The unbroken society

The Economist this week is not convinced about the Tory arguments for a broken society.

In its leader it says that it has become fashionable to say that British society is in a mess and getting worse.

But the facts say otherwise

It would be idiotic to claim that Britain is perfect. The vomitous binge-drinking mainly by the young, the drug abuse and teenage pregnancy that are still higher than in most west European countries and the large proportion of single-parent families all tell a tale. But the story of broad decline is simply untrue Stepping back from the glare of the latest appalling tale, it is clear that by most measures things have been getting better for a good decade and a half. In suggesting that the rot runs right through society, the Tories fail to pinpoint the areas where genuine crises persist. The broken-Britain myth is worse than scaremongering—it glosses over those who need help most.

Brave words from Tom Harris

I take my hat off to Tom Harris for his post yesterday on the return of morality.

Close your eyes and you might well think that it is a leader in the Daily Mail but he is being honest with what he thinks are major problems in society

He writes

I’m a Labour MP, so some will undoubtedly be surprised, and shocked that I’m writing this. But I can no longer pretend that the army of teenage mothers living off the state is anything other than a national catastrophe.

and he continues

teenage girls do not become pregnant accidentally because of ignorance, because of a lack of understanding of how their bodies work. They become pregnant because they have absolutely no ambition for themselves. They have been indoctrinated with the lie that they’ll never amount to anything, and have fulfilled that prophesy by making no effort to achieve any qualification.

Brave words but I am afraid they are very true

The first rumblings of recession based anger

That is what Max Hasting's believes writing in this morning's Guardian.

According to Max,

Seldom in peacetime has change come upon a society so rapidly and brutally. In a matter of months, the assumptions on which we have run our lives for decades, above all that of national prosperity, are out of the window. Yet, although reason tells us the game is up and that almost anything could happen, it remains hard to acknowledge how dramatically our lives must alter.

The worry is how this change will manifest itslef in society after all he says

For two decades, while we have been a greedy society, we have also flattered ourselves that we were a compassionate one. We threw money at all sorts of supposedly deserving causes, because we thought we could afford it. In future, Britain will have to become harsher and nastier, because there will be no money to be anything else.

I do beleive that this is going to be the big issue of 2009.How as a society we react to the crisis,for a crisis it is