Monday’s speech [1] by Prime Minister David Cameron used some of the strongest language heard from any 
politician anywhere in Britain or Ireland in a very long time to describe the extent of the moral collapse which led to the anarchy and looting in British cities last week.
Mr Cameron spoke of “people showing indifference to right and wrong” and “a complete absence of self-restraint” and stated, correctly, that the unwillingness of politicians to speak the truth about behaviour and morality had actually helped to cause the social problems we see around us.
“We have too often avoided saying what needs to be said – about everything from marriage to welfare to common courtesy,” Mr Cameron said
Meanwhile, he unapologetically targeted family breakdown as one of the main sources of this moral and societal collapse. The Prime Minister was very willing to state that “children without fathers” were a central part of the problem, and to point out that the parents of the rioters generally appeared to have been marked absent in controlling their children.
Families matter, Mr Cameron said.
“So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start,” he added. Quite so.
Mr Cameron has been sounding these themes ever since he became leader of the Conservative Party, and has continued to say similar things as Prime Minister.
Thus far, however, he has been long on talk and short on action. In Opposition, he promised over and over again to implement a tax cut for married families. However, this was one of the first commitments to be thrown overboard in negotiations with his Coalition partners the Liberal Democrats.
George Osborne’s cuts to Child Benefit to those on above-average earners disproportionately hit parents who take time out from work to look after their children because combined income was not be considered.
Under the move, two working parents earning just under the higher-rate tax threshold of £44,000 can take home up to £88,000 and retain their Child Benefit while a household with just one income of £45,000 loses theirs.
In May, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), founded by one of Mr Cameron’s Cabinet ministers, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, said that the Prime Minister had broken his promise to support marriage and tackle family breakdown.
In an audit, it marked the Coalition’s performance on family policy at just two out of 10, and described the Government’s approach to family policy as “just business as usual”. The Coalition’s family policy was “a disappointing continuation of the last government’s failed approach”.
To be fair to Mr Cameron, his speech yesterday did promise some action on specific policies. He promised to apply “a family test” to all domestic policy.
“If it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keeps people together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it,” he said.
And he said that plans to help families had been “held back by bureaucracy” and pledged to clear away the red tape and the bureaucratic wrangling, and “put rocket boosters under this programme”.
However, given the lack of action by the Government thus far in this sphere, observers will be forgiven for waiting to see the detailed proposals before cheering too heartily.
But in another sense, the Prime Minister was closest to the mark when he said that part of the problem was the timidity with which politicians had addressed these issues over time.
The unwillingness of societal leaders to say clearly that marriage is generally the best family structure in which to raise children, to unapologetically affirm moral standards and to hold educators to account for producing children who cannot read and write properly has led to a steady ebbing away of social capital.
To build it up again will be the work of decades, and won’t correspond to the timetables of electoral politics. But by stating some obvious truths without apology, Mr Cameron has already helped the debate. Would that any Irish politician, of any political stripe, had similar courage.