Moderator: This is a response to a post by Adrian Pabst and Phillip Blond.
Michael Keith (London, Goldsmiths): Nostalgia is clearly not what it used to be. In their slightly bizarre lament, Blond and Pabst appear to have caricatured both state and market in an elision of the contradictions between the sentimental and the rational organisation of social policy programmes in contemporary Britain.
For them, under the current government the state has conspired to "abort British society". I think that we have seen something slightly different. In policy programmes since 1997 we have seen a tension emerging between the promotion of communitarian morals and the administratively optimal organisation of public services that are targeted at objectively defined needs.
At times, the well meant urge of the former - in the New Deal for Communities, in Surestart, in faith schools, in work around anti-social behaviour - sits uneasily with the rational targeting of resources to those most disadvantaged - through family tax credits or through investment in health and education. The notion that ‘culture' includes both an implicitly ‘normal' lifestyle, work life balance or family structure and also a dissident creativity of alternatives makes the cultural an ethical contest about both rights and responsibilities.
So their mooted ‘collapse of British values' plays to a melancholic narrative that borders on bigotry. Rather than a sense of citizenship we are offered (even in its absence) a lost sense of Britishness which might provide some form of social cement. Ignoring the contested nature of the cultural highbrow and the class inflected histories of the civilising imperative, this cement works in the Pabst / Blond rhetoric to provide a sentimental unity that trumps a sense of citizenship rights. So when culture becomes problematic the chimera of multiculturalism becomes the scapegoat that epitomises the ways in which moralities are invariably contested and debated. Yet the reality on the ground relates more directly to the new migrations of the 1990s onwards that generate an ethics that stretches beyond the nation state and a demography that not only responds to British economic affluence but also promotes it.
In these circumstances the new vocabulary of integration and cohesion may or may not offer a preferable way of reading Broken Britain (see my forthcoming piece on OK next week). However, it certainly provides a slightly more nuanced reading of than one that merely valorises a return to ‘collective social norms'.
