When the music stops switch the folk devil

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 10 July 2006 17:38:47

The BBC has given a reasonable amount of coverage to this speech by David Cameron, in which he is calling for more tolerance and understanding for hoodie wearers. Overall it appers to be a good speech which shows atleast more understanding of the issues than New Labour (just slap an ASBO on them) have.

However, upon closer inspection one finds that it is actually a speech which just seeks to move from one stereotype and folk devil to another. The problem of course is the fact they all come from broken homes and just to make sure we all got the message right about what David Cameron was saying Iain Duncan Smith underlined it. He said "the biggest single root cause to most of this is the massive levels - highest in most of the western world - of family breakdown."

Well atleast we are now all clear, David Cameron is a true New Right Libertarian and what we are seeing with the Tory Party is Charles Murray, McLanahan and Sandefur, and Reary, etc rehashed. This kind of scares me because there is a logic behind their reasoning which kind of makes sense, but ends up scape goating single mothers, and the underclass and other minorities generally rather than focusing upon the social and economic forces involved.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not saying broken families are a good thing and that parents should take no responsibility, but what I am saying is he going to take into account the wider structural forces involved.
Totally hypothetical, yet realistic example:

Supermarket puts more items onto multi-buy, meaning that large "nuclear" families can make savings but lone parents (even if they have car) are less likely to be able to take advantage of this. Rather lone parent (without car) has to buy on a weekly rather monthly basis and spend more per person on basic essentials (such as loo paper).

In order to be able to do this said mother has to work all the hours there are to get the money to do shopping, buy uniform, etc, etc. The fact the school has a uniform policy is great, but main suppliers of crested items are not the cheaper shops but rather "school outfitters" which drive up cost & when shoes wear out they can't wear perfectly good trainers because this is against uniform policy.

Holiday clubs, childcare, etc tends to become unavailable once child reaches eleven, (if they could afford it in the first place). Parent then becomes apparently irresponsible for leaving child unsupervised whilst working, to get the money, to buy the food.

Child wants to fit in and so demands the correct clothing (costing more, although worker in country of origin is only paid a tiny amount) because of the pressure employed by peers, in large part influenced by commercial media and fashion multinationals.

Parent then has to work even harder & possibly take loans at a higher than average rate of interest in order to try and keep child wearing correct brands, due to pressure previously referred to.

Child meanwhile is struggling at school, and teachers think parent isn't interested because they are never available and the fact the child never has quite the right uniform. In actually fact parent is tearing hair out, not knowing where to turn because support = professionals = hassell = appointments which they are told they can't break but which are all when they are having to working increasing long hours in Macjob to pay for things.

Am I overstating? Me thinks not - I'm a "nice professional middle-class" lone parent & you know what whilst bits of it are totally hypothetical there are quite large chunks of my life in there.