Cameron’s Cognitive Dissonance

The best parts of David Cameron’s speech this morning were those passages spent defending the government’s plans for police reform and secondary education in England. This should not be a surprise: whether you agree with them or not, these are relatively coherent policies that have enjoyed the benefit of long gestation.

The rest of the speech, alas, was a humdrum tour of long-familiar bromides (families are good!), items pulled from discount bins (‘elf and safety!) and impossible promises just vague enough to escape obvious ridicule (“a clear ambition that within the lifetime of this Parliament we will turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in the country”).

Perhaps it has to be this way. Or rather, perhaps we shouldn’t have expected his speech to be better – that is, more specific – than it was. Social responsibility is a perfectly good theme (though interestingly the words “Big Society” never passed the Prime Minister’s lips) but it is, perhaps unavoidably, something easy to favour but harder to incubate.