An examination of the Swedish soul must begin, I’m afraid, with sex. Not Volvo, not IKEA, not Alfa Laval nor H&M. Not Strindberg nor Dagerman nor even Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking. Not the welfare state, not income equality nor criminal justice. Not the Lutheran Church nor collective bargaining. Not the Vikings nor 200 years without war. It’s that three letter word—and the half-myth about Swedish promiscuity—that is our starting point.
The town I live in, Lund, across the bridge from Copenhagen, hosts not only Scandinavia’s oldest university and cathedral, it is full of high-tech companies including some of the ones mentioned above and many computer technology, biotech and pharmaceutical start-ups. It is where I have lived for the last eight years. It hosts thousand of students and the weekends are notoriously wild. But the students are bright and after I’ve given a lecture I like to take those who want to out for a drink.
Citizenship First: The Case for compulsory civic service
Service as a rite of passage
9th March 2009
There are three recurring discussions I have with taxi drivers as I travel around the country- the weather (usually grey), where I’m from (Wakefield) and the state of the youth of today (the top two solutions proposed by most drivers being national service or bringing back the birch!)
It was during such a journey that I considered the need for a third response to the ‘youth of today’; what is it that makes a young person a citizen and how can this be made real for them? I asked myself do we need a modern day rite of passage; acknowledging the journey from youth to adulthood in some way that gives the individual that sense of transition and arrival in a new emotional place in the world? The keys to the pub as it were.
It was in this vein that myself and Dr Howard Williamson, Professor of European Youth Policy at the University of Glamorgan, had one of our many conversations about the real need for a youth transition initiative. Howard had written a paper in 1997 and together we refreshed it in 2002 on the basis of our debate. As pointed out in the paper, this debate is not new. In the 1980’s as youth unemployment became a critical social issue, there were calls from a variety of sources for such a programme. The debate then between a choice-based approach or a compulsory one. My view is that there is very much a case for a universal youth transition programme in this country. A compulsory programme that’s fun, engaging and developmental, designed with and by young people. Compulsory for the same reason that school is: we need to ensure every child benefits not just those that have the support to make the right choice. I could go on, but I’ve reached my word limit and it’s time to get out of the cab! Lord Victor Adebowale MA, CBE ?
Imagine a country where virtually everyone describes themselves as satisfied with their lives—only 13 per cent say they are unhappy. Where 95 per cent say they are close to their families and 76 per cent are confident about their personal futures. A country that is markedly better off than a decade before, with 600,000 fewer people in poverty and 1m fewer on out-of-work benefits. A country with universal free healthcare and the highest recorded level of satisfaction with that service, with waiting times the lowest for 40 years. A country which most people think is a good place to raise children and where most children are felt to have far better prospects than their parents had before them. But in that same country, when asked whether life in general is getting better or worse, 71 per cent of people say life is getting worse, up from 60 per cent in 2007 and only 40 per cent in 1998.
This country is, of course, Britain. Last September, David Cameron, the man most likely to be its next prime minister, said: “The biggest challenge facing Britain today is mending our broken society… Four in every five youngsters receiving custodial sentences have no qualifications. More than two thirds of prisoners are illiterate. And nearly one third of those excluded from school have been involved with substance abuse… 43 per cent of 11 year olds cannot read, write and add up properly. Last month, more than 20,000 pupils left school without a GCSE. And right now, more than a million young people are not in education, work or training.”
The Conservatives have made much of this “broken Britain” narrative. But what does it actually amount to? Strip away the rhetoric, and you find three basic claims: crime and antisocial behaviour are rampant; the institution of the family is in dangerous decline; and there is a growing underclass of poorly educated, “feral” young people.
Are you the sort of person who thinks that there is too much television, that more channels means less quality, and that listening to radio is generally preferable? Do you spend your time reading, pursuing a hobby or ferrying children around and regard watching television as a last resort? If any of this rings a bell, you may be a “digital rejector,” someone who can’t see the point of multi-channel television and chooses only to watch the main terrestrial channels, if at all. You’re quite an interesting section of the television-viewing public, because, like it or not, you are going to get multi-channel television: by 2012 the entire country will be switched over to digital, and broadcasters and their consultants are interested in how you will respond.
If you are a digital rejector—or even resister—you might be the sort of person who likes programmes that tell you about the world outside Britain, and not always through the experience of war and suffering. You might like programmes about the unreported lives of people in this country. And you might like programmes which cast a more positive light on the world in which we live, rather than those which seem to be about a population that is emotionally dysfunctional, rude, frequently drunk and sex-obsessed. If this has any resonance with you, then stop rejecting and explore the digital world—there are things out there for you.
