An orderly and civilised society

The biggest missing idea in British politics

The head of my old sixth form college was a wonderful guy from Northern Ireland who improved the lives of many people in Huddersfield, but died much too young.

On our first day there he told us:

In a third-class society, there’s a lot of litter, and no-one picks it up.

In a second-class society, there’s some litter, and some people are picking it up.

In a first-class society there’s no litter, and if there was any, someone would pick it up.

It’s always stayed with me - it’s a good way to describe the vicious or virtuous cycles in which things either become more civilised or less.

How many people reading this have heard people playing obnoxious music on public transport and weighted up saying something, versus the risk of trouble if you do?

How many people have got used to frequently smelling cannabis on the streets of London and our other cities?

How often do you see graffiti in a day?

Two recent pieces in the Times reminded me to write this piece.

Janice Turner on graffiti:

“It isn’t just the ugliness or the knowledge that some struggling restaurateur spent a fortune making their frontage welcoming only to see it ruined. It’s how it makes you feel about your neighbourhood: that it’s in decline, that you’re no longer safe, that if unseen hands can daub your corner shop with impunity, they may be emboldened to do worse things to you — and no one will stop them.”

And Will Lloyd on how other places seem more civilised now:

When they arrived back in the United Kingdom they found themselves unable to use the lavatory on the train from the airport because every unlockable door had been smashed up. Inside one broken cubicle, urine sloshed around on the floor, permeating their shoes. They alighted at a city centre station where a giant billboard advertised the services of the Samaritans. Leaving the station, they passed two brittle men enjoying some crack cocaine as they took cover next to a parked police car with a rainbow flag stencilled on one of the doors. It was, of course, raining coldly as they walked back to the flat they rent but will never be able to afford to buy.

Why we can’t have nice things

One of the most under-discussed and under-appreciated things in politics is the unrealised desire of most British people to live in a civilised, orderly society. It is something often promised by politicians - but in my lifetime it has not been delivered.

Why? Both left and right have different flaws. On the right we are culpable. From 2010-24 we prioritised other things more. We cut police numbers then restored them; lost prison officers, then rehired less experienced ones; and we didn’t deal with the prolific offenders who cause so much misery. We didn’t deliver the things we promised in opposition - like honesty in sentencing, or the of swapping of old prisons in expensive places like Wandsworth for more capacity elsewhere. We sometimes adopted the worst ideas of the left, like a mistaken crackdown on stop and search in 2014.

Then again, we did some positive things too. Michael Gove restored the ability of schools to expel dangerous and disorderly pupils and restore order, ending the system of appeals to third parties outside the school which overruled teachers and made them give up.

I thought about that the other day because there is a big new push from an army of 200 human rights lawyers to fight school exclusions. Their view is that these children aren’t being bad or violent, it is simply that “their needs are not being met.” The new Education Secretary (who is a sort of anti-Gove in many ways) is sympathetic and says she will bring “more accountability” to schools and trusts who exclude pupils. This won’t end well.

The left have a different set of problems which stop them from tackling disorder. We have a prisons minister who thinks that only a third of prisoners should be in jail and a Justice Secretary who thinks no women should be in jail. Keir Starmer says that “We’ve got too many prisoners.”

The Starmerite, human-rightsy version of the left is far too quick to tolerate dangerous behaviour if perpetrators can tell some sort of social justice or racial justice sob story. For example, Labour’s Kim Johnson is currently taking through a private members bill designed to stop prosecution of people who facilitate or help commit serious crimes. I can imagine this government allowing this onto the statute books. I don’t believe for one second the current government has what it takes to make this country more orderly.

We already know that they have commissioned the Gauke Review. This is intended to lead to a ban on short prison sentences - a long-cherished goal of anti-prison campaigners. The government have also briefed that they will stop recalling to prison people who breach their licence conditions. While initially Labour have been able to “blame the last lot”, their ideological anti-prison position will become clearer and clearer to the public over time.

