Last week I was walking down my local high street when I approached a normal-looking family with children in tow.
Usually I would have thought nothing of it except the mother of the family threw the empty soft drink can she was drinking from into a nearby bush – in full view of her children. When I called her out on this she scoffed, laughed, and carried on.
Perhaps I am getting old (it is my birthday soon) and more sensitive to these minor infractions. But I see such behaviour more and more regularly: screaming marauding gangs of young teenagers, fare jumping on public transport, and overt use of drugs in the street being just some examples.
In attempting to diagnose this problem I was struck by one glaring possibility – the idea that it’s someone else’s responsibility.
The size of the state has ballooned in recent years. Public sector debt as a percentage of GDP sits just below 100 per cent whereas as recently as 2010 it sat at just 65 per cent. We are about to hit an all-time high post war tax burden, and the NHS is close to occupying almost a quarter of all government spending.
It would be foolish not to admit that the vast majority of this increase has been the result of the necessity of the pandemic response. But we must always remain vigilant that this excess does not become the status quo.
If that is allowed, then on top of the economic challenge we will likely exacerbate an already growing moral hazard.
For when it comes to public or pseudo public service standards there is a complete absence of responsibility from individuals and institutions.
It is easy to abstract blame for poor public services to central government in toto. But whilst blame for some structural shortcomings in our institutions can be laid its feet, there appears also on the part of some public servants a lack of any commitment to their roles and responsibilities.
Take station guards. Just this week, in London, I have seen them literally stare at someone who vaults the barrier and not even blink. Or police officers, many of whom do a tireless job, watch with nothing more than a shrug as e-scooters and bicycles mount pavements and threaten pedestrians.
Such examples might seem trivial. But as has been written about on ConservativeHome before, it is precisely the enforcement of the small things that is key to making people feel like they live in a nice place
It stings even more so when many of these officers of the public realm strike so vociferously, but then return to work with the same feckless attitude to their jobs – a by-product of unionisation, ironically, where adversarialism has replaced a sense of society with a them-and-us attitude.
Moreover, the actual and perceived influence of the size of our governments (local and national) has led to a real obfuscation of personal and familial responsibility.
Our distorted economy is another excuse; home-ownership, a classic example of acquiring a stake in society, is now increasingly out of reach of millions of younger people; the sense of alienation this creates is advanced as part of the reason for our ailing public square.
But not owning property should not be an excuse to feel such disconnect from your community that you harm it.
All of this creates a vicious cycle: as the state expands, our sense of individual agency (and thus responsibility) diminishes; as that sense recedes, there are calls for the state to expand yet further to palliate the consequences.
So what is to be done? Firstly, we ought to insist that officers of the public realm actually enforce the rules and regulations which are there to keep society going.
It seems ridiculous to have to spell this out in such explicit terms, but I am sure we have all seen transgressions go unchallenged. Major crimes are generally dealt with well and rarely threaten societal cohesion. Snowballing minor crimes do, and we ought to tackle them as firmly as possible.
Second, given the intractable nature of the housing crisis we need to find new ways to give people a sense of belonging, a stake in the future, and a grasp of what we expect of good citizens; I have previously written about how we might do this.
Thirdly, and crucially, we must start reducing the size of the state. I push back hard against those who say Britain has become structurally more left-wing and statist; the hangover from the pandemic. where the public saw the benefits of big state intervention. need not be permanent.
With ballooning public finances and the singular threat of Covid-19 receding, people must be alerted to the inherent flaws in a big-state approach. Delegation, careful targeting of scarce budgets, and close collaboration with the private sector is what will deliver the best bang for the taxpayer’s buck.
Such a strategic approach is also essential if we are to fulfil our mission, as Conservatives, to help the disadvantaged and equip people to make the best of their lives. If government keeps trying to do everything, it will not do anything well.
A litterbug setting a bad example in front of her children may seem a trivial thing. But it’s through countless such small examples that people’s sense of a healthy society is chipped away.
We can’t catch every instance of antisocial behaviour. But in government, we can tackle the structural issues which drive it and blunt the official response to it, and it is our responsibility as Conservatives to do just that.
Link to original, published in ConservativeHome on 11 Apr 2023.
