We must foster personal and social responsibility in our communities, argues Marius Ostrowski
The
anniversary of the riots which ripped apart communities across England last
August has come and gone, meekly and largely without fanfare. In part, it has
been eclipsed by the timely distraction of the 2012 Olympics - and any attempts
to instigate copycat repeats staved off by the heavy security presence which
has accompanied the Games. But the ‘Olympic bounce’ in the national mood has
something of the ‘false calm’ about it. The underlying social conditions of the
UK in 2012 are, if anything, even riper for social unrest than they were last
year - and the latent
social factors left under-explored by the riot enquiries are still felt just
as strongly.
As
several of the other authors in the ‘One Year On’ series have pointed out, young
people’s relationship with authorities and institutions remains disjointed
and frayed. There have been too few meaningful
efforts to integrate the younger generation into public institutions - and,
more broadly, virtually no moves to make social structures more transparent and
democratically accountable to the citizens they serve. The threat from
austerity to social services, persistent youth unemployment, and spiralling
cost of higher education are systematically closing off young people’s possible
life directions, and only reinforcing their powerless stagnation in the status
in which they have grown up.
At
the same time, the discovery of ever more venal levels of corruption and
licence in the highest tiers of society is contributing to plummeting popular
disenchantment with the traditional figures and mechanisms of authority. The incompetence,
rampant immorality, and in some cases criminality, that characterised the recent
G4S
Olympic security debacle, the media phone-hacking
scandal and its alleged police
complicity, and the banking Libor scandal, has
contributed to a toxic image of endemic libertinism among an out-of-touch,
out-of-control social, political, and economic elite. The result has been a
significant drop in the moral authority of these traditional mechanisms to
offer guidance and lead responses to contemporary social problems, leaving
citizens searching for alternative sources of support.
The
state’s role as saviour and redeemer in this volatile context has been severely
undermined by its close imbrication with the succession of public scandals, and
also by the current government’s equivocal and inconsistent positions on law
and order. There is rising
suspicion that, far from streamlining their performance, the 13%
cuts in workforce intended to match central government expenditure
reductions - including the loss of 5,800 frontline officers - will seriously
stretch the 43 English and Welsh police forces’ ability to guarantee civic
security in future. Meanwhile, the heavy retributive ethos of the
sentences handed down for convicted rioters stand radically at odds with the
public’s clear preference for preventative, educative, and corrective means for
dealing with criminal and socially disruptive behaviour.
But
the problem is not just that the state is going about keeping the UK safe the wrong way. Rather, a
deeper concern is that there is little more that it can do to
improve the delivery of public services across the country. The public spending
cuts mandated by economic austerity force the state to confront difficult
choices about which programmes it can afford to maintain, and where its
presence will have to be reduced. Worse, the UK’s declining economic performance
is stifling opportunities for investment and regeneration, and drawing out the time-scale over which the UK may be at risk from further riots due to strained
security provisions. Spatially
redistributive solutions to unrest in deprived areas thus also become much less
likely - though clearly desirable, they are simply no longer practically feasible,
given the state’s limited resources.
The
question would-be preventative solutions to the riots need to ask is which tier
of society ought to be taking responsibility for social stability and development.
One of the greatest disappointments of the Coalition government has been the
wrongful and unnecessary association of the relationality and intellectual
focus on communities that underpins the fragmented Big Society project with the
spending cuts. There is significant popular support not only for
community-level solutions to social problems, but also - as advocated in my
previous post - for a higher
degree of individual responsibility and self-direction to counteract the spread
of apathy and state-dependence. It is a great and potentially costly failing
that communities and individuals still lack the institutional support they need
to effectively ‘take up the slack’ left by the state’s withdrawal.
The
fact that the state must partly abrogate its social responsibilities does not
preclude the need for it to help find adequate replacements to ‘fill the
vacuum’. Although recent developments such as ‘Community
Budgets’, the successor to the last government’s ‘Total Place’
programme, are starting to reverse the trend, communities and individuals are
still broadly left to fend for themselves, at the questionable mercy of market
forces. This situation is too fragile to be sustainable. The state must take
greater responsibility for recognising its own limitations, and properly manage
the handover of the functions it can no longer fulfil to those better placed and
able to do so. Above all, it cannot afford to leave the UK population
defenceless, relying on the hope that community or private alternatives will
spontaneously emerge.
Find out more about ResPublica/ NCVYS Commission on Youth here.