They have already abandoned plans to deport dangerous people too. In August a convicted sex offender was awarded refugee status in the UK after a judge ruled he would be at risk of "mob violence" in Afghanistan because he repeatedly commits sex offences. In truth I suspect he would suddenly become more law-abiding back home, where they aren’t such a soft touch. But under Starmer there is zero chance we will leave the ECHR or unblock the other obstacles to deporting such dangerous people.

But it isn’t just hard-edged criminal justice or immigration policy where Starmer will flunk the challenge of creating an orderly society. This week the Children’s Commissioner is calling for a ban on smacking children. In 2022 Starmer suggested extending the Welsh Labour Government’s ban on smacking to the whole of the UK:

“What it does is give children the protection that adults already have, and that is the right thing,” he told reporters. I would like to see the rest of the UK step into line here, because I think, well, Welsh Labour have taken a lead here and they’re absolutely right to protect children in the way that they now have.”

This is the perfect encapsulation of his human-rights-based world view.

Order in Britain has been the victim of what someone once called “a two-handed dance of decline,” which we need to break out of. One of the problems is that elites are insulated from the consequences of disorder. They don’t walk dangerous and messy streets, or get public transport, or have to live next to chaotic people.

No order, no progress

Successful places understand the connection between order and success. Applying Broken Windows theory in New York, Bill Bratton drove down levels of crime and disorder which had previously been thought to be completely intractable. But new left-wing political leadership has fettered their police on human rights / racial justice grounds, and now serious crime is shooting up again.

Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew understood the multi-level nature of what is needed for a civilised society. Arriving in London he had marvelled at the kind of high-trust society that enabled people to pay for newspapers with an honesty box. For him, decisive policy on crime was a no brainer. He said of their death penalty for drug dealers: “If we could kill them a hundred times we would”. But he also launched a concerted push to green the city, and making it the greenest city in Asia. The famous Singaporean ban on chewing gum was something LKY adopted reluctantly: people were sticking gum on the sensors for train doors and making trains late. For him needs of the many outweighed the interests of selfish few.

In the US today there is a shift of talented people out of places where disorder has been allowed to take hold - like San Francisco - and towards safer places like Texas (Though a backlash may now be starting in SF).

The US experiment with “defunding” or withdrawing the police has demonstrated once again the people who suffer from a disorderly society are not the strong and the rich but the weak, poor and different. Ironically, black people in the US have borne the brunt of an increase in homicides under the “defund the police” movement.

Disorder in its strong form is obviously tragic. Britain has got used to crimes that would once have been news for months: kids stabbed on the way to school, killings carried out by children, and more. Violent disorder grows out of lower level disorder. But although it’s less dramatic, there also is a lot of direct suffering from lower-level disorder and the loss of civilised standards.

More than order

I am a big fan of the Parliamentary system. Going door-to-door chatting to constituents is an amazing reminder of the gulf between the SW1 conversation and the things that would actually make a difference in people’s everyday lives.

There’s a category of things that people raise with me which that I would lump together under the “liveability agenda.”

Many of them are about having a pleasant, civilised and nice place to live. As it happens, there is good evidence that disorderly environments have further bad consequences (the literal origin of ‘broken windows’ in policing.) But people also just value a civilised environment in itself.

In no particular order, here are some of the things we should do:

• National ban on playing music out loud on all public transport, enforced with more staff onboard and large and instant fines until the norm is changed.

• End “street scars” which make our streets look messy and disorderly.

• End Box Blight - with phone boxes and street furniture covered in graffiti and stickers.

• Have a crackdown on spitting - which is endemic in bits of London.

• Set a galvanising national goal to reduce the amount of litter.

• Plant trees on every residential street in the country where this is remotely possible.

• National push to clean up all the graffiti in the country, catch more of those who do it, and give them more serious sentences.

• Push and incentivise the vernacular replacement of ugly buildings (increasingly common across Europe).

• Councils to sort empty shops (including using rental auction powers in LURA 2023).

• Councils and housing associations to sort dumping of fridges / mattresses / broken cars in gardens.

• Action to stop e-bikes and scooters being stolen / ridden on pavements.

