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Cameron assails the 'culture of moral neutrality'
Tory leader David Cameron says UK society has become accustomed to "moral neutrality".
- By Andrew Porter, The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2008
- Published: 00:07 July 9, 2008
London: Conservative leader David Cameron attacked the culture of "moral neutrality" on Monday, calling on the obese, the idle and even the poor to accept some responsibility for their plight.
The Opposition leader said Britain risked creating a society where nobody was prepared to tell the truth "about what is good and bad, right and wrong".
Society had become "far too sensitive" to people's feelings, with no one prepared to say "what needs to be said".
Speaking during a visit to a deprived area of Glasgow, Cameron added: "Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour.
"Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more."
"We talk about people being 'at risk of obesity' instead of people who eat too much and take too little exercise.
Social exclusion
"We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion - it's as if these things, obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction - are purely external events like a plague or bad weather."
Cameron said he accepted that personal circumstances - such as where someone was born, their neighbourhood, their school or their parents - had a "huge impact" on their lives.
But on a day when a 14-year-old boy became the 19th teenager to die from stab wounds in London this year, he insisted social problems were often the consequence of people's own choices.
The erosion over several decades of "responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline" and "respect for others" had led to a culture of "instant gratification" and a lack of boundaries on people's behaviour, Cameron said.
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