Respect cannot be learned, purchased or acquired – it can only be earned
- Government Respect website [1]

So goes the government Respect website – with all the furrowed brow earnestness of an MTV rap artist in close-up. The New Labour government has seen fit to deploy the resources of public administration for the task of raising the ‘respect’ barometer nationally. A crisis of respect allegedly stalks our country. On council estates, city streets, in schools and hospitals people are exhibiting a basic lack of regard for one another. This expresses itself in rudeness, aggression, mistrust and contempt towards intimates, strangers, people in positions of authority, people who are culturally, ethnically and racially different, as well as personal property and the physical environment. In short anyone and everything can be – and currently is – an object of disrespect.

According to the government the origins of this crisis are essentially cultural and moral. Even if we might be able to trace our more fragmented society – in which common bonds of understanding and shared projects have become harder to achieve – to structural changes, the effects are nonetheless cultural and moral. As with so much government activity on this front, the real concern is with the behaviour and attitudes of a so-called underclass comprised of feral children, teenage mums, hooded youth, and drink-sodden, neglectful parents. As Anthony Giddens (1998: 147) says of this cultural demoralisation: ‘the social influences creating underclasses are structural before they are cultural, but once in play they may bring cultural demoralization of a profound kind’. In the era of TINA (There Is No Alternative), however, government has given up on the notion that it might do anything about causes – so it misdiagnoses effects and treats them as if they were causes, thereby appearing at least to be doing something.

Basically, then, the ‘decline-in-respect-thesis’ goes something like this: the welfare policies of the post-war era, right up to and including the John Major years, had been indifferent to the changing structures of deprivation and the combined effects of deindustrialisation and family and community breakdown. Having long ceased to be a necessary stop-gap for economically lean periods, carrying a useful hint of shame, state benefits were now maintaining a separate moral universe of chaotic, deviant families for whom honest graft was as alien as thongs to Eskimos. A cultural individualism born of post-1960s permissiveness had worked to loosen the bonds of social solidarity and cohesion, undermined traditional family structures, obliterated horizontal forms of social control and diminished respect for established sources of authority. Moreover, technological advances, the rise in consumer spending and policies of privatisation were each in different ways contributing to the extension of the market into domains of social life previously regarded as off-limits. Factor in globalisation, the 1980s property boom, progressive education and the widespread availability and use of class A illegal drugs in deprived neighbourhoods for the first time and you now have a society of antisocial individuals caring only for personal gratification and the advancement of individual rights.

This cultural sea-change has thus worked to wash away any remnants of the basic social capital and trust required to bind disparate members of a community together. For the law abiding, hard working majority, however, this isn’t such a problem. We pay our taxes, watch our property values, scan the Ofsted school reports and league tables, and ensure our own children are well provided for in terms of cultural capital. Atomised we may be, and politically quiescent, but ‘communities’ are neighborhoods in which the poor, people of colour and those who pray to the East live – even if, confusingly, we also live in such places. We don’t need the mutuality and respect conferred by the label ‘community’, for we have friends and shared interests. ‘Community’ is what you leave once you have enough money to buy your own place.

Luckily the governing class, who know a thing or two about what communities need despite not actually living in them, is willing and able to administer a course of therapeutics that will counteract atomisation. New Labour seeks to facilitate the process of respect’s reinsertion in demoralised lives. In taking personal responsibility for (anonymously) phoning the authorities – so that the latter can use their summary powers against the children making noise outside people’s windows – ‘communities’ can both experience the warm glow of self-respect and start to feel less atomised. And once they have started with children, who knows, they might then feel emboldened to encourage the authorities to do something about all those other undesirables in the neighbourhood, such as beggars, drug users and unemployed asylum seekers, ruining the aesthetic appearance of things. And how about sending drug sniffer dogs into schools and doing random urine tests? That will definitely earn the respect of all those sneering teenagers. Such acts of identifying, naming and getting the authorities to confront antisocial behavior is figured by those in government as the first steps toward galvanizing and healing fractured communities, regaining the confidence of the law abiding.

The respect agenda has piggy-backed on the community safety and antisocial behaviour agendas. Touchingly optimistic about the ability of a new catchphrase to capture the imagination of the British public – and desperate for new ways to shore up its fragile legitimacy – New Labour has now fixed on ‘respect’. One of the reasons, presumably, is the semantic, cultural and generational reach of the word and the fact that in its vacuity it expresses something nobody in their right mind could possibly be against. Respect manages at once to sound firm and caring; it is both traditional and contemporary without the authoritarian overtones of antisocial behaviour.

Crucial areas of New Labour’s social policy are now starting to resemble the list of ‘Golden Rules’ tacked up on the playground walls of primary schools up and down the country: ‘be respectful’; ‘make others feel happy’… It would be funny – in fact it would be hilarious – if it wasn’t so depressing. Our government genuinely believes you can have a crusade for respect. You can see the ‘respect’ graffiti projects already: a thousand ‘wildstyle’ encomiums in splashes of brilliant Day-Glo to: ‘love yourself/positivity’ etc. Coming to a youth/community centre near you. You can just hear the sound of the rap/grime lyrics at a ‘respect’ event in the ‘community’: ‘don’ ass’ for respect till ya giv it, liv it…’ You get the picture. Anyway what am I talking about? That sort of thing has been going on in youth work and youth arts in the name of ‘inclusion’ for some time now.[2]

On the other hand, the hydra-headed thesis justifying New Labour’s attempt to remoralise society is grounded in some truth. We have become more individuated. Society is more fragmented. Some children are evidently not receiving the emotional care, nurturing, stimulation or education they require. Many are growing up in levels of material poverty that are a disgrace in a country as rich as ours. Only a fool could be blind to this fact. The quality of our public culture and political life is denuded. An extreme form of cultural egalitarianism has led to a cynical mistrust of all figures potentially bearing authority. And yet respect must rightly be earned.