On such an exploration earlier this year, I came across the Community Channel. Shamefully, despite working in television, I don’t think I had watched it before then—though subsequently I have found that very few people who work in television have watched it; even fewer politicians and opinion-formers have. (Not that this prevents some from having a—generally unflattering—opinion on the subject.) More than 70 per cent of the population are not even aware the Community Channel exists. For many people, the name itself must be a turn-off, with its smack of do-gooding. Indeed, research by the Community Channel shows that its viewers consider it respectable and worthy (bad) ahead of involving, intelligent and modern (good). These responses reflect one of the many dilemmas for the channel—in its own words, it is “dedicated to raising awareness and inspiring its audiences into action on issues and causes that matter to them.” But for most of us, watching television is a passive entertainment activity: we don’t seek out television programmes as members of an interest group.
Education and health have been the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of New Labour public service reform. The government has poured impressive sums into schools and the NHS, while submitting both to the rigours of inspection and “choice.” But an interesting difference in the direction of reform has begun to appear. While government has slowly come to recognise that the priority for the NHS should be prevention, to reduce reliance on medical services, the opposite is true of education.
Nurseries and schools now carry an enormous burden of progressive ambition. Whether the problem is rising obesity, anti-social behaviour, falling social mobility, low voter turnout or racism, the government’s instinct is to look to schools to fix it. Over the last six months, ministers have announced plans or mooted proposals to introduce Saturday schooling, to further improve school lunches, promote cookery classes and give more space to history—especially British history—in the curriculum. And this against a background of plans to establish Sure Start childcare centres in “every community” in England, increase state funding for early-years education (by 2010, every child over two will be entitled to 15 hours of free nursery care a week), dramatically extend after-school activities for older children, and open school playgrounds and other facilities up for local community use.
What we are seeing here is the convergence of a number of distinct developments. One has been the move of mothers into the workplace—a move actively encouraged by the government. The number of mothers in work has risen steadily since the 1970s, which has meant increased demand for subsidised early-years and after-school childcare.
Late on a sunny autumn afternoon in October, I and about 100 fellow residents of the Holly Street estate in east London were gathered in a public garden listening to the Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin’s sermon. “What is happening in our community?” she asked. “If you are going to be a community together, then we are going to need to work together to improve that community.” It was the memorial service for Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba, the 40-year-old Congolese man who was murdered this month in an unprovoked attack in the stairwell to his flat. On this of all occasions, it was impossible not to ask oneself the simple question: what community?
The Holly Street estate should be a success story. Built in the late 1990s, its design—social housing, with wide open streets and a mixture of public and private ownership—is an exemplary reaction against many of the architectural disasters of the 1960s. After a period last year of public drug-dealing and regular disturbances, an uneasy peace now just about persists. But “community”? Would murders such as this one happen in a real community—one based on continuity, reciprocity and shared endeavour? The more distant this sort of community becomes, the more frequently it is invoked and the more confused we all become.
Consider the following expressions: “the international community,” “building stronger communities,” “giving communities what they want,” and “police are seeking support from the community.” In the space of four familiar catchphrases, the emptiness of the term is laid bare. The first strips it of anything specifically local, the second suggests that it is the product of policy, only to be contradicted by the third which implies it is a sentient being. In its use of the definite article, the fourth removes any specificity from the concept and mystifies it. Yet these mantras reverberate through the studios of the Today programme and Newsnight, offering politicians and public commentators the constant fallback option of saying nothing whatsoever.
This essay is based on the pamphlet “Progressive Nationalism,” published by Demos in May 2006. To read the full pamphlet text, click here, and to read replies from Neal Ascherson, David Blunkett and others, click here.
The foreign prisoner debacle that cast a shadow over the recent local elections, and the government reshuffle that followed, marked one of the lowest points in the long New Labour hegemony. They were also a reminder of the unexpected dominance, since 1997, of the “security and identity” issues: crime, terror, asylum and immigration, race and national identity, hostility to free-riders, rising incivility and so on. Partly thanks to events—Iraq, 7/7, increased immigration—and partly to the fading of the old left/right, state/market conflict, these themes have dominated domestic politics, alongside public service reform, in Labour’s second and third terms.
The security and identity issues have not, historically, been strong themes for the centre-left. They seldom lend themselves to technocratic solutions and give rise to emotional, sometimes irrational, responses that liberals find hard to understand. When Labour came to power in 1997 it had clear social, economic and constitutional goals, many of which it has achieved. This has been far less true for the security and identity themes, although the famous “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” slogan and the “rights and duties” approach to citizenship signalled a reasonable attempt to combine liberal principles with tough-mindedness.