• Requirements that public e-scooters should be of the docking station variety, rather than scooters being simply dumped across pavements.

• Councils to sort derelict or unsightly buildings, including more aggressive use of Section 78 and EDMOs. More use of notice to complete on stalled building sites.

• Push for hotspot policing everywhere and shift from reactive to preventative policing - plus reconsideration of PCSOs vs officer balance.

• Actual enforcement of the law on cannabis.

Creating an orderly society

There are lots of things - beyond just criminal justice - that we could do to make Britain a more orderly and civilised place.

But the first step is to acknowledge something about the interconnected nature of the problem.

A civilised and orderly society is a momentum game, and for some time the momentum has been against us. To get out of the vicious and into the virtuous circle will need a big push on all fronts.

Crime and really serious disorder comes out of a disorderly society. But elites are programmed to think that moves to create a more orderly society are “silly” or “cringe”.

Two examples:

• Network Rail have recently installed an “official” graffiti-style mural on one of the small railway stations in my constituency. Something similar has been done near a parade of local shops. This is the state creating a more disorderly street scene. We should not do this.

• The police are unrecognisable compared to even a few years ago. In my lifetime they have gone from highly smart and orderly to wearing black t-shirts with exposed arm tattoos. They also now appear in body armour and festooned with devices / mace etc. This is more understandable, but still subtly communicates to us all that we are living in a more disorderly and potentially violent place. We should find a safe but smarter alternative.

There is a whole book to be written on the idea of the Cool. About how the backlash against the highly orderly societies of the postwar years was pushed on by the middle classes, for decades after it became glaringly obvious it was imposing a large cost on people who were less fortunate.

In 1798 John Adams linked the ability of people to enjoy freedom to their own internal ability to restrain themselves: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

He probably wasn’t the first to make the point that the more that we can create the atmosphere and vibes of an orderly society, the less there is need for repressive or restrictive measures.

In contrast, in our society, we have gone a long way in the other direction - for example we put up ineffective posters telling people not to harass each other. Robert Cialdini explained 20 years ago why this sort of thing is a mistake:

Within the statement “Many people are doing this undesirable thing” lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message “Many people are doing this.”

There is an asymmetry about order. It doesn’t take many people to shatter the shared illusion of an orderly, high-trust society, and inflict discomfort on a much larger group of people

For example, some morons from a left wing group threw soup on paintings. Now visitors to the National Gallery have to queue in the rain while they wait to be searched. That is why such offences need exemplary punishments. Instead they are repeatedly being spared jail.

When I was born you could walk into Downing St, Parliament, and other public institutions without going through airport-style security. Disorder and terrorism are different, but in both cases it only takes a few wicked people to force a shift that makes life worse for the many. So you have to hit them hard, for the good of the many.

Missing in action

Perhaps the most subversive things on social media today are accounts like “Bobbie” - which consist of… largely comment-free footage of mid-century Britain.

They are subversive because the contrast with Britain just a few decades back is so embarrassing.

There’s a certain chunk of people on websites like twitter who react very negatively to any suggestion that any aspect of our society may have got slightly worse compared with the past, and don’t like any suggestions that we should do anything to try and make Britain more orderly.

This is odd. These people are often not preaching what they practice. Their attitude to how schools should treat misbehaving kids is totally different to their expectations for their own kids.

Many sensible centrist types can see that disorder is what they would call “socially unjust”, and that the worst off suffer most. They can also see that it’s public servants from teachers to social workers who suffer first from disorder.

So, what’s the block? It is partly a funny set of mental asymmetries. For example, Kier Starmer thinks parents shouldn’t be allowed to smack their children because kids should be ‘treated like adults’. But he doesn’t want them to be treated like adults when they punch a teacher in the face.

But above all I think the idea of doing things that would make Britain more orderly is just regarded as uncool, cringey or naff.

Instead, today’s elites still valorise people like Banksy, whose work is painfully obvious and trite. Perhaps things will change once the Starmer Generation retire. Perhaps we will start valorising the people who pick up the litter, not those who drop it?