Civility and social progress

Libby Purves concurs with Cameron's diagnosis of society in the Times today:

"As Mr Cameron said, there’s a lot we have started to shed responsibility for — public manners, civic pride, carrying a job through and taking the rap if we foul up. And the way has been led by a governmental and official culture of denying guilt and refusing ever to resign, and a mania for removing responsibility from individuals by hedging them in with restrictive rules. Head teachers, police, NHS staff, museum curators, officials of all sorts are made to spend far too much time in the tedious tasks of “accountability” (meaning form-filling and pretending to have hit imaginary “targets”). Individuals, meanwhile, fear to tackle nuisances in case they themselves are jumped on by the law."

Click here to read yesterday's civility speech in full (over 4500 words) or continue reading this post to see a few extracts. It brilliantly articulates some of the subtler, underlying problems with 21st century British society. The New Culture Forum has also covered the speech.

Deputy Editor

Civility

"A civilised society is a civil society - in the literal sense of being civil to one another. Civility is what builds the institutions and traditions that make our society strong. Civility is not something you can measure - like the size of the economy or the productivity of public services. Indeed, to me, this is a sign of its importance[...] We have come to assume - and to resign ourselves to the fact - that civility is on a permanent and inevitable downward slide. This is curious, since in other areas, we assume the opposite. We don't assume that the economy will get worse."

Infantilisation

"Think of the messages parents give children from an early age. Be careful. Don't do that. Do it this way. I'll do that for you. That seems to me a fair summary of most of the messages that government gives the public. We are infantilising people - treating them like children, with the result that many of us are behaving like children. Policy is made for the minority who do wrong rather than the majority who do right."

Reforming welfare

"We need to reform our welfare system so it encourages responsibility... reforming Incapacity Benefit, for example, so there are clear incentives to get people off it and into work wherever possible. We support the direction that the government is now taking on welfare reform. But we would be different in one crucial respect: we intend to place far greater emphasis on the small local organisations and social enterprises that can play such an effective role in getting people off welfare."

Neighbourhood institutions

"And we must remember too that the civic institutions that matter in our communities go well beyond local government. A community includes the sports club and the church, the charity and the local business, the school and the GP's surgery. It includes all the private associations that people form for public purposes - to clean up the streets, or look after the elderly, or give teenagers something to do. It is these neighbourhood institutions which, alongside local government, will help bring about the revolution in social responsibility that our country needs."

Stifling voluntary action

"Meanwhile people are prevented from engaging directly in their own communities by a host of laws and regulations designed to protect the vulnerable. The effect of these laws is to prevent the vulnerable from receiving the support they need from the community."

Comments

[Mark Fulford]

So I want to give people real control over what happens in their area: control over the way public services are delivered, the way planning decisions are made, and how public money is spent.

Local decision making leads to a postcode lottery. Will the media accept this? Will they let the government off the hook when some local services fail because some local people took the wrong decisions?

I hope so, but I doubt it.

I'm sure that David Cameron is sincere about this, but I fear that the media will corner him into revoking power where those powers led to bad decisions.

[Gospel of Enoch]

Decisions made locally eh? Good to see Dave adopting UKIP policy - and now he wants to be civil to everyone, he can't call us "closet racists" anymore - Hallelujah!

[Jon Gale]

Good speech - I recomend people read the whole thing.

[voreas06]

Your average person on the street sees manners as a pointless exercise only undertaken by foolish fops. so if someone knocks into me I will apologise, I know it is not my fault and even if the other person knows it is their fault 9 times out of 10 they will accept my apology without offering one of their own, it is almost like they believe they have won a little game of one-upmanship with me but in fact they have demonstrated they are neither a fair or reasonable person. This behaviour is even more likely if they are with friends or family as for some reason they believe they will lose face/respect if they are civil. I am not even talking about just teenagers this seems to be virtually everyone from middle aged women to children under 6. Manners need to make a comeback, civil behaviour needs to be rewarded (it is difficult to know how it would be achieved but perhaps we need a ministry of civility and fair-play that will fine a company for the rudeness of its employees and reward it if it acts civily and responsibly. The hope would then be that this behaviour would seep out into the community at large). Civility is not some relic from the time of empire it is the glue that holds society together.

[George Hinton]

Civility, good manners and standards of behaviour are sadly lacking from our present government. How can one give leadership and direction and expect good behaviour when we have Cabinet Ministers who brawl, commit serial adultery, abuse their position for personal gain, are serial liars, refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, are more concerned with ensuring their gravy train, rewrite history and gloss their actions, treat the electorate with contempt, take money for influence, pervert due process, ignore the laws and process of Parliament and Country and act as if the Robber Barons were still in power. And that folks, as we know, is only the prologue of the tale.
This country will take a long time to re-develop any semblance of good manners and civility, as decades of socialist dogma has insisted, that civility and good manners are part of the grand conspiracy to enslave them and keep them "working class".

[simon]

Well, i haven't read Cambo's lastest bull...speech on the topic, but a bullet-point made me laugh out loud:- 'stop being rude to shop assistants'! The only way that will happen is if shop assistants machete the next rude arrogant b*stard to 'try it on' ( and if gutless management throw the offenders out of the store)! Seriously, i know where he is coming from. In West Oxon there's a significant campaign by the polis to stamp on 'anti-social behaviour' led by their exemplerary commander Dennis Everenden. If only all police chiefs were like him...So , it all ties in with what is happening in Cambo's own constituency. Pity there's hardly any substance to the reports of the speech....

[Paul Oakley]

What we have lost is the old, unfashionable concept which actually worked: do unto others as you would be done by. The spread of the "rights" industry over the past two decades has had at its core the forceful assertion of selfishness no matter what.

[Sally Roberts]

voreas06 - I've had the same experience as you on many occasions! Even worse is the experience on a crowded tube when rudeness is the order of the day and if you challenge any behaviour you get four letter words and other insults in return! Even at times when the tube is less crowded, you get people putting their feet on the seats who think it is their inalienable right to do this and anyone who tells them not to is completely out of order! The word "sorry" is never used - people seem to be afraid that if they utter it they will somehow lose face. I honestly don't know what the answer is - but it clearly does not lie in more legislation!

[Bill]

Well said the above posters. But it is our politicians in general who created this mess. Manners are essentially about discipline and our politicians have undermined common sense, hierarchy and discipline in almost every aspect of our lives. And when they are not spoiling things for the rest of us, they don't universally set a great example for the rest of us with their do as I say not as I do attitude.

[Sally Roberts]

I think reality TV and soaps have contributed to the problem as well. In "Eastenders" the characters insult each other the whole time and aggression and general yobbishness is the order of the day. On "Big Brother" a contestant was bullied unmercifully because she behaved like a lady by three females who clearly were little better than trollops.

[Bill]

Well said Sally. I have hated Eastenders and its depressing theme tune ever since it started.

[David Sergeant]

"Policy is made for the minority who do wrong rather than the majority who do right."

This seems to me the fundemental point. Policy has been made in reaction to an issue, usually after a PR campaign by a minority that gets the publicity, in particular, soft interviews on the BBC. To go against this will require strong nerves.

It seems to me that a lot of the incivility is deliberate against the "unfair" society and Labour politicians regularly have encouraged this for years.

But, surely I can't be the only person who remembers Blair 8/9 years ago defending some of the scruffier actions of his government as "considering the many as opposed to the few".

However,