I live in Hackney and my partner’s due date to give birth was a few days ago. My reaction to the riots has been one of sadness, anger and fear. Talking to my neighbours yesterday on the estate where I live, I found everyone feels the same: that the police can’t protect us and that they better get a grip soon. What can we do? Well, I’ll be buying a baseball bat to put behind my front door to protect my family. These are the primitive realities at play I’m afraid.

At Demos we’ve got some pretty robust findings that ‘tough love’ parenting – where warmth and love are combined with clear boundaries and high expectations over behaviour – seriously builds the character of young people (their ability to shape their own lives and be socially responsible). And character not only helps you live a happy, fulfilling and moral life – it also significantly increases your life chances.

But actually, I’ve come to realise, the idea of tough love can be generalised to many areas of life and should be our guiding way out of the mess we’re in post-riots.

One thing that frustrates the public about politicians is their mealy-mouthed apologism for morally outrageous behaviour. Witness Ken Livingstone’s shameless electioneering by directly linking ‘the cuts’ to the violence. Never mind that the Pembury Estate in Hackney has just been refurbished on a huge scale, that millions have been spent on youth projects in the area; Ken is steeped in left-wing apologism to the point of perversity. The public are sick of politicians making excuses for the failure of people to take responsibility for their actions – including it has to be said, the actions of politicians themselves. What the public wants is the tough side of tough love – clear, morally unambiguous and consistent condemnation of wrongful behaviour.

But that does not mean the public want the ‘state to get out of the way’, as neo-liberals might have it. They are perfectly happy for the other side of tough love – warmth and care – to be funded by their taxes. People would happily pay for a top-notch care system that took kids out of neglectful and abusive families. They would be happy to pay for this as long as it were accompanied by an unwavering moral stance on irresponsibility.

But a damaging way of thinkng has grown up which lies in the way of a politics of tough love. Politicians and other members of the liberal establishment have succumbed to an intellectual malaise that should only rightly afflict a confused first-year undergraduate - moral relativism. Too many of the great and the good shy from clear moral stances on issues for fear of imposing values on others. But out in the world, people find this attitude craven and infuriating.

Earlier in the year Demos carried out some more research on character, interviewing lots of people about what they thought about the concept. We expected people to say it was judgemental or old-fashioned. Not at all. People from all backgrounds, cultures and religions agree on the fundamentals of good character: honesty, loyalty, kindness, courage and fairness. Tellingly, when we interviewed some young men in Bermondsey who had been the victims of abuse, neglect and gang culture, we found they had exactly the same concept of character as everybody else. They weren’t relativists at all, just frustrated at the inability of people in their circumstances to be able to show good character.

Part of the problem here is that the governing class are all PPE graduates who’ve learnt morality and politics inside classrooms and party headquarters. Politicians like David Davies and Alan Johnson who come from ordinary backgrounds are thin on the ground these days. Those of their ilk instinctively understand the common morality of the people and so are able to talk convincingly and without cringing about tough love. As John Major has recently said, our polity and society are poorer for not having more politicians like these. The politicians we do have seem to belong to an elite that is just as amoral as the looters and rioters of recent days – whether it’s avoiding taxes or falsely claiming expenses.

What would a tough love state look like? Let’s start with schools. In Hackney, several academies, formerly some of the worst schools in the country, get results that grammar schools in rich suburbs would be proud of. What do these academies do? They set clear and high expectations about effort, behaviour and morality. There is zero-tolerance of ill-discipline but visit the websites of these schools and you will find sophisticated counselling and mentoring services operative as well. That is tough love in action and by God it works.

As well as education, welfare would look very different in a tough love state. The Universal Credit is a move in the right direction, in that it seeks to better reward work, but really, we ought to be handing out serious prison sentences for repeated benefit fraud. Defrauding your fellow citizens of their taxes for personal gain is morally outrageous and should be treated as so. Moreover, those who aren’t in work after a year of claiming benefits should have to take on work or lose their claim, even if that means government created jobs such as picking litter (it’s a moral issue not an economic one). This policy would probably garner about 80 per cent support in the country and it is a mystery that politicians don’t adopt it instantly. But such toughness should be coupled with an end to the recent mean-spirited chivvying of disabled people unable to work. The welfare state should genuinely protect those in need and the public will happily pay taxes for it to do so. Why? Because the public believes in tough love.

It is imperative, however, that we apply tough love to the top as well as the bottom of society. Let’s see the Government naming and shaming tax avoiders who benefit from the political stability and infrastructure of our society but feel able to pay as little as possible towards it.

Will any political party take up the tough love mantle? I am doubtful. Ed Milliband is right to talk about responsibility at all levels of society, and about just deserts for hard work. But will he have the guts to push through the tough side of tough love? Put it this way, the grip of mealy-mouthed apologism is so strong in our culture that for now, much as it depresses me, I’m still buying that baseball bat. 

 

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