Despite the hours spent toiling over them, few of the speeches delivered by political leaders to their annual party conferences produce even a memorable phrase. Most pundits could, of course, name a few – Hugh Gaitskell’s promise to ‘fight, fight and fight again’ against the adherents of unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1959; Margaret Thatcher’s vow that ‘the lady’s not for turning’ in 1980; or, perhaps, Neil Kinnock’s attack on the far left in 1985, which began Labour’s slow return to sanity.
But on the steps of Downing Street the morning after his re-election, Tony Blair’s victory speech managed to evoke a distant echo of one of the few notable lines – ‘it is time to get back to basics’ – delivered by his predecessor, John Major. Rather than the piece of cheap moralising it was later seen to be (especially when the press contrasted the prime minister’s rhetoric with the rather colourful sexual antics of a number of his parliamentary colleagues), Major’s speech – which praised the ‘old values of neighbourliness, decency, courtesy … self-discipline, respect for the law and consideration for others’ – was more a reflection of the somewhat aimless nature of the Tory party at the time.
Having dispatched the trade unions, socialism at home and state socialism abroad, what dragons, after all, had Margaret Thatcher left for her successor to slay? Now, after eight years of great ambitions – from precise targets to cut world poverty to rather more vague pledges to make Britain ‘a young country once again’ – is Tony Blair, too, lowering his sights? For while the prime minister’s victory speech ticked all the domestic boxes that pollsters tell him are the voters’ priorities – keeping the economy strong, improving public services and tackling illegal immigration – he spent rather more time pondering the ‘disrespect that people don’t like’ that he had heard about on the campaign trail.
Since then, the ‘war on disrespect’ has been unleashed on several fronts: we have seen endorsements for shopping centre bans on ‘hoodies’; warm words for the notion that juvenile offenders should wear uniforms so that ‘justice can be seen to be done’; and even calls for more ‘structure’ to be restored to family life, with parents ensuring that proper bedtimes are enforced and mealtimes are shared by all the family. But is this a war that the government can win? Although the prime minister has elevated the issue of antisocial behaviour to a new level, it is hardly a new priority. Since it came to office in 1997 (when fast-track punishment of young offenders was one of its five ‘early pledges’), the government has developed an array of weapons to tackle antisocial behaviour, most notably the ASBO.
The problem, however, is that while ASBOs have proved electorally useful they appear to do little to allay public concerns, despite the fact that vandalism – the closest proxy for antisocial behaviour in the government’s crime statistics – has been dropping since the mid-1990s. Police seeking a suspect should perhaps look no further than the fourth estate: the number of mentions of the subject in the press has risen from virtually none in 1997 to nearly 1,500 a year in 2003. It is not simply the case that a government that has pledged to ‘listen and learn’ from the bloody nose inflicted on it by the voters is now none too keen to confront the public’s misconceptions.
As the next spending review approaches, it is clear that the government will not be able to sustain the kinds of increases in public spending that were a feature of its second term. Labour will need causes and, indeed, policies that either come a little cheaper than some of those it has championed so far or whose results, like waging war on disrespect, are somewhat more difficult to measure than exam scores or hospital waiting lists. But not really being able to measure success is a double-edged sword: the government is, to a degree, putting perceptions of its competence in the hands of the number of petty vandals, beer-swilling yobs and ‘hoodies’ that individual law-abiding Britons, their friends, families and acquaintances encounter between now and local election day next year. And the more the government talks about them, the more the public are likely to notice them. As John Major found, going ‘back to basics’ can have unexpected results.