The war against yobbish behaviour needs its armaments. Those necessary for the first skirmishes have now been put in place along the main battle lines around the country. This new armoury has been promoted under the trade names of acceptable behaviour contracts, antisocial behaviour orders and on-the-spot fines.
It is early days, but the successes hoped for from employing this new programme have not yet been fulfilled.
What is the genesis of the plague of disorder sweeping so many areas of the country? Voters find the peaceable kingdom in which they have lived for so long shattered by the brutal emergence of yob rule. Their demands for action have necessarily led the political high command to concentrate its attention on attempts to create some resemblance of order.
But unless the causes of the present discontent are analysed correctly, the yob insurgency will continue unabated – with every likelihood that it will escalate. In Neighbours from Hell: The Politics of Behaviour I set out what I believe to be the root cause of the astonishing transformation in the behaviour of many people. A significant number of families are now ceasing to teach their offspring the set of common decencies that underpinned the country in which most of us grew up.
Well-functioning families manage to strike a balance between each of the members. The self-importance of each is balanced by the self-importance of every other family member. An agreement is reached. Rules of engagement are satisfactorily negotiated, whereby the needs of any one member have to be offset against the needs of the other members of the household.
The self-respect of an individual is thereby intimately bound up with the
need to preserve the self-respect of other household members.
The social skills developed within the family are the very ones used to negotiate successfully engagement with the outside world. It is the failure of families to teach these skills, centring on the practice of common decencies, which is the root cause of neighbourhood disorder.
Britain did not become a peaceable kingdom by accident. A number of forces were at work, but none was greater than what is known as the evangelical revival. That revival transformed the character of the British nation. Individuals were taught a responsibility for their own actions, and the success in transforming the individual led to a culture of respectability sweeping much of the country before it.
There were, of course, important supplementary forces that helped to shape the character of English men and women. The mutually owned welfare state, pioneered by much of the labour movement, played a crucial part. The citing of causes for past success does not give us much of a clue on how that past success can be regained.
There is little or no possibility of a second evangelical revival sweeping the country. But the teaching role of that personal religion does need to be replicated by secular society if the present level of disorder is not to become irreversible within the confines of a free society.
Welfare and education are two universal services in our society that I believe must be developed into the two great teaching forces for acceptable behaviour. How this might be achieved is set out in more detail in Neighbours from Hell: The Politics of Behaviour.
The 1945 Attlee government had a very definite view of the nature of the welfare state it was establishing. Privileges and responsibilities were the name of the game. The idea of welfare being a right, which came automatically rather than being earned, was foreign, not only to the Labour party, but to the country as well. That is why a national insurance system, where eligibility is based on past contributions, was so popular then and remains popular today.
A key move the government must make is to return to the idea that there are no free tickets to the welfare feast. Our entrance has to be earned. I have suggested that at each stage when an individual signs on for benefit they will have explained to them that welfare is a contract. Society has decided quite properly that individuals in certain circumstances should be eligible for help. In return, that same society expects the individual to behave as a civilised member of the community.
Most people believe they are entering such a contract anyway, even though, as at present, they are not required to sign anything. But for others it would be a helpful reminder of the social highway code, which it is in everybody’s interest to maintain.
Making welfare based on contract would have to be introduced over time.
But this phased programme of reform should be accompanied by a major change when someone is born and thereby becomes a member of our society. When the British expeditionary force sailed for France in 1914, practically every soldier had been baptised and thereby welcomed into a wider community beyond that of the family. When our forces went to Iraq, over half of them had not been baptised.
I suggest, therefore, that the community ought to take over the publicly welcoming role that baptism played in the past.
Instead of registering the birth of a child as a hurried and private affair with a registrar, such a registration should be turned into a public welcoming service. Here the registrar would remind parents and the family that the outside community has a very real wish for the child’s life to be successful. An outline would be made of all the help society has pledged in order to bring this about. In return, parents would be reminded, in outline, of the duties of parenthood.
The idea of basing our relationship with society on a contract should be extended to schools. At the moment each parent is supposed to sign a contract with the school over their child’s education. It is a hurried affair and most young people I have spoken to cannot recall it let alone lay their hands
on the contract. I believe school contracts should become another major teaching weapon in the armoury against antisocial behaviour.
In one of Birkenhead’s secondary schools, I am beginning to work with pupils on what that contract should look like. The pupils accept that their parents and the school will rightly have a big say. But the pupils have very clear ideas on what they want. They want a safe school and one free of bullying. They also want to gain the social skills to be good employees. The pupils also question whether they should have the power to exclude pupils who disrupt the school.
It is already clear that school contracts could play a part in recreating a self-governing Britain, which would over time make all the sanctions against antisocial behaviour less and less relevant.