Cameron Scraping the Barrel

By Kevin Maguire on January 22, 2010 5:32 PM Permalink
David Cameron's guilty of distatesful, desperate politics by exploiting the awful Doncaster case of the young sadists to support his Broken Britain propaganda. Tony Blair was guilty of similar opportunisn over Jamie Bulger and I daresay political chancers did it in the late 1960s about Mary Bell. Doncaster social services have serious questions to answer, as Haringey did with Baby Peter, but Britain is self-evidently not suffering widespread social breakdown in which a significant number of kids try to kill other kids or adults go around murdering children. I don't deny the horror of what the 10 and 11-year-olds did in Edlington but Cameron is wrong to explode a rare nightmare into general breakdown. Children's Secretary Ed Balls' aides are highlighting a BBC Look North Yorkshire report of locals in Edlington resenting Cameron's contemptible politics. Balls pointing out the parents of the desentisised, immoral young attackers were married would be as irrelevant as asserting the mam and dad breathe oxgyen if Cameron wasn't simultaneously presenting wedlock as the answer to society's ills. It isn't. Cameron went to a private meeting on Dewsbury's Moorside estate last October to issue a cringe-making apology to the neighbours of kidnapping mother Karen Matthews. The Tory leader admitted on the quiet that he'd been wrong earlier to dub the area "a place where decency fights a losing battle against degradation." The Tories didn't spin the Dewsbury apology to win headlines as they had the original smear. I hope after he's reflected over the weekend, Cameron drives to Edlington and issues another apology - this time to the country as a whole. I for one won't be holding my breath.