Seldon Man
Monday, December 14th, 2009 | This post was written by Fiona MelvilleThis article in the Sunday Times about Anthony Seldon, the head of Wellington College, is fascinating. His head of wellbeing, Ian Morris, caused a certain amount of scepticism when he was first appointed, but points out this key insight:
“Traditionally, PHSE [personal, health and social education] has been about telling kids all the bad things to avoid — promiscuity, drugs, etc — instead of trying to get them to think about how they can make their lives better.”
This seems to me to be an absolutely fundamental part of how we need to approach policy-making more generally. Endlessly having people telling you that this is bad, that that is forbidden, that something else is dangerous just wears us down and makes us disengaged.
Encouraging people to try, to make the right choices, to take advantage of the situation they are in, and helping them to do so, is exactly what the Conservatives’ social revolution is all about.
Clearly it is not a given that this will work in every situation, for everyone. But for example, while there’s a lot of over-interpretation of the marriage tax bonus (this article, also in the Sunday Times, tries to invent a revolt – but every single quote from those supposedly revolting MPs who are named could be said by David Cameron or indeed me), what the Tories want to do is not moralise, or stigmatise, but to support people who make good choices for their own lives, and help those who, for whatever reason, don’t.
I get the impression that a lot of people are deeply cynical about whether the Tories mean what they say on such policies, and whether there is any point in them. But the point of the hugely ambitious Tory social revolution is not to shoehorn everyone into little boxes. It is to free and support people to make the very best that they can of their lives.
So that insight from Ian Morris, of the value of help to make good choices rather than just telling people not to make bad ones, is actually the key Conservative insight into human behaviour, and the fundamental requirement if we really want to change the way our society functions.
And it has the added bonus of lightening the seemingly never-ending doom and gloom to enable that sense of optimism – which is what Tory members voted for when we chose David Cameron as leader.
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