On the day that Tony Blair announced his Respect agenda to the assembled media last month, Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, gave a speech about ‘Asbomania’. In it she argued that the government, in its desire to clean up our streets and meet out preventative justice, was adopting informal legal measures that ignored the very foundations of the British legal system. ‘Traditional criminal justice values… [such as] the presumption of innocence… are [now] neither fundamental [nor] inalienable,’ she said.
Liberty are like Marmite. You either love them for their heroic stance against an overbearing, would-be totalitarian government, or loathe them for leaping to the defence of any blinged-up, Burberry-clad inhabitant of Chavistan. However you feel about them though, Chakrabarti’s observation that the government is ever more inclined to reform the criminal justice system in order to achieve its goals of social harmony is undeniable.
And who, after all, can blame them? New Labour is in the invidious position of needing (at least to appear) to do something about our culture of disrespect and incivility, without actually being able to do that much about it. Tony Blair has said on countless occasions that he cannot clean up our streets personally from Whitehall. Notwithstanding his best efforts in the Respect Action Plan, the tools available to government are simply too blunt to deal with the micro-issues of our streets – the old lady knocked to the ground waiting for a bus, the abuse casually offered to a passer-by, the post-pub vomiting in a neighbour’s garden – let alone the reasons behind them. Attempts to develop new tools simply provoke the kind of criticisms that Chakrabarti levelled in her speech.
The government’s problems are, at least in part, its own fault. Years of over-promise and decades of centralisation have fooled the public into thinking that things can only get better. The tiny fly in the ointment – that there is nothing inevitable about social progress – has been ignored.
But it is also, more profoundly, a problem whose origins lie outside government. By and large, people are moral because of other people. They are respectful and civil not because they are told to be or threatened with consequences if they are not, but because of the relationships that form, guide and enthuse them. Respect is a function of relationship.
Our problem lies in the fact that our dominant culture of social and economic liberalism, in which the individual is sovereign, slowly dissolves those relational bonds that inspire and nourish our civility. The social/ cultural liberalism that has become the norm in Britain since the 1960s tells us that there are no social norms. You’ve got to ‘be yourself.’ You mustn’t let anyone else tell you who to be or what to do. The result is that things that are obviously immoral and/ or detrimental to our relationships and thereby to society as a whole – lad’s magazines’ attitude to women, the casual violence of many video games, the use of pimp iconography in advertising – are deemed acceptable. Because none of them can be shown to cause rape, crime or anti-social behaviour, none is culpable.
On the other side, economic liberalism, which sees the market as ethically neutral and recognises no value outside profit, has an equally invidious affect, promoting a culture of personalised hypermobility (i.e. heavy car use) that dislocates families and poisons public space, of unregulated capital flow, which destabilises communities, and of massive consumer debt, which wrecks lives in a manner only bettered by drink and drugs.
Our obsession with GDP, in spite of the fact that it now no longer correlates to our happiness, compounds the matter. Criminal activity (money spent on locks, alarms, surveillance equipment, etc) and divorce (money spent on lawyers, estate agents, new properties, etc) are good for GDP. Cohesive families, in which parents care for children and/ or other relatives at home, use public transport rather than the car, and avoid debt wherever possible, are generally bad for it.
These twin problems lie behind the breakdown of respect in our society and no number of government gimmicks – three quarters of Church Times readers who responded thought that the Respect Action Plan was ‘just a gimmick’ – will change that. Respect and civility only flourish in a shared cultural and ethical framework. Without that, things can only get worse.
The real problem facing government is that establishing that framework is not only a long-term goal, but one that demands a fundamental reorientation of our values. We need to stop seeing the individual as sovereign and start recognising that the individual only becomes a person by being in relationship (to paraphrase John MacMurray, one of the Prime Minister’s favourite philosophers), and that therefore relationships are at least as important as personal liberty.
We need to stop thinking so much about how we can attain personal goals and think instead about how might achieve the common good. We need to oust the word ‘freedom’ from its position as rhetorical trump card and re-establish the credentials of others, such as shame, honour, reputation, pride, and decency. We need to oust GDP from its position as the only acceptable metric of progress and establish the credential of others, like the New Economic Foundation’s MDP, Measurement of Domestic Progress.
Only then will the policies that we already know we need to implement – toughening advertising and broadcasting standards, tightening up credit legislation, attacking the grocery monopolies, strengthening marriage, recapturing public space for the public – become implementable.
Until then, respect action plans will come and go, ‘the utter bloody rudeness of everyday life,’ to use Lynn Truss’s recent phrase, will increase, and Liberty will be kept busy monitoring and critiquing governments’ successive attempts to micro-manage the problem away.
This article first appeared in the Church Times.
