Earlier this year, the BBC broadcast a two-part documentary called The Death of Respect. It went out late and would have been missed by many. For those who did not see it, there was compelling evidence this week that the social decomposition chronicled in John Ware's programme is very real, when film of a Sheffield student relieving himself on a war memorial was shown in the same news bulletins that covered the murder of five British soldiers in Helmand. It's hard to think of a more offensive image than booze-fuelled urine flowing over poppies, on a day when courageous servicemen are being slaughtered in order, the Government claims, to keep the rest of us safe. Hard, but not impossible. The front-page story from my local newspaper, theBrentwood Gazette, came close: thieves stole the Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal collection box from St Thomas's church in the town centre. In the week of Remembrance Sunday, low-lifers had plumbed new depths. Do not tell me that these are isolated incidents. Anxiety over the collapse of respect in modern Britain is not, as some liberal sociologists would have us believe, the creation of news-hungry tabloids and suburban reactionaries. Examples of guttersnipery are all around: from unpleasant vulgarity (spitting and swearing) to the contempt with which a sleazy political class treats its electorate. We are, one fears, in danger of becoming inured to disrespect. On the way to the train station each day, I trudge past a trail of sweet wrappers, sandwich boxes and drink cans, discarded on the grass verge by children walking to school. Every morning they litter the streets, seemingly unaware of the mess piling up, while eating breakfast on the hoof. I once challenged a twerp who was poking an empty crisp bag into a neighbour's hedge. He seemed shocked that anyone would care. Litter is annoying, but in the grand scheme of a society that has traded personal responsibility for blame transfer, it is little more than a pointer to a deeper malaise: the corrosion of deference in our schools, the abandonment of manners on our streets and, yes, the death of respect for civility and integrity. We are close to the point where ethical behaviour is regarded as an affliction to be pitied, a loser's burden. In a piercing summary of what has gone wrong, Britain's Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, concludes: "Concepts like duty, obligation, responsibility and honour have come to seem antiquated and irrelevant. Emotions like guilt, shame, contrition and remorse have been deleted from our vocabulary, for are we not all entitled to self-esteem? The still, small voice of conscience is rarely heard these days. Conscience has been outsourced, delegated away." Indeed it has. Individual wrongdoings are, increasingly, an issue not for those concerned, but the state, which dishes out rights in return for unquestioning obeisance. In place of self-restraint, we have installed an all-embracing culture of grievance. Culprits have learnt to claim victim status. As the banking crisis and MPs' expenses scandal revealed, there is barely a distinction between legality and morality. Freedom means pursuing that with which it is possible to get away. If everyone else is gaming the system, only a mug would choose to do otherwise. When caught, the perpetrators point shamelessly to a failure by regulators. Soon after becoming prime minister, Tony Blair offered a fresh start for a modernised Britain. It was an attractive vision. He did not want, he said, his children brought up in a country where gangs of teenagers hung around street corners, doing nothing but abusing passers-by. "I tell you: a decent society is not based on rights," he said. "It is based on duty… the duty to show respect." No quibbles there, except that after 12 years of his New Labour project, the respect to which Mr Blair referred is in the sewer. Teachers who seek to reprimand offensive pupils are attacked by yobbish parents; train drivers who ask unruly gangs to get off are beaten up. A vulnerable mother kills herself and her disabled daughter after years of brutal abuse from thugs. This, I'm afraid, is the reality of contemporary Britain, a sprawling no-respect zone. According to a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research, Britain's teenagers are among the most badly behaved in Europe. It paints a picture of adolescents immersed in consumerism, who are drunk more often and involved in more fights than their Continental counterparts. The IPPR's explanation for our dismal record is a collapse in family and community life. In Italy, 93 per cent of 15-year-olds eat regularly with their parents; in Britain, it is just 64 per cent. We should not be surprised. The British state rewards unmarried mothers with a level of benefits most would be unable to earn in legal employment. They are incentivised to go solo. For Karen Matthews, who colluded in the kidnapping of her own daughter, Shannon, there was no right and wrong: just an economic decision, a perverse cost-benefit analysis. She worked out that having more children with a variety of fathers meant a rising tide of cash payments and handouts in kind. In her miserable milieu, self-respect and honour seemed like unaffordable luxuries. The same conclusion must have been reached by a neighbour and close friend of the family, who was jailed yesterday for benefit fraud. In establishing 40 "respect zones" to fight anti-social behaviour, Mr Blair's Government promised to provide "parenting classes" and other "family projects". This was, in part, a response to official figures showing that half of all anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) in England and Wales had been breached. What happened to that initiative? One senses little progress. Respect, of course, is a two-way process. For a system based on mutual respect to function properly, those at the top must show the way. This, sadly, is where our political leaders fall short. It's all very well ministers cooking up respect agendas for hoi polloi, whose votes they need, but how much respect is shown to those same people from on high? When Labour forced through its disastrous policy of mass immigration, what respect did it show to the millions of indigenous working-class voters whose communities would come under serious strain as a result? Did anyone explain the true consequences, rather than just the bogus benefits? And when David Cameron gave us a cast-iron guarantee that we would be able to vote on the ratification of a European Constitution (for that is what the Lisbon Treaty is) did he consider how disrespectful it would be to renege? Apparently not. Up his sleeve was the metaphorical small print. As bleak as it seems, Lord Sacks's prognosis is unavoidable: "Parliamentary reform and financial re-regulation will treat the symptoms, not the cause. Without conscience there can be no trust. Without a shared moral code there can be no free society. Either we recover the moral sense or we will find, too late, that in the name of liberty, we have lost our freedom."No respect, no morals, no trust - welcome to modern Britain
Our political leaders are falling short as we sink under a tide of vulgarity and sleaze, says Jeff Randall.
Thursday, 5 November 2009
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