GEORGE GALLOWAY has been surprised that none of his fellow
Celebrity Big Brother contestants has asked him what it is like to be a Member of Parliament. The Respect MP has been shocked at the depths to which conversation between the glamour models, pop stars, whatevers has sunk: “Extraordinary stories at the breakfast table which involve every orifice and every fluid known to man,” he complains. This from the man who boasted in 1985: “I spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me.” I expect some may have found that offensive, Mr Galloway; not least the person you were married to at the time. Respect is a multifaceted thing.
I wonder what the relative viewing figures were for Big Brother last night, and for Tony Blair’s “respect” speech earlier in the day. It is easy to sneer at politicians’ attempts to make the country a politer place. I don’t.
The pamphlet published yesterday, Respect Action Plan (RAP), once you get over its irritating acronym, contains plenty of high ideals and strong suggestions. Ministers involved in its assembly emphasise the difficulty of getting different government departments to work together, a problem that mirrors the near-impossibility on the ground of getting local agencies operating in tandem. So the suggestion that a single person be put in charge of seeing a “problem household ” through the various interventions may just work.
May just . . . there already are an awful lot of agencies, people and money being poured in to help “problem families”. The Respect Action Plan fairly bristles with sources of aid or advice: Children’s Centres, Sure Start, Children’s Trusts, Children and Young People’s Plans, the Youth Justice Board, Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, Education Maintenance Allowances, Care to Learn scheme — and that’s only with the 40-page brochure open on one page.
Health, education, police and social services all spend much of their time dealing, separately, with the same offenders or families. We have ASBOs (antisocial behaviour orders) and ABCs (acceptable behaviour contracts) and PGAs (parental guidance agreements); orders or agreements between parents or children and the State to behave or refrain from behaving in particular ways. The “action plan” aims to target interventions more effectively and at a younger age. There will be more orders, more advice, more sanctions. More money. And More Acronyms.
The question is whether agents and instruments of the state can effect the cultural shift that ministers and the official Opposition want to see; to have society relearn the basic values of consideration for others. The Tories would use the voluntary and social enterprise sector to try to achieve the same change. Hark at David Cameron: “The real respect agenda must include long-term solutions to the causes of social breakdown, not just short-term sanctions and punishment.” Diddly diddly doo. With the new Tories sounding more and more like new Labour, who is going to talk about the missing element?
Fathers. Where are the fathers? Look at acceptable behaviour contracts. Some 13,000 of these have been signed, twice the number of ASBOs. Drawn up individually between youth workers and individuals, they warn a child, under threat of an ASBO, to avoid a range of actions from writing graffiti to hanging around in stairways, throwing things or swearing. They are doing the job traditionally done by a father: don’t do that again, or else. “There aren’t any fathers” is what you hear when you talk to members of teenage gangs and those who get involved in crime at a young age.
The cultural shift that would be of greatest effect in restoring a culture of respect is somehow to encourage fathers to take responsibility for their children again. All the interventions announced yesterday — support and intervention “for parents of children and young people at risk”, “taking action to improve the parenting skills of teenagers who become pregnant”, parenting contracts etc etc — all these are aimed at the parent who actually cares; often a parent who cares too much, with four kids, no time and no money. When the RAP says “we will tackle irresponsible parents”, it isn’t talking about the most irresponsible ones: the ones who show no interest, if they are there at all.
The one present — at meetings with the social worker or the school — is not usually the parent lacking responsibility. If a parent fails to respect his or her own child enough to show an active interest in their development, then what lesson does that teach the child about respect? Any adult will have to fight to shift the low self- esteem of a child whose parent has walked away from it. And self-esteem, or self-respect, is the beginning of respect for others.
I’m not sure any action plan could fill this gap. But just as ministers took the lead in changing attitudes to drinking and driving, so too they should take the lead in changing attitudes to parenting. This isn’t some right-wing agenda about forcing people to get married or to stay in unhappy relationships, and nor is it about the narrow financial pursuit of the Child Support Agency; it is about forcing people, be they 15 or 53, to take responsibility for the children they spawn.
Somehow the women’s rights movement, and the extension in the legal powers of mothers over their children that followed it, have hurried or forced fathers out of the picture and then accepted the relegation of their responsibilities. Make it a legal responsibility if necessary, with severe penalties for walking away from a child, and use that signal to create a social stigma (one that must apply too to any parent preventing access to a child). For at the moment it is easier to abandon a baby than it is a dog. The new Animal Welfare Bill imposes a duty on the person responsible for an animal to ensure that its needs are met. Dump a cat or a goldfish and you face imprisonment; but when a father abandons a child we shrug and mutter “bastard”.
How did we get here?