In each of these domains New Labour is convinced that respect will only come about if the state itself mediates, formalises and monitors every ligature of interaction between parties. Individuals and groups, parents and children, can simply not be trusted. But an assumption that anyone who wishes to pass on the benefits of their learning and experience is operating either purely out of self-interest or is in some way committing an act of imperialism is misanthropic to say the least. New Labour oscillates between, on the one hand, ‘respect’ as the super-ego of community – the external force to whom the antisocial individual must submit – and, on the other hand, ‘respect’ for the sovereign will of the consumer who must never be prevailed upon by ‘producer interests’ lest they take their business elsewhere.

How does the respect agenda work in practice? First the target must be exhorted to modify their behaviour, and then they must be directly empowered and regulated to ensure that the behaviour is in line with norms, targets and benchmarks as set by central government. If agency is perceived as being absent, then agency will be enforced externally. The orthodoxy of today’s leftist cultural politics has also engendered a form of multiculturalism that Amartya Sen calls ‘plural monoculturalism’ and Zygmunt Bauman ‘multi-communitarianism’. Respect, at a cultural level, then, is wielded against those who would dare, whether through the written word or verbally, to pierce the thin skin of the sovereign ‘other’. New Labour’s support of faith schools and its courting of ‘cultural’ and ‘community’ leaders only serve to perpetuate this situation, despite its recent attacks on cultural separatism.

New Labour’s concept of respect betrays an administration that has nothing but contempt for people at all levels of society. It uses the rhetoric of democracy, localism and subsidiarity, but is in fact deeply authoritarian and paternalistic. Ordinary citizens cannot be trusted to solve the problems of living together informally; problems that have been exacerbated by the increasing privatisation and state surveillance of public space and the weakening of locally based civil institutions open to all groups and identities. A focus on lifestyles and preventative health measures exposes the way that ethics and performance have ousted morality in the lifeworlds of the governing class.

Ironically, Richard Sennett’s (2003) book Respect is often invoked approvingly in debates in government circles on the respect agenda. But New Labour’s respect agenda, in line with much of its public policy, is about making people ‘responsible’ and an idealised, one-sided notion of individual autonomy. This is in contrast to what Sennett attempted to do in his book, which was to ask the question: How might we forge a form of welfare that accepts that some people will need to be dependent on the state for material, practical and sometimes emotional services and support, whilst respecting – in how we work with such people – their indivisible dignity and autonomy? Welfare conditionality, targeting, close monitoring, means-testing, customer choice, combined with parenting orders and the like, are ways of coercing – if not shaming – people to be autonomous; autonomous in the sense of living independently of state support in a state approved manner. This has nothing to do with respect, but arises rather from one part puritan contempt for dependency, and one part belief that the new economy can no longer support a universal welfare state.

Respect in Sennett’s terms, rather than in New Labour’s, would require the resources for a radical improvement of the welfare infrastructure so many of us depend upon. It would require that nobody be expected to live on a sum of money way below their ability to meet basic needs. It would require welfare workers with the autonomy, education and personal agency to work developmentally and respectfully with the most disadvantaged in society. Not for the purposes of surveillance and lifestyle moralising, but for education, care and support. Crucially, such respectful relations between welfare professionals and clients should not be substitutes for, or simulacrums of, friendship, bonding and intimacy. As Sennett sees it, clients retain their autonomy and self-respect in relations with welfare professionals when the latter discharge their obligations to the former not as professional ‘friends’ but as ‘strangers’ whose motivation is impersonal duty rather than a desire for some form of Gemeinschaft (Sennet 2003: 196-200).

In social capital terms, Sennett is pointing to the desirability of promoting ‘bridging capital’ (ie bridges between strangers) over ‘bonding capital’ (Sennett 2003: 198). The latter, which emphasises intimacy, corresponds to New Labour’s taste for coaching, mentoring and counselling as methods of behaviour modification. Such an opposition usefully anatomises the important distinction to be made between more or less desirable forms of state intervention. Many teachers, GPs, social worker, nurses and youth workers see their role as providing public service in an imperfect world to whosoever happens to require it. Whilst their commitment might be total, it is not motivated by the desire to fill another’s emotional void or to run their life for them. Profound social atomisation and personal chaos require professional help, in extreme cases institutionalisation. But it should not be the role of welfare to pretend to solve or seek to finesse problems that are ultimately systemic in origin.

The tragic irony of New Labour’s approach to welfare is that they have introduced formality into aspects of the relationship between professionals and their clients that properly require informality whilst burdening the role of welfare with intrusive responsibilities that compel a disregard for the very notion of another’s right to privacy. The government’s presumption to deploy professionals and volunteers to inculcate respect between family members and others is the very opposite of respect. New Labour is sadly afflicted with the same anti-democratic tendencies GK Chesterton identified in Edwardian middle-class philanthropy and Fabianism a hundred years ago (Chesterton 2005). Enduring questions of political leadership, social solidarity, collective action and the socialisation and education of the young remain as compelling as ever. The government’s respect agenda has nothing of genuine value to contribute to efforts to confront these ongoing issues. Now an agenda for ‘trust’, that would be an interesting proposition…

Patrick Turner is a writer and researcher on youth issues

[1] http://www.respect.gov.uk/

[2] The Poetry Society run a ‘Poetry Slam’ competition for young would-be performance poets on the theme of respect

Chesterton, G.K. (2005). What’s Wrong with the World. McLean, Virginia, IndyPublisher (print to order)

Giddens, A. (1998). Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, Polity Press

Sennett, R. (2003). Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. London, Penguin/Allen Lane