“Police have lost control of the streets, the forces’ watchdog warns as new figures show that an estimated 14 million incidents of anti-social behaviour take place each year – one every two seconds.” This was the solemn report in the Daily Telegraph recently following statements by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary that anti-social behaviour has become a national disease, leaving many town and city centres as virtual no-go areas for many people on Friday and Saturday nights.
“Broken Britain” was a central theme of the Conservative Party’s 2010 general election campaign and has been a regular talking point in the columns of the right-wing press for some time. Their explanations for the nation’s travails are predictable: the decline of traditional institutions and authority, the lack of discipline in schools and excessive state handouts. Their solutions are equally familiar: lower welfare payments, reduced dependency on the state, police hands freed from red tape and the further diminution of remaining trade union influence.
Right-wing columnists such as Simon Heffer and Peter Hitchens have been fulminating for years about rights above responsibilities, the denigration of middle class values, the culture of state dependence and even the abolition of Britain.
It’s easy to jeer at all this as the over-excited over-exaggeration of aging reactionaries and tabloid sensationalists. However, they are right about one thing. Britain is broken – brutally so – and it is getting more damaged every day.
Those on the left should accept that anti-social behaviour is on the increase in this country and the crime rate is unacceptably high. Meanwhile, the national character is seen as one of surliness, aggression, resentfulness and general lack of decency.
We cannot continue to insist that all is well. This would leave the political initiative in the hands of the right when what we need is a proper analysis of the situation and the policy prescriptions that will genuinely lead to a better, fairer, more decent and more just society. Sadly, such policies are scoffed at by the Tories, ignored by the Liberal Democrats and have been abandoned by the Labour Party.
The right has already outlined what it intends to do. David Cameron may seek to disguise this by passing himself off as a “one-nation” Conservative, pontificating about the “Big Society” and insisting that we’re all in it together, but the course is clear. The right in Britain wants this country to become more like the United States.
What they seem incapable of grasping is that Britain already is quite like the US, but not in some of its more positive aspects, such as the egalitarianism that comes from being a nation of immigrants.
What the right wants, but what we truly do not need, are more of the state cutbacks and union busting that caused so much pain and devastation when they were implemented by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In fact, if we are serious about repairing the nation’s social fabric, we must end the alienation and anomie that is the legacy of the ’80s. We need to turn the tide on Britain’s social decline by once and for all moving from free-market economics to a social market model. We need to get back to what social democracy should be all about: creating a more cohesive and inclusive society by giving people a meaningful stake in it.
We are looking in the wrong direction if we look to the other side of the Atlantic for inspiration to achieve these ends. Rather, we should take as our example counties across the English Channel and the North Sea. These are the nations that have empowered their people and provided a more just way of life. No neo-liberal administration has backtracked on the gains of social democracy and the trade union movement, and these countries are better off as a result.
When cross-country comparisons of this kind are made, the right’s explanations for the causes of our social collapse are exposed as deeply flawed. The limited government and low unionisation approach is no recipe for social cohesion. The social fabric of the US is torn. It puts record numbers of people in prison. Crime rates in its inner-city areas are on a par with those in the slums of Brazil. Rates of HIV infection in some areas of the US are comparable with those in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Is it coincidence that many countries beset by social deprivation and unrest have records of hostility to such social democratic institutions as unionised workforces and workplaces? Britain has the lowest social investment in Europe, while the American right seeks to stall the development of even a watered-down version of European social democracy. This has severe social and economic consequences.
With its concentration of power and decision-making in the hands of chief executives and stockholders, the Anglo-American model has facilitated social collapse. Elsewhere, worker participation and social investment has meant healthier and happier societies. In the workplaces and the schools of these countries, there is dispersion of power and encouragement of people to take greater control of their lives, which is promoted by the social and economic set-up.
This is the approach propounded by Dr Herbert Henzler of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University. He wrote: “Laws on co-determination, combined with a tradition of patriarchal concern, have made European chief executives deeply committed to their employees, treating them more like partners in a long-term enterprise than anonymous factors of production.”
Could this be the explanation for the more cohesive societies in continental Europe, where people are more courteous and civilised? And should it be a surprise that studies into national well-being show that those countries with high levels of unionisation and social spending, particularly the Nordic nations, rank consistently at the top?
This continental model of empowering people is not confined to the workplace. It expresses itself in the general quality of life. A bullying reduction programme for schools devised in Norway and Sweden in the 1980s has been effective in improving the lives of both children and adults. The programme combines regular reviews and class meetings to discuss bullying with school-wide assemblies and training to raise awareness.
It is worth noting how similar this is to the model of worker co-determination. It encourages people to come together, it asks people what they think and it promotes collective decision-making and problem-solving.
Rather than adopt such an enlightened approach, Britain has done with its schools what it is has done with its social model: It has gone for laissez-faire while having a top-down model of authority.
The result in the Nordic countries has been emotionally healthier children with autonomy and the right to have a say in their school’s policy. Meanwhile, Britain’s children, like its adults, remain alienated in a world of concentrated authority.
Along with our lower public investment, this is surely the reason why our children behave so poorly. The discrepancy was strikingly apparent when Unicef’s study into child well-being in rich nations was published in 2007. Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland all ranked in the top six. The United Kingdom was bottom of the 18 countries surveyed.
Perhaps what is most worrying about the nature of the debate over Britain’s broken society is that it is so one-sided. Only the right is taking part. The left must no longer exclude itself from the discussion. The Tories may be the only ones talking about broken Britain, but, far from being the people to repair, it, their policies will turn this country into an even more broken society than it has already become.
