Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Over on his Diary Iain Dale gave me a good thumping for daring to suggest that Thatcherism could be one of the root causes of the epidemic of violence among young people in our country. In the comments Dizzy kicked in too. Perhaps the cruellest of Iain’s barbs is his description of me as “normally rather sensible”.
Mention of Thatcher’s responsibility has a neuralgic impact on Conservatives. We are urged on to be grateful to the Lady for reviving Britain, but we cannot for a moment be permitted to suggest that she has any responsibility for what Britain has become. She who ‘saved’’ Britain is also a toxic legacy in electoral terms (and for good reason) and so discussion of her living impact is a nerve too far. Let’s keep her in the waxworks where she can be safely illuminated in the spotlight of “greatness”. But talk of her actual consequences…
“Why are our teenage abortion figures by far and away the worst in Europe? Why are our promiscuity figures the worst in Europe? It's difficult to pin the blame on Margaret Thatcher for either of those, Mr Barnett... I really am not intending to get into 'old git' mode, but the point of this post was to take issue with Anthony Barnett's caricature of Margaret Thatcher. According to many on the left, everything that's wrong in this country can be traced back to the reign of Mrs T. It is lazy thinking and indicates a barrenness of ideas simply to hark back to a Prime Minister who left office eighteen years ago.”
What is Iain talking about? Surely not my little post? All I did was to respond to the media’s coverage of Time Magazine’s cover story on Britain’s Mean Streets and ask “has anyone pointed out that today’s teenagers are Thatcher’s generation, born after the Falklands war introduced the celebration of gratuitous violence as the route to success? Hooliganism starts, as they say, from the head down. Doesn’t it?”
I thought this was, well, rather sensible.
I’ve dealt with the Falklands (which more understandably riled people) in my response to the comments - and explained that by Thatcher’s generation I mean those born between 1982 and 1997. And I’ll grant this, I meant that reference to hooliganism starting from the head to include Tony Blair. But the main thing I want to lay on the line is that all the sociological lamentations over “feral youth” are crocodile tears unless we are willing to look at the overall impact of strategic state policies. These are long-term matters. If you read Paul Rogers you will know that the Pentagon thinks of weapons systems in terms of thirty years. Don’t our policies towards children demand the same? Iain glimpses this:
“Many single parents do a brilliant job with their children, but others do not - can not. The lack of any form of male role model is to the detriment of any child's upbringing. The inability of parents to say 'no' nowadays is just as bad. None of this is Margaret Thatcher's fault. None of this is Tony Blair's fault. The roots of this failure of society go back far beyond their periods in power.”
I’m sorry, but this is useless - to simply throw up one’s hands in this way. Having told me not to “hark back” 18 years I’m told in the same breath that we must “go back” “far beyond” 30 years. But more important the whole point of the Time story was to document the comparative seriousness of the issue here in the UK. Again, Iain saw this was the story when he opened his post by asking if Britain is once again “The sick man of Europe”. It seems that teenage violence and anti-social behaviour is measurably much worse in the UK than elsewhere in the EU. But if this is so, what is Europe doing right that we are doing wrong? We need a broad focus on how we are governed not waffle about how our society’s failures are lost in the mists of time.
It is not a matter of blaming but of explaining.
First, how should we describe what is happening? Young people of 30 and under who I know are astounding: witty, humane and argumentative in a hugely sympathetic way. A definite improvement on my generation, without a doubt, I’d say. But there are many of their age less well educated who are inarticulate, aimless, vandals. Now they are topping themselves. Suicide is one route, as Jane Powell of Calm has reported. Assassinating each other is another (and more rarely adults). There is an endemic, aimless violence they commit upon themselves. At least when French youth get violent they riot, i.e. they join together, they demand voice, they articulate their rage at being excluded from France. Britain’s dislocated “hoodies” are not invited to be part of our society, and nor are they demanding it as they should be. School is not interested in them, only their test ‘results’. They can’t express themselves, and without voice lack self-worth. Theirs is a claimless aggression. The result is too often an incestuous infatuation with the drama of violence itself and the skill of animal defiance and skateboard speeds as they injure and kill each other while scorning society as pointless. I don’t want to exaggerate its extent and reinforce any moral panic, but nor should we dismiss the intense seriousness of what is happening as knives and guns enter the lives of our young adults. My younger daughter was in a night-club when one of the guys dancing was shot in front of her; executed as the police put it, apparently by someone he had humiliated, who simply went home and got his shooter.
Now look at this graph from an article by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in the British Medical Journal .
The UK is at the bottom of 23 rich countries in terms of the wellbeing of its children. It is also one of the most unequal. The graph indicates a correlation between these two factors. Martin McIvor who alerted me to this research in his comment on my post points out that inequality “hugely increased in the UK [between] the end of the 1970s, when roughly 1 in 10 children were born into poverty in the UK, and the early 1990s, by which time it was around 1 in 3. (Labour has brought that down a little, but only a little.)”
(Er, if these figures are right and Mrs Thatcher became PM in 1979… no, no; slap, slap!)
Now the Tories are attempting to get to grips with the legacy whatever its source. According to Ian Duncan Smith’s massive and challenging multi-volume Conservative Task Force research and report (opens a pdf) on the “Broken Society” published last year (but not mentioned by either Time or Dale),
“Poverty places enormous strain on relationships, as does poor housing and the lack of meaningful employment. (Research indicates the relationship between levels of lone parenthood in an area and poor job opportunities for men.)”
And the report tells us:
“Crime is strongly correlated with family breakdown - 70% of young offenders are from lone parent families and one third of prisoners were in local authority care (yet only 0.6% of the nation’s children are in care at any one time).”
While there is not an epidemic of sexually reckless, morally vacuous, substance abusing, criminal youth - there does seems to be endemic self-organisation into bullying gangs that is markedly worse than other countries in our continent.
Why? Iain accepts that it pre-dated New Labour. Whatever their limitations (considerable) I am quite sure, a) the government is trying to address the issue and, b) it certainly stopped the Tsunami of Americanisation that was building up thanks to the Tories 18 year earthquake. As I have said, Major was worse, because more a-moral, than Thatcher. Just think of his destruction of the railways. For example when my same daughter started at a good state secondary school in the last year of the Major government the Tories had just put through the national curriculum. Her school literally did not have the text-books across all years and pupils could not be given effective GSCE homework without them. The government knew about these shortages across the school system. What we did about it in our daughter’s school is another story – but children across the land could not be properly taught that year. Labour attempted to turn this around and certainly stopped an impending catastrophe. The relief that greeted the 1997 victory remains justified even if Blair and Brown threw away the larger opportunity they were given. And today? At least Ed Balls is insisting that young people stay on in education until they are 18. The key issue here is language. For those facing minimal qualifications it is essential that, as a society, we insist that girls and boys learn to be articulate and are given the space, time and teaching that will lift their game. You cannot persuade people to see reason if they have not been given the resources to reason.
But in addition we need to present a model of sane well-governed behaviour to our children. How can we do this if our state is insane and badly-governed - and worships warfare? Of course good parenting is more important in every individual case than good government, Iain. But if we need family life to save our society from the way it is ruled why not change the way it is ruled as well?
The model of market oriented, individualist, high-inequality government increases the amount of mindless violence on our streets. This is what I mean by the influence of Thatcherism, for example when she said we should "celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country….It would be a good thing for our country if there were more millionaires in Britain not fewer… [we] must enthusiastically advocate empowering people to climb without limits, free from any barrier holding them back". Without limits! How about that as a British value. Whoops, it was Secretary of State John Hutton on 12 March this year: Thatcherism is alive if not so well as it once was.
