British politics is increasingly becoming a politics of blame. Instead of addressing difficult social problems, politicians are finding people to punish.
Small boats are one example. Parents whose teenage children commit offences are another. Poverty, benefits and migration become convenient targets, while the underlying causes of social problems receive far less attention.
In this video, I argue that this is mindless politics. Teenagers have always tested boundaries. Parents cannot know everything their children do. Making already poor families poorer by punishing parents for their children's behaviour will not prevent crime. And blaming asylum seekers does not resolve the political and administrative failures that have contributed to dangerous Channel crossings.
The deeper problem is that poverty, inequality, inadequate housing, limited opportunities for young people and underfunded public services are real and the issues that need to be addressed. Solving them requires serious government. Blaming people is much easier.
That is why Britain needs grown-ups in the room. We need politicians willing to accept responsibility for the consequences of political decisions and prepared to invest in functioning public services, policing, criminal justice, education, housing and opportunities for young people.
Politics should be about solving problems, not finding scapegoats.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Mindless politics is replacing serious political debate in the UK, in my opinion. Too much politics is being reduced to the expression of base sentiments. Ideas that in earlier generations of politicians might have been considered unthinkable are now being openly expressed. Complex social problems are being turned into opportunities for anger and blame. The result is politics that avoids responsibility rather than solving problems.
Small boats are one example of how this works. The small boat problem was manufactured by our politicians, who have then exploited it. Politicians who refused to provide safe routes for people seeking asylum in the UK, as people have the legal right to do, created a situation where people have resorted to crossing the English Channel in small boats, and a resulting crisis has been exploited to generate deeply offensive racism and hate. Those seeking asylum are blamed for a problem that politicians actually helped create and are doing very little or nothing to solve.
The same politics of blame is now being directed at some parents. Some politicians are now suggesting punishing parents when their children commit crimes, from shoplifting onwards. Benefits or other privileges might be withdrawn as a consequence. That is what they're proposing. And parents might even face criminal penalties for alleged neglect. Again, the political instinct being revealed is not to tackle the problem, but to find someone else to punish.
And the fact is that teenagers test boundaries as an entirely normal part of growing up. Young people have to discover the limits within which adults are expected to live, and sometimes that means they do things that are wrong or even illegal. And very few adults will have passed through adolescence without making some mistakes for which the police could have spoken to them, or done worse. And I'll put my hand up, I did. That does not make their parents responsible for those mistakes. The children make them, and we should accept that this is a normal part of life that has gone on for decades.
And as a matter of fact, parents cannot know everything their teenage children are doing. Children do not normally announce that they've been out shoplifting when they come home. Nor do they necessarily disclose drug taking, illicit sexual encounters, taking part in fights or other risky behaviour. Establishing parental intention or culpability would therefore be extraordinarily difficult if children commit these offences, but parents are to be blamed. Responsibility cannot reasonably be imposed simply because someone is a parent.
And the link in the suggestions made to benefits is something that troubles me greatly. That suggests that there is deep-seated class prejudice within this argument. It assumes that parents of children who offend are likely to receive benefits. Teenage boundary testing is not confined to the children of benefit claimants, by a very long way, as the history of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University reveals. Do remember David Cameron and Boris Johnson were members of that, and it was notorious for its lawbreaking. Crime is not confined to poorer people and major crimes can involve the wealthy.
Poverty is being treated as evidence of culpability when it is nothing of the sort. What is more, making poorer families poorer cannot solve the problems associated with poverty. One in five people, including millions of children and teenagers, experience poverty every day in the UK. Financial hardship can create real needs that sometimes contribute to petty crime. I'm not exonerating that. I'm stating a fact. And withdrawing benefits would deliberately increase that hardship. Greater deprivation would increase the likelihood of offending rather than reduce it.
And the real causes of the crisis we have are being ignored. The excuses being offered and the blame being pointed at are all about providing cover. The real crime issues we have were all caused by austerity. That reality is being ignored while politicians blame vulnerable people. Punishing or imprisoning parents could deepen alienation and destabilise families, and the police and criminal justice system is already under-resourced, and this would only stretch it much further at a time when it can't cope already.
Poverty, inequality and the lack of opportunity for young people are not being tackled effectively by our government, and there's no sign that it's going to do so. Politics has failed people and is now blaming them for the consequences of that failure. That is what I am seeing.
We need grown-ups in the room as a result. Grown-ups who will solve these problems rather than blame people. We need politicians who will accept responsibility for the society their decisions have helped create. We need public services, policing and criminal justice systems that really work on the basis of proper funding. We need to tackle inequality, low pay, poor housing, poor education, and lack of work. All of these things need to be addressed, and post-neoliberal politics must tackle problems rather than scapegoat those with the least power.
We need an end to the mindless politics of excuses and to replace it with the politics of care that really works. That is what this country needs at present. More finger-pointing, more blame, more mindless solutions that will only make everything worse: none of those is required. Real solutions are.
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I look back at stuff like ‘social exclusion’ in wonder and can’t believe sometimes that it ever existed, that we were even concerned about it – but we did and we were.
The way I see it, Thatcherism/Neo-liberalism nearly died in 2007/2008, and the state it so abhorred saved capitalism from itself.
Since then we’ve had a huge push back – the Tory government of 2010 giving a huge helping hand and making out that it was Britain that was effectively bankrupt when the private financial system had essentially eaten itself alive and was bankrupt.
And the ongoing result is stuff like you describe above – passing the buck – still – onto ordinary people whilst the flagrant disregard for rules and natural law is ignored in the city as long as bonuses are made and money is just moved around from the many to the few.
