Public standards have fallen far enough - the remoralisation of politics is overdue

by Richard Harries

05 March 2025

Shortly before the 2024 general election, Keir Starmer said that action to prevent knife crime was a ‘moral mission’. Not long before that Rishi Sunak had described the infected blood scandal as ‘a decades-long moral failure at the heart of our national life’. What was unusual about those two statements was the use of the word ‘moral’. For decades we have shied away from using it in our public discourse for fear of being thought judgemental or found to be hypocritical. But with the new government and its sense of serious purpose perhaps the time has come to acknowledge that this presupposes a sense of moral purpose.