Back to Basics was a political campaign announced by British Prime Minister John Major at the Conservative Party conference of 1993 in Blackpool. Though it was intended as a nostalgic appeal to traditional values such as "neighbourliness, decency, courtesy", the campaign was widely interpreted in the media as a campaign for socially conservative causes such as the traditional family. It became the subject of ridicule when a succession of Conservative politicians were caught up in scandals. Context The previous year of Major's premiership had been beset by infighting within the Conservative party on the issue of Europe, including rebellions in several Parliamentary votes on the Maastricht Treaty. He was also dealing with the fallout from the Black Wednesday economic debacle of September 1992. John Major's speech Major's speech, delivered on 8 October 1993, began by noting the disagreements over Europe: Major then changed the subject to "a world that sometimes seems to be changing too fast for comfort". He attacked many of the changes in Britain since the Second World War, singling out developments in housing, education, and criminal justice. He then continued: Major mentioned the phrase once again near the conclusion of his speech: Media reaction During 1993, Britain was going through what has been characterised as a moral panic on the issue of single mothers. Government ministers regularly made speeches on the issue, such as John Redwood's condemnation of "young women [who] have babies with no apparent intention of even trying marriage or a stable relationship with the father of the child" from July 1993, and Peter Lilley's characterisation of single mothers as "benefit-driven" and "undeserving" from the same year. The murder of James Bulger earlier in 1993, by two young boys from single-parent families, served to intensify the media frenzy. Apart from some generic platitudes about families and self-reliance, Major's speech said nothing specific about sexual behaviour or single motherhood. On 6 January 1994, Major explicitly stated that the campaign was not "a crusade about personal morality". Despite this, the "Back to Basics" campaign was widely interpreted by the media as including a "family values" component. According to Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson: Writing in his diary shortly after and in reference to the Michael Brown story (Brown being a government whip who resigned in 1994 in the wake of newspaper revelations that he had taken a trip to Barbados with a 20-year-old man), Piers Morgan, who