The prime minister unveiled an exciting new initiative on Thursday, announcing that he is determined to make “respect towards other people . . . a central part of our agenda”. Respect. That’s the very latest thing, the new must-have, all-purpose new Labour panacea, which will bring order to our disorderly schools and streets.
Like Simon Jenkins, my distinguished new colleague above, I am astonished by this vacuous effrontery. And I am afraid it is going to be uphill work for Tony Five Shags as far as I am concerned. However ferocious his agenda, he will never extract respect from me.
The belief that government can or should interfere in such a crude way with our attitudes, or that the state can “build” or “rebuild” communities, is not merely wrong. It is part of the problem. New Labour seems to have learnt nothing. The only people who can instil respect in people, and create community among people — if at all — are people themselves. Contrariwise, all government seems able to do is to destroy. Butskellite governments since the war, for all their good intentions, have managed to undermine respect and destroy communities by nationalising everything right down to family responsibility and charity.
The curious thing about respect is that it’s so highly valued by the very people — like the rude boys in hoodies who so frightened poor John Two Jags Prescott in a motorway cafe recently — who feel it least. Respect is what young gangstas and wannabe gangstas demand; dissing them is what they cannot bear, it fuels the anger that drives them to crime and violence. They feel disrespected in our society, because they are.
Far be it from me to think like a liberal, but it has always seemed obvious that just as those who have never been loved cannot easily love others, so those who have never been respected cannot easily respect others. The only way to get lost and delinquent young people to show some respect is to teach them self-respect, which involves showing some respect to them.
Pronouncing that parents are to blame for the yobs on our streets, as Blair did last week, may be true, but it doesn’t help. It’s about as useful as banning hoodies. The parents of yobs are all too often part of a cycle of deprivation and may never have learnt anything about self-respect. Young people long for respect to be shown to them and demanded from them. They are dissed and patronised all the time, from cradle to antisocial behaviour orders.
I live in the heart of Asbo territory in the north end of Kensington and Chelsea, a borough that has some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Most youth workers say there are more guns and knives now in North Kensington than ever. Despite the best efforts of an exceptionally efficient council, all the indicators of social breakdown are hugely above the national average.
State intervention has made little difference; many things are getting worse. The best hope of re-creating some sense of community lies in the power of men and women to get together to try to do something in their own backyard.
This is happening where I live. There is a charity in a handsome new building a couple of streets away from me. Its name is the Rugby Portobello Trust — it’s an amalgamation of other charities, including one set up by Rugby school in the late 19th century. It’s there to serve local young people between eight and 25 years old, who might otherwise be pushed by neglect and peer pressure into the worst of inner-city problems, straight into the Asbo set.
It offers all kinds of things — a club that is a safe place to be (unlike many clubs) with a gym and a cafe, computer training, professional recording equipment and training, driving and cooking lessons (for future employment), a chance of trips to the country and even a small private school for children doing badly in the state system.
It already provides housing for homeless young people (often straight out of care) and help from some inspired youth outreach workers. One of them is Michael Kelsick, a charismatic young black man who spent several years in jail before redirecting his life. Now he spends a lot of time trying to help young people understand the risks of drugs, crime and teenage parenthood, and the rewards of the many things they could achieve. The trust’s plan is to train some young people to run a small existing charity themselves. They will then be able to see themselves as leaders and contributors, rather than as losers and receivers. Respect, as they say.
A little further north on the notorious, high-crime Mozart estate is another neighbourhood scheme called Real Action, largely run by local people — 50% of the workers are unpaid volunteers — and rather touchingly under the “protection” of the roughest elements in the community, who even send some of their children there. It’s a literacy project — the brainchild of Katie Ivens, a pioneer of the Campaign for Real Education — with a drop-in centre and some small classrooms to teach schoolchildren and adults to learn to read quickly and easily.
They use the Butterfly phonics method, which is extremely simple for both teacher and student. State-sector educationalists might sneer at strict whole-class teaching and synthetic phonics, but Real Action’s results are sensational and people are justly proud of it. Just 30 hours of Real Action teaching lifts a person’s reading age, on average, by 13 months. The comparison with the abysmal state school results is startling.
Both these projects offer much of what deprived children lack and need — an extended surrogate family, a safe place to be, interesting things to do, useful things to learn, good adult role models who can offer serious advice, a sense of belonging, hope for the future and an atmosphere of mutual respect. Such projects can’t help everyone; some children are already damaged beyond help. But it can help most. If the state sector were providing all this, these charities would not be needed and nobody would give them any money. But they are desperately needed.
If we are talking about respect, the government should show it to such charities and such charismatic people by leaving them alone to get on with their work in their own way, as far as possible.
My view is that statists don’t respect charity at all. When it works they just take it over and regulate it out of all recognition. But that’s a different column.
