Edward Davies is Research Director at the Centre for Social Justice.
Kemi Badenoch has had, by anyone’s estimation, a successful conference.
She has rightly identified the political space for a party focused on sound finances. And the Tories have shown they are still a party with real policy firepower.
But I cannot shake the feeling that there isn’t any combination of policy tweaks that will assuage the rancour of the British electorate.
The truth is there is a growing feeling that there is something going wrong in the UK, and the wider western world, at a deeper level. Not just in our politics, but in our roots: socially, culturally, morally.
Over the last five weeks I’ve attended five different party conferences and what has struck me more than the variety of policy discussion is how often I have heard a common language of morality. Not just that politics needs to discover a nebulous moral purpose, but that there are specific moral conundrums interlaced into all our policy problems.
Questions around the unaffordability of pensions have been framed by intergenerational “fairness”, how the social fabric is being torn apart by “individualism”, whether parents are taking “responsibility”.
These concepts are not policy proposals; they are questioning the values that individual citizens of this country now hold, and whether politics has the power to confront them.
It struck a chord because the data we see at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) keeps raising the same questions.
Research from Kindred Squared has shown that parents are no longer taking responsibility for a lot of basic early years development: in the 2024 School Reception cohort, teachers report that 34 per cent of children don’t know how to listen or respond to a simple instruction, and a quarter are not even nappy trained. That’s an average of 7 or 8 children in every reception class that can’t use a toilet.
That’s surely not the teacher or government’s job?
Further upstream, there isn’t a piece of research out there that contradicts the idea that children are best raised by their mum and dad in a committed relationship. This has been the reality for over 90 per cent of children for most of human history. But in 2022, for the first time ever, the majority of children were born to unmarried parents. There is not much the state can do about that – getting married is a personal choice – but the state is sure as hell picking up the tab in education and welfare support.
The CSJ’s recent work on school absence has found a near collapse in the relationship between schools and families. Almost half of parents now think missing one day of school every fortnight is reasonable. This is the government’s standing definition of “persistent absence” and is linked to scores of negative outcomes from criminality to future earnings. Meanwhile, teachers are increasingly striking, not over pay and conditions, but the behaviour of pupils making their job unsafe.
There are now almost 10 million working age adults in the UK who are economically inactive: they are not in work and not looking to be. Over a quarter of Birmingham’s working age adults are now on out-of-work benefits and in wards of some towns the majority of adults are.
Time and time again the problems being highlighted in the data do not show policy problems that government can easily fix. They show the social contract, our expectations of each other, our basic shared morality, has shifted and created dramatic new realities.
Nor is this just about individual choices – organisations, institutions, and businesses reflect choices too. Laws like the Employment Rights Bill are often just the government cack-handedly trying to regulate for moral norms and standards that are no longer commonly assumed.
Parents are tearing their hair out over an online world that is destroying their children before their eyes – social media pile-ons, suicidal forums and violent pornography are all the stuff of childhood now.
As policy makers try to balance on the tightrope of an imperfect online safety bill as best they can, all the above problems would be solved in a heartbeat if businesses, and importantly the individuals that run them, simply decided they did not want to profit from these things.
The problem is how we broach this stuff without appearing to ride the moralising high horse, but the alternative is far worse – in a world where what is legal is moral, we should absolutely expect the ever-increasing laws, regulations, governments and taxes that we now have. And given they do not address the root problem anyway, their impotence will be inbuilt.
It’s a long way to an election and the mood can change in a heartbeat, but the problems we face in the developed world will not. Any party that wants to change the country rather than just win an election will need to understand those problems or their reign will be short-lived too.
The commentariat fixates on the polling and the politics. Whose stock is rising and who deserves the stocks.
But this is not just a fight for the political future of the UK, it is increasingly a fight for its soul.
