Cameron on Black Fathers

Cameron has jumped feet first into the debate about black fathers. I have to say it makes me a little uneasy, an Old Etonian presuming to comment on an issue about which he has little experience and even less understanding. In an age when the political imperative seems to be to score points by finding simple solutions to complex problems, my view is that the last thing politicians should be doing is moralising. Actually Dave, what we want are political solutions not moral ones. Now don't get me wrong, of course there are moral issues - and solutions have to take account of the moral landscape, but this constant need to find someone to blame worries me. He does touch on poverty and education, though his comment that "mobility has to be unblocked by a revolution in secondary education where you have got to bust open the monopoly of the state system..." should sound alarm bells for all of us who care about education.

Last week I attended a conference for academics in the field of youth and community work. Bernard Davies raised a number of important issues with regard to the political landscape, some of which I will return to. But he struck a chord with me when he bemoaned the fact that we no longer talked about race equality but rather 'community cohesion'. A friend of mine, who has been in the Race Equality field for years, just got a job, doing what he has always done, as a community cohesion officer. Hmmmm, the power of language in helping us side step difficult issues!

At the same conference I attended a shocking workshop highlighting the discrimination still faced by black students in HE, something else I will return to having naively thought things may have changed.

So, getting back to Cameron, if he has to start moralising I would have a lot more respect for him if he did so in a context that acknowledged the racism so many black people still face and looked at serious policies to tackle poverty and an education system that condemns some of our most vulnerable young people to failure. Now those are all issues politics can tackle head on.