David Cameron was wrong on ‘broken Britain’, and he’s wrong on the ‘social recession’.

Today David Cameron continued a theme he has long pushed, that Britain has a “broken society”. He claimed today, in a speech on family and social policy that Labour have lead Britain into a ‘social recession’. He seized on the disturbing Edlington case which in a stroke of luck the courts ruled on today, claiming it was not an “isolated incident of evil” but symptomatic of wider social problems. Lets be clear this case was truly horrific, anyone who has read through the reports from the court could not argue otherwise but to suggest that this case reflects a wider pattern reflected across society is nothing short of ridiculous.

Looking at the history shows us that cases whereby children do evil crimes are not confined to the here and now, the obvious comparison is the 1993 Bulger case but before that in 1968 Mary Bell was convicted of the manslaughter of two boys (aged four and three) aged just 10. Do these cases mean we should assume that under the the Conservative’s in the 90′s and Labour in the 60′s that Britain was void of morality and broken? Of course we don’t, these are isolated incidents which we find so shocking because they are so rare – this is not to say that local authorities and governments should not learn as much as possible from such cases, but we must not be fooled into thinking we can stop such horrific child crimes from happening.

To be fair to David Cameron, he also points to “high crime rates”, teenage pregnancy and drugs to show that Britain has a ‘broken society’, its not hard to find out that the “high crime rates” Cameron mentions are indeed a good deal lower than in 1997 – with the latest quarterly police figures showing a further 8% drop in overall crime, whilst the latest British Crime Survey stated “that the risk of becoming a victim of crime has fallen to a new historical low of 22%.” Cameron should look at the facts and instead of pandering to The Daily Mail and creating empty sound-bites, realise that on a day whereby the DEC Appeal announce that donations from the British Public have topped £42 Million for Haiti that although Britain has some real problems, its far away from being the ‘broken’ hell he portrays.

I put it to David Cameron and The Conservatives that if today’s society is ‘broken’, then it has never been ‘fixed’.

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Tags: Broken Britain, David Cameron, Tories