Cameron said.
Cameron wants “social responsibility, not state control” to be the “principal driving force” for social progress, where people would be encouraged to solve their own problems, and required, by compulsion if necessary, to play their part.
Up to now, the idea has been too indistinct for voters to grasp, and regarded by many as a code for the Tories’ traditional hankering after a smaller state – where those who can, thrive and those who cannot are forgotten.
Dubbing his idea as “progressive conservatism”, he said it was progressive because it bids to create a more equal society, but conservative because it draws upon conservatism’s historic values of discipline, responsibility, respect for family and faith, and appreciates “the limitations of the state”.
However, when it came to drawing upon a past prime minister who espoused similar values Cameron quoted not a Conservative, but a Liberal, William Gladstone, who once said: “It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.”
Kinsella’s brother was murdered two years ago: “His death has completely destroyed my family. We have tried to understand it, why it happened, how his life was able to be taken so easily, and why it still happens,” she told the audience.
Just a few months before his death, her brother, whose killer later taunted the Kinsella family with Facebook messages from his prison, had written a piece for his English exams, imagining what it would be like to be killed by a knife, which the Conservative leader read out.
“Everything feels cold. Numbness persists. As I stare up at my killer-to-be he feels not the slightest measure of remorse at what he has just committed. Instead his dark smile sickens me in ways I couldn’t imagine,” he had written.
Since then, his sister has campaigned for action to stop the seemingly endless knife attacks in London that have claimed the lives of nine teenagers so far this year. People want education, rehabilitation and discipline for offenders, she said, and Cameron is the man to do it.
If the Conservatives are elected on May 6th, she will now head a team, Cameron said, that will decide how Home Office funding is directed towards the myriad of community groups working on estates “rather than bureaucrats in Whitehall”.
Outside Jonathan Bartley and his son Sam were waiting for Cameron. The family had been told to send the seven-year-old to a disabled school in Streatham by Lambeth council, rather than go with his sisters to a local primary.
Mr Bartley accused the Conservative leader of wanting to treat other disabled children in the same way because the party’s manifesto says that it would “end the bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools”.
“You talk about broken society – it nearly broke up our family getting my son in. His two sisters go there, it is our local school; we had to struggle for two years and in the end the secretary of state [Ed Balls] had to intervene. There is a bias against it and you’re saying there’s a bias for it,” Mr Bartley told Mr Cameron, as the television cameras milled around.
The Conservative leader claimed he was being misunderstood: “When my child was alive, we were absolutely desperate to find the right sort of education for him, and the local education authority didn’t even tell us about the availability of special schools and the reason was they said there was a current bias towards mainstream.”
The two men disagreed. Cameron left. He may want a more socially active British public, but it brings dangers for politicians.