What a missed opportunity 2007/2008 was. And we will continue to rue it. This extreme capitalism is as bad if not worse than any religious or political extremism. It is financial terrorism – subtle but effective at leaving those who wield it firmly in charge.
Might it be that the main stream media, including the B. B. C, also have significant responsiblity for moving socio-politics from being peresented and addressed as a relatively genuine and necessary, pro-social activity to being “politainment”, in a time of attention seeking communications and general and political “fandom”?
Yes
A striking example – Judge Fulford in the Southport phase 1 report blamed the system for the killer of three little girls not being apprehended – mainly that it was never clear which agency or professional was responsible at any one time.<p>
But he did also say the parents should have reported him when they new he had a weapon , but said the parents should ‘not be vilified’. He named no other individuals – professionals – so inevitably Kemi Badenoch said ‘the parents should be deported’ – despite them being British citizens.<p>
And it seems the reason parents are now to be blamed for what their children do – is also a response to Judge Fulford’s report.<p>
His main conclusions reinforced what some of us have been saying for 20 years – ever since the appalling Lord Laming’s Climbie Inquiry and the subsequent Children Act 2004 . This spread ‘accountability’ widely among agencies and professionals in a top down multi agency labyrinth – which is essentially a ‘blame-avoidance’ system in which ‘everyone is accountable’ so that ‘no one is accountable’.<p>
We have suggested a ‘bottom up’ system built around a lead professional on the front line – who would get to know and be fully involved with the family or child needing protection and safeguarding. This contrasts with the present system where up to forty professionals may have had ‘contact’ with the family – but each with a very partial and possibly conflicting view.<p>
We have to see whether Fulford’s phase 2 Southport recommendations will face up to this – but in the mean time action has already been taken on blaming parents.
Richard- ‘ we must tackle problems rather than scapegoat those with the least power.'<p>
Expectations for Southport phase 2 not high
I based this in part on that report
A former colleague went on about ‘Managements Duty to Manage’
All to often things were happening that management should either have known about or if they didnt there should have been some sort of process in place that might pick up when something is going wrong.
As I also say, if an individual performs badly on one occasion then its their problem, there comes a point however when if it isnt picked up then it becomes a management responsibility when something goes wrong.
And all because each agency involved can only think about its BUDGET and not what its job actually is.
And they said Compulsory Competitive Tendering is over.
Answer: No!
Have a look at Human Factors, pioneered by the Aviation Industry but now expanding.
It addresses why people make the decisions they do – and its usually looked at in situations where things have gone wrong.
When people are under stress, and in this case its financial or housing stress their ability to deal with the usual crap life throws at you are significantly reduced so that means that they make bad choices, that includes offending.
Reduce the stress and you reduce the poor choices, its not that difficult.
Its also worth pointing out that there is a piece of legislation that does allow ‘third parties’ including parents to be held to account when a motoring offence has been committed, its called ’cause or permit’ and is covered by amongst other things the Road Traffic Act 1988
Road Traffic Act 1988: It is an offence to use, or cause or permit another person to use, a motor vehicle on a road without valid insurance (Section 143), without a valid MOT certificate (Section 47), or without a proper driving licence (Section 87). [1, 2, 3, 4]
In the context of the post it could be applied to the parents of young people riding electric scooters, electric motorbikes etc however there seem to be very few if any prosecutions, suggesting that either its not easy to make it stick or some unwillingness or inability to use it. In the alternative if the owner says ‘No I didnt allow them to use it’ then the driver/rider can be prosecuted for ‘Taking without owners consent’ so it can be ‘useful’
As ever politicians are proposing new laws rather than enforcing what already exists.
Joint enterprise is also an issue here.
I think it’s worth adding two pieces of political news from Scotland.#:
A recent Norstat poll showed those in favour of Indy at 76.6% after Don’t Knows of 11% are excluded. In the immortal words of Wee Ginger Dug “The settled will of the people doesn’t come much more settled-willier”. This follows an Ipsos poll which showed very similar outcomes of 78% for and 22% against.
Another critical finding of both polls is that, among people who voted in the Scotland’s May elections for parties other than SNP, there is likelihood of future support for Independence of 33% (Labour), 30% (Reform), 21% (LibDem) and 17% (Tory).
If that’s not enough, yesterday Holyrood passed a motion ‘that the Parliament agrees that Scotland is a nation that has a right to decide its own future’ by 82% of MSPs across Scotland’s 3 main parties. The other 18% was mainly due to Reform MSPs walking out in indignation.
Today, the UK media are having a bonanza day of headlines and reports about deaths from drugs in 2025 in Scotland rising by 11% against 2024 levels. The irony in all of this is that an independent Scotland could ensure proper boundary controls and thereby prevent large deliveries of drugs and their distributors from entering Scotland (much of the drug traffic into Scotland is run by English County Lines gangs).
There are also the problems which result from Westminster having total control over possession, supply and manufacturing of drugs, while Scotland’s powers are limited to Health & Rehabilitation of victims and Policing of trafficking and prosecutions within Scotland. As long as we’re stuck under Westminster rule we can’t adequately manage our borders and our governmental powers only apply after the damage has been done.
Ken
Are you sure these claims on poll data are right? As far as I can see, those are people supporting a second referendum, not another poll, and they are not quite the same thing.
I think the MSP vote was very encouraging. Same on the Lib Dems and Tories, and Reform made fools of themselves, as usual.
Richard
I’ll need to check the poll data in the morning.