After last week’s Cabinet meeting in which the Government finalised its legislative programme for the forthcoming Parliament, Prime Minister Blair made a widely-reported speech. In it, he declared that, among the objectives of his new term of office, paramount would be the introduction of new legislative measures designed to curb growing yobbishness and unruliness, particularly among the young.
Blair characterised this element of his programme as one designed to restore a culture of respect. Having been quick to admit that the objective was not one any government could be expected to achieve single-handedly, he called for a debate on how best others could join with government in helping to achieve it.
Judged by the column inches that have been devoted to this subject in the press since his speech, Blair’s call for such a debate can be judged a resounding success. This is more than is likely to be able to be said for the legislative measures announced in the Queen’s Speech to tackle the problem, according to much of this comment.
A growing consensus is emerging that Blair’s proposed measures to tackle unruliness will prove of little effect or even counter-productive. This is because, so claim his critics of which I am one, they do nothing to reverse the chief underlying cause of the unruliness. This has been the steady collapse of the two-parent family which best socialises children to enjoy the greatest chance of staying out of trouble.
There is another flaw in Blair’s remarks to which, so far as I am aware, commentators have yet to draw attention. If allowed to stand uncorrected, it threatens to vitiate whatever measures his government should take to curb unruliness informed by it.
That flaw is the wholly unwarranted distinction Blair drew in his speech between such respect towards others, as he wishes to see become the mutually expected norm of behaviour among members of society, and any forms of deference by anyone to anyone all forms of which, Blair seems to suggest, belong to a bygone age of prejudice that society has rightly moved beyond.
Blair draws this fallacious distinction when he observes that: ‘People [today] like a society that is less deferential. They want a society free from old prejudices... But a loss of deference is very different from a loss of respect for other people.”
Doubtless, Blair is right that, in the past, some forms of deference have been called for by people who have had forms of prejudices society is better off people no longer having.
However, that some forms of deference are misplaced and unwarranted does not mean that they all are.
Nor does it mean that the respect we should consider is due to others can or should be given in appropriate measure without appropriate forms of deference being extended to others according to their status.
With use of the term, "status", we finally reach the nub of the issue.
Being politically correct new Labour, what Blair wants from members of society is a democratic strictly equal measure of respect for each from all, regardless of their rank or status. That the measure of respect towards others that should be supposed appropriate be an equal one, regardless of people’s differing physical and moral attributes, is a wholly fallacious, morally unwarranted and even positively pernicious and dangerous egalitarian dogma.
In the same way that, ceteris paribus, the able-bodied young should defer to the elderly and infirm by allowing them to take precedence and take the only remaining seat in a crowded underground railway carriage, those who have previously exhibited great moral or physical courage or genuine great self-sacrifice are, ceteris paribus, deserving of being treated by others with more deference and greater respect than those whose moral achievements are less heroic or saintly.
Deference to age, wisdom, and virtue are wholly in order. Until this moral fact is seen and accepted by all in authority, no one in it is ever going to be able to solve the problem of social unruliness.
It is not less social deference that is needed but more.
Even our present-day young robbin hoods, the subject of current concerns in relation to unruliness, are not immune to feelings involving deference, as is indicated by their pathetic proneness to suffer misplaced bouts of anger at the perceived failure of their peers to extend towards them the appropriate degree of ‘’spec’’ they consider to be their due.
What is so wrong with their behaviour is not that it is governed by such hierarchical considerations of social rank, but that they have such a morally impoverished notion of what is deserving of deference, confining the qualifying qualities to nothing besides physical bravado, cunning, and disrespect for authority.
Those in authority will continue to fail to elicit from that quarter any respect for themselves or anyone else, unless and until both they and everyone else in ‘respectable’ society are prepared once more to treat people with the varying degrees of respect and deference they are due according to their standing in a moral hierarchy in which people are by no means all on exactly moral par with each other.
In sum, respect and deference are things that people have to earn and receive from others by their moral and other worthwhile achievements. They are not things that can be conferred on everyone alike by ministerial fiat, any more than they can by the creation of some government funded equal respect and deference commission charged with statutory powers to require everyone to undergo respect-sensitivity training.
Comments (2)
This announcement on 'yobs' is only so much bunkum, on so many levels.
Firstly, I can't remember a time when security guards in private, roofed places did not make people take off their hats
Secondly, these children of Blair, risen under his regime, disregard 'respect' because they have received no respect. The law is ever more an arbitrary device that is not based upon reason, but upon whimsical caprice.
If a state rules with a rod of iron, rather than convincing citizens of the reason for cooperation in the joint endeavour of the nation, then they will receive the most minimal cooperation. Whenever the rules can be twisted or broken without repercussion, they shall.
We, the denizens of this state, have no real in-put into the running of our country, yet we are ever more controlled by overarching authority. This is the effect, not of oppression, but of 'domination' (Marion Young). We are not empowered, we are ruled.
If you want people to respect the rules, you have to give them a stake in them. 'Stakeholder Society' arose as a term at precisely the time it was taken away from us. We all know that the jury-rigged 'consultations' only favour those whom the government wants to be consulted - plain and simply.
Lastly, to be tough 'on the causes of crime' does not mean sending children to prison for dropping litter before they can progress to more serious crime, but thinking: Why are these kids hanging around on street corners or in malls? Is there no where else for them to go? Being tough on the causes of crime means opening up a youth drop-in centre in Bluewater where regular members of staff can build up a dialogue with the kids to help provide for their needs which would make the kids better understand the needs of others and stop them loitering pointlessly.
Why do I feel that these continual press annoucements are just a way of creating a one-way dialgoue with 'the people' (ala Mussolini) and of sowing fear and dissent, giving Labour both popularity and power?
Posted by Chas | May 23, 2005 11:12 PM
Posted on May 23, 2005 23:12
You are right to say that one of the contributory factos in the decline in respect has been the decline of marriage etc. Yet, there are other contextual cultural factors which are having an equally important affect. The role of the popular media and its relentless obsession with celebrity etc is creating a cultural context in which the totemic symbols which define our culture are at best ambiguous in relation to the fostering of culture of respect and at worst profoundly inimical to it.
Posted by James | May 23, 2005 4:55 PM
Posted on May 23, 2005 16:55