Five years ago this summer, Britain had its worst riots for a generation. Bradford, Burnley and Oldham went through their own versions of the disturbances that spread across France last year, with the full panoply of burning cars and broken windows, confrontations between white and Asian youth, charging riot police and makeshift barricades.
The immediate official response was harsh—256 people were charged in Bradford alone. Almost all pleaded guilty and dozens of mainly Asian young people were given unusually stiff sentences—an average of over four years for the adults, a year and a half for the juveniles, far more than in previous incidents. (And despite the fact that many Pakistani parents, particularly in Bradford, had put pressure on their sons to give themselves up.)
But the subsequent response was more reflective. After the Brixton and Toxteth riots in 1981, Britain went through a bout of soul-searching. Lord Scarman’s inquiry prompted a review of policing and other policies, and Michael Heseltine’s famous cabinet paper, “It Took a Riot,” made the case for a more activist government inner-city strategy. Twenty years later the machinery of official inquiry moved into action once again, under the former Labour minister John Denham. The local authorities commissioned a succession of official reports which sought to explain what had led to the disturbances. Ted Cantle, the former chief executive of Nottingham city council, was given the most important task: David Blunkett, then home secretary, asked him to draw on all the other reports and explain what had caused such deep polarisation, what could be done about it and the lessons for national policy and practice.
The debate over identity and Britishness has been raging in Britain over the last few years, and with particular urgency since last year’s London bombings. These issues of identity extend to a common social challenge. Over the next generation in Britain we must re-learn how to live together successfully. The solution I advocate is not to pretend that everybody can feel the same affinity with all identities outside their own, but to build an “encounter culture” in which it becomes easier and more rewarding to interact with and respect others.
This is not just about government and public policy; it is personal, cultural, civic. The starting point is the recognition that it affects everybody. As a black MP representing one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in the UK, people often assume that when I address these issues, I am talking primarily about race. But look beyond race, at the hundreds of thousands who have joined Countryside Alliance marches in recent years, for example, driven in part by the perception that the urban majority do not understand their culture and values. Or look at inter-generational conflict. We know that every generation laments the declining moral standards of the one that comes after it. But the intensity of public feeling aroused by anti-social behaviour, and the widely held perception that legal sanctions like Asbos are necessary, seems to represent an unusually sharp divide. Look forward a generation to the potential conflict of resources over pensions, social care, the costs of climate change and so on, and you may wonder which loyalties will be most influential in determining people’s attitudes to the distribution of those resources.
One of the defining characteristics of contemporary British society is its social diversity. Identities—whether based on occupation, class, faith, or territory—that once perpetuated themselves by being passed automatically from one generation to the next have become more fragmented and conditional, and in some cases disappeared altogether. In a globalised, consumerist society, identity seems much less something we inherit and increasingly something we can choose, shape or discard. We go on six times more foreign holidays that we did in 1971. We travel seven miles further each week to visit friends than we did in the 1980s. We spend eight times longer online per week than we did in the late 1990s. This is the paradox Manuel Castells identified when he wrote about “the net and the self.” On the one hand, we have an urge to affirm our own individuality and differentiate ourselves from some of the more suffocating aspects of our traditional identities. On the other, this is offset by a continuing human need to belong, to remain anchored in something collective.
Britain’s digital infrastructure is in rather good shape. Broadband internet rollout was all but completed in 2005. It also became possible last year to transact with government online—from registering a vehicle to filing a tax return. The 2005 “e-readiness” survey produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Britain as the fifth best digitally equipped nation in the world, a table currently topped by Denmark, with Germany and France straggling in 13th and 18th places respectively. Britain’s first wave of digital modernisation is thus almost complete, a period in which the internet evolved from a niche interest to an everyday tool for over half the population, and mobile phones became ubiquitous and classless.
The second wave of development looks set to merge these two trends, as the rapid spread of wireless internet access pushes us towards an “always on everywhere” society. Bandwidth levels, which determine how much information we can send and receive, are now reaching the point where television programmes can be transmitted online. And after much anticipation, mobile phones are beginning to act as web browsers and televisions, not to mention cameras and camcorders.
Most of the argument about our progress into the digital future assumes that it is both inevitable and desirable. Its shape has already been mapped out by a network of consultancies, academics and think tanks. The only question left unanswered is how quickly we will get there. But while the benefits of the digital revolution are evident enough, we should surely be wary of embracing a worldview that sees technological bottlenecks only as restraints on freedom. London Underground is looking at ways of enabling mobile phones to work on the tube, to eradicate one of the city’s last blocks on digital connectivity. But what else will be lost in the process? Technological bottlenecks can also be necessary conditions of social interaction or valuable moments of isolation.
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