‘Fixing Our Broken Society’: David Cameron’s Post-Thatcherite Social Policy

Abstract

In July 2008, the Conservative leader David Cameron made a speech launching his party’s campaign in the Glasgow East by-election. The theme of the speech was ‘the broken society’: ‘the social breakdown you see here [in Glasgow Gallowgate] is just an extreme version of what you can see everywhere’, the Conservative leader said (Cameron, 2008f). British society was broken. The Labour government was to blame;and the Tories were just the party to fix it. A year earlier, Cameron had first talked in these terms ahead of the report from the party’s Social Justice Policy Group, one of a series of policy groups established by the new Tory leader. Cameron gave welfare reform to former party leader Iain Duncan Smith and his Centre for Social Justice. Under Duncan Smith between September 2001 and October 2003, the Tories had failed to make any headway in the polls, despite his attempts to find a more compassionate side to modern British conservatism. Now, under Cameron, the idea of the ‘broken society’ was being used to help to dispel the impression that the Conservative Party, by its own admission, was the ‘nasty party’ of British politics.