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Tuesday 7 October 2008

It’s the Broken Society, stupid

The social consequences of welfare dependency scar our great towns and cities. In Glasgow, where 55 per cent of households have no earned income, male life expectancy is 69 years, lower than in the Gaza Strip, North Korea and Iran. In Calton, the poorest area of the city, male life expectancy is 54 years, which puts it on a par with sub-Saharan Africa. These shaming statistics have not happened because we have looked the other way: public money has poured in; state spending now accounts for 70 per cent of the Glasgow region’s GDP, putting it on a par with the communist countries of the old Eastern bloc.

The cracks in Britain’s Broken Society, however, go far beyond the underclass, though that is its most serious manifestation. There is a general feeling that, across the social spectrum, Britain has become a coarser, more yobbish society, in which discourtesy has become a national habit and violence is always lurking beneath the surface. A general societal, moral and cultural collapse extends well into the comfortable middle classes and is reflected in manners, dress style, violent demeanour and foul and sloppy language, even among the supposedly educated. In a nation with too many Jade Goodys, it takes a Bollywood actress to remind us of the traditional British virtues of tolerance and courtesy.

The fractures are now everywhere. In Britain’s Broken Society, 42 per cent of children are now born out of wedlock, 45 per cent of British marriages end in divorce, 24 per cent of kids are being brought up by a lone parent and, by a 19 point margin, we have the highest teenage birth rate in Europe, despite 46 per cent of under-18 pregnancies in Britain ending in an abortion (also a European record).

Alcohol-related deaths have close to doubled since the beginning of the 1990s and a third of 16- to 24-year-olds binge drink each week; 26 per cent of children have taken drugs (up from a mere 5 per cent in 1987) and 75 per cent of people think that drugs are a problem in their area. A recent report in the Lancet revealed that today’s generation of teenagers is the first in recorded history to be less healthy than its parents. Hardly surprising, then, that the recent Unicef report found that Britain was the worst place in the industrialised world for a child to grow up.

The 21st-century challenge for Britain’s politicians is to mend the Broken Society as the late 20th-century ones finally managed to reverse our Broken Economy. But, just as it took a previous political generation a long time to rise to the economic challenge, so today’s generation has been slow to face the new social one.

Mr Brown has yet to acknowledge that there is a Broken Society, perhaps because it would be an implicit criticism of the past ten years. David Cameron vaguely grasps that this is the new ground on to which British politics is moving but has yet to provide any kind of policy response. Sir Ming Campbell has yet to say anything on the matter.

It will not be easy: the Broken Society will be at least as hard to fix as the Broken Economy. Our political leaders will need honest minds and fresh attitudes to confront it. From Mr Brown, more of the same will not be a solution. From Mr Cameron, hugging a hoodie somehow doesn’t quite hack it.

More articles from: Andrew Neil | this section

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