Tough love can’t kiss off lack of cash

David Cameron is at his best when at his most Blairite – and, boy, was he Blair-like over the last week. Flying home to take personal control of the crisis. Holding a press conference in the street outside No 10. A strong statement to parliament, then a stronger speech in his constituency. “Tough love and tough policing” – straight from the New Labour playbook.

David Miliband, who for better or worse doesn’t look over his shoulder at Blair, made a call for a public enquiry and linked the lawlessness of the rioters to the MPs who’d looted their expenses, and the bankers who’d trashed the economy. Both men showed themselves at their best – and exposed their deepest flaws.

Start with Cameron, he is the best communicator the government has and he did it again. Passionate, heartfelt soundbites: “Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control.” You hear that, and you experience a political leader channelling and expressing public anger – and leading it to a conclusion. The answer to the problem is implicit in the statement.

And who could argue? Each of his propositions persuades that there is a solution. Communities in control. Crimes that lead to punishment. All work, until the last one – “children without fathers”. Really? Do we need fathers back in families? This formulation would have been inconceivable in the Fifties and Sixties when so many had lost their dads in the war. As Gil Scott-Heron, whose mother was abandoned by Celtic’s first black player Gil Heron, put it: “I came from what they called a broken home/But if they ever really called at our house/They would have known how wrong they were/We were working on our lives and our homes/Dealing with what we had, not what we didn’t have.”

This is the hard heart of family policy. We know a lot about the importance of structure and stability to children. But we also know that the wrecking ball can be the presence of a dysfunctional adult.

It’s not tidy for a conservative ideology, but single parents – mainly mums, but many dads too – are very often doing the right thing. They are making a loving space for kids to be brought up, when the alternative – staying in a relationship – is impossible. It is not moral relativism to say that keeping couples together at all costs is madness – it’s maturity, we no longer ask women to stay and absorb all the pain for the sake of the kids.

Now, Cameron isn’t the only one in a fankle on family policy. So is Ed Miliband. He has rightly demanded an inquiry into the riots – if we can have one on phone hacking, surely we can have one on civil disturbances unmatched on any scale by any other European country apart from France.

And in a clumsy manoeuvre, characteristic of the coalition, as Cameron denied an inquiry his deputy Nick Clegg announced one. So, a win for Ed. And his line of argument that the moral examples set at the top – by bankers and by MPs – has an influence on everyone else is palpably true.

In a dog-eat-dog world why not rob a shop if you can. You’d be a fool not to, innit?

The difficulty for Labour is that its account of family starts and finishes with money. Tax credits. Social security. SureStart. Listen to most Labour politicians and you’ll start to think the only problem facing British families is the lack of money. Sort out income and you sort out everything? Really? There is no evidence for this, and the smarter younger generation of MPs like shadow health minister Liz Kendall get it.

Like Blair said, in social policy “what matters is what works”. Blanket universal benefits are too expensive, and don’t deliver substantial enough benefits. Targeted interventions do – but they focus on parenting, and behaviour. Back to socialisation and structures and expectations.

The paradox of all crime is that so few do so much damage. Study after study show that a small proportion of people commit the vast majority of crimes. It’s what bleeding heart liberals need to remember when they look at re-offending rates – those who go to prison are, by and large, already pretty bad people.

So, we finally come to diversion and early intervention and, of course, bump our shins again on Tony Blair.

I vividly remember a presentation in Chequers when the staff from the Dundee based family intervention project talked Blair through what they did and what they achieved. Tough women dealing with complex disadvantage, but with a compelling story of improvement and change. It was costly, but cost-effective. It was judgmental, but well-judged.

Labour bought it as an approach – and one of the perverse ironies of current events is to see and hear David Cameron swallowing his pride and advocating New Labour policies.

In one sense, who cares – a good policy is a good policy and if the Prime Minister wants to expand family intervention to reach the toughest 120,000 families, then it’s a good thing.

But in another sense, Cameron is in a real bind. Like Miliband, he explicitly rejected the New Labour, the Blairite, prescription on law and order. Too many targets. Too much interference in civil liberties. Yet, in the end, it is what works.

Yet, here’s the rub. Cameron and Miliband probably agree on urgent and radical family intervention. A good thing too, since it works. The problem is that neither of them has a coherent plan for financing it. The Prime Minister has set a huge target to be met by 2015, yet one of the many Blairite “abominations” he abandoned was “ring-fencing” of spending. So he cannot will the expansion of programmes, only wish it.

As for Ed, he’s is an equally tough bind. He can’t explain how to fund policies, because he can’t explain how he’d make public finances add up. A man with no tax and spend rules is in the end a man with no plan.

In the end, perversely, we have good policy – shared by both sides – but no ability to deliver it successfully because of paralysis in their political analysis.