Phillip Blond (Lancaster, University of Cumbria) & Adrian Pabst (Nottingham, University of Nottingham): Iain Duncan Smith's visionary report on Breakdown Britain demonstrates that both Brown and Cameron are failing to grasp the nature and extent of Britain's social crisis.
Under New Labour, the state has conspired to abort British society. By combining the worst excesses of rightwing free-market capitalism and leftwing centralized bureaucracy, the Blair years created an authoritarian market state that has sidelined civil society and stripped Britain of its culture of ethos and service. Utilitarian managerial politics has reduced happiness to individual consumer choice and elevated personal pleasure over collective social norms.
Britain really does have a broken society. Family breakdown is at an all-time high. Soon over half of all new-borns will have unmarried parents, whose relationship on average will last only three years. Moreover, the rise of one-parent families is overwhelmingly concentrated in the poorer sections of society where low-paid work and marginalized children have created a new underclass permanently dependent on state benefits. Little wonder that a recent UNICEF report placed Britain at the bottom of the developed nations for child welfare and well being. This lack of formation has dire results: Britain's youth has the highest rates of abortion, alcoholism, pregnancies and STD infection rates in Western Europe.
The collapse of British values has other, wider consequences. Over the last decade, a wholly unprecedented wave of immigration has added 5% to Britain's population. But since nobody has any idea what Britishness means anymore, there is no real culture to integrate these new immigrants into. Consequently, inner-city Britain is developing into a patchwork of mutually exclusive societies, newly segregated along lines of class, ethnicity and religion. The uncritical promotion of multiculturalism has perpetuated this civic disintegration by eschewing the issue of an organic common culture in favour of liberal diversity.
Nor are Britons as economically secure as commonly supposed. Personal debt is at an all-time high, a growing tax burden and rising inflation are putting households of even two working adults under real pressure, not least because house prices have more than doubled in most areas in the last ten years, whilst real earnings have risen by just 24%. Thus, people's most valuable asset is also their most vulnerable and expensive debt.
For those cut off from access to credit and relatively higher wages, prospects are bleak. Wages at the bottom - depressed by low-skilled immigrant labour - have hardly risen and these workers face a lifetime as tenants of an asset-rich rentier class that they cannot buy into. Britain has a huge and unaddressed asset gap, with half of the population owning just 5% of the wealth. New Labour has helped to cement and make permanent the underclass that Mrs Thatcher first brought into being. Social mobility is lower than at any other time since the 1920s. While Britain is a tax-free haven for the non-domiciled super-rich, the middle classes have seldom been so economically insecure nor the working poor so trapped.
Economically, the UK needs a massive redistribution of asset wealth and political power to the poor. Culturally, Britain must recover a civilisation of public virtues and social purpose. Only a combination of both will allow a revival of British civil society.
