Horner's Corner

The Irresistible Itch

by on Nov.28, 2009, under politics

responsibility

The Irresistible Itch

Colin Kidd

Ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher, personal responsibility has been the irresistible itch that the Conservative Party dare not scratch – at least not in public. Notwithstanding the party’s boosterish slogans of enterprise, freedom and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality. In theory, these Conservatives wished to roll back the restrictions of the socialist state; in practice, many of them reckoned that wartime rationing had been good for the moral fibre of the nation, and took the view that the softness of modern consumerist lifestyles had raised a society of degenerates. It was but a small step from inside lavatories and quilted toilet paper to long-haired decadence, dysfunctional families and drug addiction.

However, as Thatcher learned in the months before she became leader of the party, it was a mistake to broach too obviously the ethics of personal responsibility. Had not her ally and mentor Keith Joseph seen his own leadership aspirations shrivel in the aftermath of his notorious Edgbaston speech? When Joseph addressed the Edgbaston Conservative Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the Conservatives, under Ted Heath, had just lost a general election and Joseph had emerged as the likeliest alternative leader. However, in a speech which deliberately departed from economic issues to denounce the permissive society, Joseph undermined his political credentials. He warned that Britain’s ‘human stock’ was ‘threatened’ because a high and rising proportion of children were being born to adolescent mothers ‘in social classes four and five’, some of whom were ‘of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment’. Joseph believed that these mothers were ‘producing’ the ‘delinquents’ of the future, ‘denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters’. To prescribe birth control for these girls was perhaps ‘immoral’, but surely, Joseph calculated, it was the lesser of two evils. Although Joseph’s message resonated with the Conservative base and beyond, his invocation of eugenics undermined his reputation with the broadsheet press. The influential journalist Alan Watkins described him as ‘a saloon-bar Malthus’.

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LRB · Colin Kidd · The Irresistible Itch.

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