Britain Debates ‘Slow-Motion Moral Collapse’

by John F. Burns and Alan Cowell - The New York Times - August 15, 2011

LONDON — Divided over Prime Minister David Cameron’s plan to bring in a retired American police officer after last week’s riots, politicians staked out competing positions Monday for both the causes of the violence and the cures for what the British leader called his country’s “slow-motion moral collapse.”

The speeches by Mr. Cameron and the Labour opposition leader, Ed Miliband, seemed to signify a further retreat from a cautious consensus as the riots flared and some politicians were forced to return early from vacations after apparently underestimating the fury of the arson and looting.

While Mr. Cameron blamed criminality among a minority for much of the turmoil, Mr. Miliband spoke of a broader “crisis of values in our society” rooted in “greed, selfishness and gross irresponsibility” stretching from bankers to lawmakers to journalists involved in the phone-hacking scandal.

“It’s not the first time we’ve seen this kind of ‘me-first, take what you can’ culture,” Mr. Miliband said, speaking at the state-run school he attended in his youth in north London. “The bankers who took millions while destroying people’s savings — greedy, selfish and immoral; the M.P.’s who fiddled their expenses — greedy, selfish and immoral; the people who hacked phones at the expense of victims — greedy, selfish and immoral.”

With both men seeking a moral high ground from which to appeal to potential voters, the exchanges on Monday offered further definition to a sharpening political debate over the causes of the disturbances and the best way to prevent a recurrence.

For Mr. Cameron, in particular, it offered an opportunity to reclaim the law-and-order mantle traditionally worn by Conservative leaders. But he also acknowledged social problems in what he called Britain’s broken society.

“This must be a wake-up call for our country,” he said, promising a “fightback” against Britain’s problems.

“Social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face,” Mr. Cameron said Monday, referring to such issues as poor classroom discipline, unpunished crimes and — a frequently visited subject for him — single parent families from which fathers are absent.

“Some of the worst aspects of human nature” had been “tolerated, indulged, sometimes even incentivized, by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally demoralized.”

“What last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism — it’s not going to cut it any more,” Mr. Cameron said. “In large parts of the country this was just pure criminality. These riots were not about race: the perpetrators and the victims were white, black and Asian. These riots were not about government cuts: they were directed at high street stores, not Parliament. And these riots were not about poverty: that insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.”

“We know what’s gone wrong; the question is, do we have the determination to put it right?” Mr. Cameron said at a youth center in his home constituency of Witney in Oxfordshire. “Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations?”

The differences of approach followed another corrosive debate at the weekend when the mayor of London and an array of British police officials publicly opposed Mr. Cameron’s suggestion that William J. Bratton, a former police commissioner in Boston, New York and Los Angeles, be recruited to sort out the capital’s policing problems. The suggestion was never likely to go down easily with critics arguing that the tough measures Mr. Bratton adopted to deal with street crime in American cities are a poor fit with Britain’s much less aggressive traditions of policing.

Mr. Cameron and other government ministers have also criticized the police for standing back in the early days of the rioting, and they have implied that the decision to crack down came only when the government intervened. For their part, police commanders have said that it was they — and not Mr. Cameron or the home secretary, Theresa May — who decided to bolster police deployments, noting that Mr. Cameron and Ms. May were vacationing abroad when the riots started. As for the police’s initial hesitation, the commanders said it was the product of years of “mixed signals” from political leaders, who have punished the police in the past for reacting too forcefully, but who say this time they should have responded sooner and with greater force.

Mr. Miliband called for a “national conversation” on the causes of the riots that would “give people a chance for their voices and views to be heard.” While the government has set out plans to evict rioters and their families from state-subsidized housing and to strip convicted rioters of welfare benefits, Mr. Miliband said weaning young wrongdoers from crime was “harder when support is being taken away.”

The implications for British politics were far reaching. Mr. Miliband was staking out ground that has strong support on the left wing of his party, if less among an older, traditionalist Labour bloc as incensed in many ways by the rioting as traditionalist Conservatives. Many of those who work with underprivileged youths have also spoken strongly against the kind of retributive measures Mr. Cameron and his ministers have advocated, and they pressed for the continuation of the redemptive social policies that have prevailed for decades.

They have spoken out strongly, too, against round-the-clock courts that have been in session in London and other cities, sending 60 percent of the 2,500 people arrested in the riots to jail pending trial. The national average for those jailed while awaiting trial for criminal offenses was 10 percent before the riots.

The courts have also handed down harsh jail terms even to the lesser offenders, including a five-month sentence in London to a 22-year-old single mother of two who was given a pair of shorts by a friend who had looted a local store.

But for Mr. Cameron, another political calculus was at work. He spoke of his determination to break with the conventions that have governed mainstream politics since the demise of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s my-way-or-the-highway approach in 1990, when she resigned. “We have been unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong,” he said. “We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said, about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy.” But now, he said, “the party’s over.”

The prime minister’s new hard-line approach is not likely to sit well with the junior partners in his coalition government, the left-of-center Liberal Democrats, who have been increasingly restive about the impact of the harsh public-spending cuts demanded by the Conservatives. If they were to quit the government, that could force a new general election.

But with opinion polls since the riots showing strong support for a law-and-order crackdown, and support for the Liberal Democrats at a nearly historic low, Mr. Cameron may calculate that they have little choice but to stay with the Conservatives, bowing at least part way to Mr. Cameron’s new right-of-center impulses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/world/europe/16britain.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimes