The only way to finally end anti social behaviour is to re-forge the bonds of society. In so doing, Labour can radically improve the lives of the people it is pledged to serve and achieve an ironclad legacy that no opposition party could unpick in any single term of office. Mrs Thatcher infamously said there was no such thing as society. Labour’s legacy must be a living monument that refutes that.
Why target anti-social behaviour? It is an issue that troubles people across the political spectrum. True blue Tories and Labour heartland voters, the salon and the public bar alike agree that they no longer feel in control of their streets. Some liberals wrongly think that anti-social behaviour is a ‘wedge’ issue for the right. They fear that by acknowledging its importance we leave the door open to a larger anti-liberal agenda. They could not be more misguided. Not only is anti-social behaviour a legitimate concern to Labour’s core supporters, but to solve it (and we have the broad consent of the electorate to do so) we must re-engineer the bonds of our society to restore solidarity – surely the sovereign Labour virtue?
This is no place to give a detailed social history of the post-industrial age. Suffice it to say we have moved from a customary, settled and value-laden set of social relations to a set characterised by alienation, isolation and incessant mobility. In doing so, we have won many of our dearest freedoms. But have we also lost our sense of what I shall call social repose. Our home is not just bricks and mortar. It is our neighbourhood. It is our comfort in the daily transactions of greetings, of buying the newspaper, of nodding at others in park, as we go about our business. Nor is a pleasant life all that is at stake.
The lack of such social bonds leads to anti-social behaviour.
Let us conduct a thought experiment. Imagine it is, say, 18 December. You are a man coming home half cut (yes, you!) from a Christmas party. The streets are quiet but not deserted. You are nearing home but have been caught short. You desperately want to urinate. What inhibits you from going in the street more: the general embarrassment of someone seeing you or the very particular embarrassment of a neighbour who knows you by name seeing you? What would you say to them the next day? Exactly. It is harder to commit sins against individuals than the abstract mass of society. Why do you think teachers who see pupils abusing school property say ‘would you do that at home?’ They know that even children make an instinctive distinction between someone’s property and anybody’s property.
Similarly, think of those figures of rectitude that guiltlessly filch canteen cutlery, but who would simply never even think about taking cutlery from a friend’s house when visiting for dinner.
We have to face the facts. Not enough people will properly regulate their behaviour against the spectre of an abstract body of opinion. People will largely curb their behaviour for the shame of upsetting specific people.
However, in the modern age, with frequent movements (if not us then our neighbours) and without the shared local ministries of church, of public house, regular beat policeman and the whole panoply of little platoons, we no longer have the automatic knitting together of people who live near each other.
Your neighbour is a stranger.
But can we really create sufficient social capacity by trying to resurrect the old fashioned geographical neighbourhood? Modern networks of friends exist and flourish outside the spatial plane. For many in London, for example, the diagrammatic tube map, and station dots where their friends live, is their ‘neighbourhood’, in a far more operative sense than the collection of streets near the house that they happen to live in for a year or two.
The solution is not in trying to foster ‘traditional’ community structures in soil that has grown too shallow to support them. Ironically, the answer may lie even further back in history. Here is an idea to conjure with.
The Anglo-Saxons had a system of tithings and tithingmen. This, in some ways, was the basic, atomic unit of society instead of the individual. Like a citizen’s chain gang, ten people were bound together and accountable for each other’s behaviour. Insufferable, you may think. A gross imposition. But imagine it for a moment. Just like a jury is randomly selected to judge the behaviour of another after a crime is committed, a tithe (a permanent, inward looking jury of peers) could monitor each other’s behaviour before any crime in committed.
The present practice is right – it is just that juries are needed before and not after the fact of a crime.
We do all sink or swim together. We are all of us are bound to each other. Making that apparent by knitting the fates of small groups of ten randomly chosen individuals together simply makes it easier for everyone to understand that elementary fact. This proposal makes the social contract concrete. Imagine one of your ‘tithees’ has a drug problem. Immediately, you are called on to take a constructive attitude to encourage them out of a cycle of despair and theft. Instead of talking about inhuman hoards who are drug addicts, you find that your own best interests demand that you take a hand. Now, of course, we would need safeguards to protect those who had taken all reasonable steps to look after someone set up self destruction. Besides, we are talking here of supervision, not executive action.
It would be the role of a ‘tithing’ to call their fellows, ask how they are, maybe even all meet up regularly, and if there was anything wrong, to alert the proper agencies. The very randomness of the groupings would stitch together rich and poor, all diversities into a new set of ‘families’.
There was a theory in the renaissance, that any drop of water taken from an ocean contained all the elements of the whole sea, in exactly the same proportion. So it is with our society. While we cannot legislate from the top to rebuild the bonds between people en masse, we can forge strong droplets and thus make the sea whole.