He said:
We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification. Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more. Of course as soon as a politician says this there is a clamour - “but what about all of you?” And let me say now, yes, we are human, flawed and frequently screw up. Our relationships crack up, our marriages break down, we fail as parents and as citizens just like everyone else. But if the result of this is a stultifying silence about things that really matter, we re-double the failure. Refusing to use these words - right and wrong - means a denial of personal responsibility and the concept of a moral choice.
David Cameron (via anarchaia)
You want to know why we’ve seen a “decades-long erosion of responsibility” David? You couldn’t have a better recipe for rising crime and social decay than ripping the industrial heart out of a community and then leaving it to rot. This demented and wicked act, borne out of the Chicago School and the worship of Milton Friedman, has been repeated throughout the world and always with the same result.
In Glasgow, as with my own city of Sheffield, the resulting resentment of this disastrous encomium to capitalism was left to ferment for a couple of decades by a polity that has now fallen so far wide of reality that it is irrelevant to all but Nick Robinson et ses amis. The urban regeneration of Glasgow city centre in the 1990s never reached here and the concomitant social problems that always come whenever an entire community is thrown overboard spreads its tendrils far and wide. Boarded shops and broken windows; drug abuse and despair; alcohol and violent crime; life expectancy below that of a resident of the Gaza Strip; twenty Bensons and a scratchcard (“How will you feel if you win?”) and above all the feeling that the good times are happening somewhere else.
This is the reality for the residents of Glasgow East and from this fractured society come the feral, illiterate, innumerate children of those broken homes, who have seen what society served their parents and are now so filled with hatred and confusion and incomprehensible rage, that they wander the streets in gangs looking for something to fuck or fight.
This is the legacy his party bequeathed to Glasgow East from their last period in office, a legacy built upon by the New Labour project, seriously relaxed about the rich and pretty fucking comatose about the poor, whom they knew would have nowhere to go as the triangulation began to squeeze. And whilst they are not standing in Glasgow East, almost everywhere else come the fascists, knocking on doors, crowbarred into their suits, with undiagnosed colorectal problems causing a persistent itch, drawing from the same deep well of hatred as Cameron himself hoped to do just three years ago, when he penned one of the most sinister party manifestos of recent times.
No, I don’t need a lecture on self-discipline and respect from a bully. I don’t need a lecture on responsibility from somebody who had it handed to him on a plate. I don’t need a lecture on instant gratification from a political party whose entire ethos, as with that of the world from which it draws much of its funding, is predicated on us buying more and more of that which we do not need. I don’t need a lecture on morality from a fucking PR man. I don’t need a lecture on “fail[ing] to say what needs to be said” from a man who used immigrants as a punch bag when it suited him.
No, I don’t need a lecture from David Cameron.
This piece was also published at Liberal Conspiracy.