Is It Time To Re-define The Social Contract?

As Gordon Brown, one of the leaders of the New Labour ideology in 1993, then chancellor and Prime Minister since Labour came to power in 1997, looks back over the sixteen years the Party has had to enact and deliver on this pledge, he begins his last Party conference before the General Election, having to acknowledge that Labour have failed.

On 29^th September 2009, he told Labour Party Conference Delegates that: "We won't ever shy away from taking difficult decisions on tough social questions."

"The decent hard working majority feel the odds are stacked in favour of a minority, who will talk about their rights, but never accept their responsibilities."

This is directly comparable to Blair’s interview back in 1993, when he then said, “there’s the side of personal responsibility, which we must enforce against those that are committing crimes”. It is almost as if the last sixteen years have bypassed the two leaders and they were sharing notes.

Brown’s answer this time is to look at what he is prepared to label as “problem families” which he claims are causing misery in communities. “Hoodies”, gangs and even single mothers have had their day, as politicians look for another scapegoat to divert attention from policy failure. To achieve this he is proposing to quadruple the number of Family Intervention Projects. These are binding contracts which require parents of children guilty of anti-social behaviour to accept one-to-one support or else lose their benefits.

The policy is in itself a paradox. It stands to reason that if benefits are removed from a family dependent on them, bearing in mind that benefits are paid on the definition of the minimum amount the law says is needed to live on, then need and necessity will ultimately force some people who are already struggling financially, to the sort of petty crime/unsociable behaviour that may have caused the problem in the first place. Flippantly, at least, the policy could be deemed a success, simply because it has “closed the circle”. Tragically, on an individual as well as at a societal level, it is likely such a move will dispossess even further those already on the fringes of society.

Much has been made of the financial losses endured during the last year and the subsequent costs of repairing the damage caused. Little has been said of the same corresponding democratic deficit that has existed for decades, and nothing substantial has been offered to recover from it. Taking electoral turnout as the measure of a healthy society, then there has been no tangible benefit for the investment of billions in new schools, hospitals, housing and regeneration programmes. When turnouts for a general election hover around 60%, 40% of the population have failed to engage in the decision making process that governs the society in which they live.

At a local level, when council ward elections in some areas achieve turnout rates of 20% or less, 80% of a resident population has no say or influence in what is happening around them. In such circumstances, it stands that there will be little collective, or social, responsibility for what happens in a particular area. The loss of social cohesion, whether it be caused by unemployment, a breakdown in household structure, or a loss of community facilities will result in individuals becoming dispossessed from the community in which they live and further alienated from any sense of a collective or social responsibility for the people and area in which they live.

This democratic deficit needs to be restored, but not by re-hashing previously tried and failed policies. Billions spent on neighbourhood renewal will improve the physical and built environments in which people live, but will have little impact in creating a shared ownership within a community. Across the country local authorities are revisiting the same places that in the 1990’s were pilot areas for what is now termed neighbourhood renewal to repeat the process (and the spending) all over again without looking to see why the initiative failed in the first place.

No Government can ever run a society like a business, but there is one key lesson that is transferrable from business to Government. That is the basic tenet that the single biggest resource a business has is its staff, its people. If a business fails to invest in its people it will fall behind its competitors and in some cases cease to exist. Governments need to understand that society is not made of bricks and mortar. Renewing the built environment make a positive difference to the appearance of an area, but without investment in the people of an area, the job remains unfinished.

Investment in the social fabric of a society rather than the landscape in which a society lives must be the first priority of any government. By this, it is not enough to generically increase spending in education, benefit levels, front line health services, tackling anti-social behaviour, etc. These are simply tools that are used by policy makers looking for the next headline, but are now proven unable to change the attitudes of the individual within the context of the community in which they live. Gordon Brown would not, in 2009, be repeating what Tony Blair said in 1993, if they worked.

There needs to a shift in paradigm if the democratic deficit is to be restored. Action against anti-social behaviour will of course always be required. This is the perennial stick with which to beat the problem of social exclusion. Education needs to learn how to teach democracy outside of politics, policies encouraging and rewarding altruism and altruistic behaviour need to be introduced and in such a way that encourages wide participation, and where necessary, obstructive or socially meaningless legislation together with its counter-productive measures need repealing .

Investment in citizenship should be developed as an alternative to renewing public works contracts on an almost rolling basis for those areas with the highest proportions of the marginalised and dispossessed. There needs to be a clear re-definition of the social contract where rights are the reward for accepting responsibility, and where responsibilities are abdicated, rights are withdrawn.