Social Engineering: the Cameron Model

July 10th, 2008

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There’s an old calumny that often gets levelled by right-wing politicians in times of resurgence against their left-wing opponents: the charge of ’social engineering’. Of course, this is a ridiculous charge, as social engineering is what governments always do, no matter where their personnel come from ideologically speaking. The Times‘ reading of Cameron’s speech yesterday in Glasgow evoked this theme by seeking to align Cameron’s ‘vision’ with the growing insistence on the blogs and in the papers that ‘the debate’ in Britain should be about the case for authoritarian government versus the case for liberty from it (or ‘personal responsibility’).

In flagging the significance of yesterday’s speech, the Tory leader hinted at both the length of its gestation and his trepidation at making a moral pronouncement. “The time has come for me to speak about something that has been troubling me for a long time,” he said, adding: “I have not found the words to say it sensitively.” What followed was an intensively crafted passage that seeks to re-establish public morality and expressly tilts the balance from the State to the individual.

Right, so the balance is being tilted from ‘the State’ to ‘public morality’, and this is freeing the individual how, exactly? Further on, we learn a little more about the terms under which this ‘re-balancing’ may happen:

It was only yesterday that the Tory leader showed a glint of the steel he would deploy as prime minister. Whether it is the benefit claimant denied payments for failing to look for work or the teenager jailed for carrying a knife, Mr Cameron wants to be able to say that he was clear about his intentions. “This is about signalling very clearly how serious we are in addressing social breakdown and about securing a mandate for the very radical things that we want to do to heal the divisions,” one senior Cameron aide said.

So in other words, the social engineering practised by Blair (encouraging people to be ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ via the target-driven micromanagement of welfare and left-managerialist rhetoric of ‘empowerment’) will be replaced by Cameron style social engineering (encouraging people to be ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ via the target-driven micromanagement of welfare and ressentiment-fuelled rhetoric of ‘taking responsibility for yourselves’). Same regime of governance, different moral emulsion.

Still, what this does emphasize (yet again) is just how irrelevant any attempt to insist we all return to debating cod-Millian libertarian tropes about how ‘positive liberty is tyranny’ is to real-world politics.