Daring to agree about our moral sickness

I HAD planned a column for today on the Citizen's Charter. Then I thought I would write about Labour's terror that the Mirror was deserting it. But wherever you go, whoever you talk to, there is only one subject that interests people at the moment. The murder of James Bulger hangs over the whole country like a dark cloud. It has invaded the dreams of strangers and made newspaper readers cry. It sticks in the mind.

These other subjects can wait: what do new consumer rights or newspaper battles matter compared with the creeping belief that the country's social morality has fallen apart? Partly because of the accident of poignant video footage, the last hours of a two-year-old from Liverpool have come to symbolise a wider sickness. After a succession of savage murders and rapes, themselves the human emblems of the statistics of rising violence, the Bulger killing has already become one of those incidents that we notch in our minds, measuring society's descent. It is as significant in that way as the Moors Murders or the Yorkshire Ripper killings.

And yes we know, most of us, that the statistics are slippery; that rape figures are swollen by a greater readiness to report the crime; that Britain is less violent than many comparable countries; and that the lost Fifties Eden of comparative tranquillity was itself a historical rarity. We know all that. Even so, the days when smirking politicians and nasal social scientists could persuade us that nothing much was wrong have gone for ever.

And knowing that something is wrong, we reject, most of us, the glib jabber of the party political explanations. The collapse in traditional values during the Sixties was something to do with it. The more extreme examples of Thatcherite neo-liberalism were, too. Mass unemployment, today's scourge, a destroyer of families and individual morale, is part of the problem. All of those explanations are true; each, by itself, is a politician's lie.

Any analysis must also include the ebb of religious faith - Matthew Arnold's 'melancholy, long, withdrawing roar' - and its effect on individual behaviour. For a while, and among some people only, socialism seemed to provide a secular alternative. But socialism, having suffered its own schisms, heresies, false Popes and Inquisition, has lost all authority.

These may seem high-falutin responses to a murder. Nearer-to-hand explanations about video culture, Hollywood, even the latest generation of computer games, are important. But to talk about them, you need an agreed moral framework first.

It must start with individuals and families, because leaders have so little moral authority. Relying on the public conscience is not a counsel of despair. In early Victorian London, child prostitution and child murder were common. The public knew all right, but the public didn't feel. There was no overnight revolution; but the cult of childhood and many genuine advances were spurred by Charles Dickens and other writers. In a sense, a remote-control security camera in a bleak Bootle arcade is the Dickens of our day.

If our consciences are stirred, we can start to have a more serious debate about morality, crime and the duties of citizens. But here we quickly re-enter the political world. There can be no effective civic or secular morality which is kicked casually, even cynically, between the parties. A disputed morality is a weak one.

This is a proper subject for politics, which is, after all, more than the mundane business of getting and spending. It is also a kind of social poetry, expressing the dreams and fears of voters. Its performers are responsible not only for the electoral success or failure of their parties - the rule by which they are generally judged - but for how they articulate those dreams. To speak with effect, today's discredited leaders would need imagination and humility. But if not politicians, who?

This is something that, finally, politicians of the right and left are starting to think about. Tony Blair (and I break a confidence here, for which apologies) has been worrying about whether politicians such as himself will attract ridicule, or be misunderstood, if they start speaking openly about moral decadence. He has decided to risk it, and makes such a speech today. Douglas Hurd has addressed similar questions, from a different viewpoint (though not that different).

The first requirement of such a debate, if it is to be serious, is that politicians of the left and right find some basic agreement from which a national consensus could arise. And the good news is that some are inching towards a common analysis, as Labour becomes more moralistic and some Tories start thinking more socially.

On Channel 4 News on 4 February, Mr Blair responded to the Prime Minister's extraordinary speech blaming inner-city socialists for rising crime, by arguing: 'We need to get away from the approach that says it's either all society's fault or it's all a matter of individual responsibility, and we need a new approach.' There had to be individual punishment and renewed assaults on bad housing, poor training, etc. And Kenneth Clarke, the Home Secretary, responded: 'We are in danger of agreeing on the analysis.'

Hallelujah] This may not be a giant intellectual breakthrough. But it is something on which serious politicians could build. For this is either a political issue, or it is something we can only retreat from into private depression. It is, in the end, a rather practical, down-to-earth matter. It is, in the end, about self-preservation.