A look at ourselves
A couple of years ago I was standing in an airport check-in queue in the United States. A lady from Mexico, also en route to London, asked if I had been very polite to the rather bemused check-in attendant. “I believe English people are so polite and have wonderful manners” she enthused.
Well I hope she was not too unpleasantly surprised on her visit here. Whilst it is surely true that most people here are indeed polite, we have a terrible loutish, yobbish minority whose behaviour here or abroad is at times grotesque. Drunkenness and violence are now internationally recognised characteristics of contemporary British society.
The extreme manifestations of this is the knife and gun crime culture which takes such a tragic toll. This Government has sought to redistribute wealth to try to help people at the lower income scale. However alienation and feral behaviour has worsened. It is clear that money will not solve the problem, and endless new criminal justice legislation.
Iain Duncan Smith has tried to examine the causes of this through his Social Justice Commission. He has explored the darkest nooks and crannies of British life. It is not a pretty picture.
He has examined the causes and come up with some solutions which go well beyond simply deploying redistributive tax and welfare arrangements.
Family breakdown is at the heart of our social malaise, people trapped in welfare dependency, educational failure, increasing addiction and soaring personal debt – these are the root causes of anti-social and at times brutal behaviour.
For this we should be hugely grateful to him. It will be up to the next Conservative government to begin to reverse the destructive atomisation of our national life.
Iain is guest speaker at my constituency annual dinner tonight. It is a sell out. Everybody present will know that this has been a huge failure of this Government, and will be listening to him with great interest, admiration and concern.