The passing of Frank Field and civility too?
The challenges of opening up, and engaging people in, a genuinely free civil society
RIP Frank Field, who sadly died this week. For those who remember him - and going by the fond tributes, many clearly do - he was a ‘decent’ man. A word you don’t hear that much these days, especially to describe a Member of Parliament and former Minister. There was much I didn’t agree with him on. His pursuit of the Blair government’s politics of behaviour, for instance, in the 1990s. I didn’t like the way politics had become petty and authoritarian. It was no longer about big ideas and social change. It was all about noisy neighbours (about which he wrote a book) and anti-social youth. But maybe he was ahead of his times? He saw the fraying of community first hand, and wanted to do something about it.
He was that rare thing, especially nowadays - a conviction politician. He was the last of the few resisting the rise of the managerial, machine politician. But also a politician who seemed to have a genuine connection with and affection for his Birkenhead constituents (whom he served for 40 years). He took his role seriously as a public servant - as their public servant. They were decent people, and he expected the anti-social sorts that had become the folk devils of the time, to be decent too. I have more sympathy for his position now than I did then. And I am perhaps less optimistic than I once was about us successfully addressing a problem that has got much worse.
But encouraging people to rat on their neighbours or expecting the police to socialise their youth, was never going to work. And it would mean ordinary people outsourcing what authority they had to experts and the state. But it is only us, in our communities, that can tackle these difficult and entrenched issues. So, it was with some anticipation that I attended a recent book launch on The Soul of Civility. The author of said book, Alexandra Hudson, gave a thought-provoking account of why civility - or the lack of it - is something we should be concerned about. The anti-social behaviour agenda of the nineties was about anti-social youth. Today, society as a whole can feel anti-social.
The book is yet to be launched in the UK, but I was hoping it’s author might speak to some of these concerns. By all accounts, Frank Field was a model of - as well as an advocate for - civility. An old school solution, you might say, to what Hudson described as a ‘crisis of personhood’, and our tendency to de-person those with whom we disagree. Field would never have done that. He was an admirer of Thatcher and latterly got behind Brexit too. And was consequently a victim of such incivilities himself from his own thinkalike party colleagues. As Hudson said, we have difficulty talking about differences of opinion these days. It is in these times of ‘hyper partisanship’ that we are reminded that civility is ‘profoundly fragile’.
The talk, taking place in the heart of Westminster, was titled The Dilemna of Civility. And fittingly so. The very idea of civility is something of a paradox. ‘Isn’t civility the greatest enemy of freedom?’ asked one audience member. Hudson described herself as a classical liberal - but isn’t the liberal ideal of liberating the individual from traditional constraints the very source of the problem, suggested another. I’m not so sure our freedoms and our need to cooperate with each other, are necessarily opposed. We are social beings but we have minds of our own too. The creative tension between these two facts is surely what makes us who we are?
Doesn’t civility need a little incivility to keep things real? Responding to Hudson’s talk, Noah Khogali, Scottish Conservative Party Councillor for the Strathearn Ward, argued that partisanship and polarisation can be good things. Instead we have Scotland’s draconian Hate Crime Act, and the ‘rampant hostility’ post the 2014 Independence Referendum to alternative, non-orthodox opinion. Much the same is true south of the border post the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Samuel Rubinstein, a writer for The Critic and Unherd, concluded that politics is a messy business. It is a mistake to try to ‘flatten’ it through appeals to civility.
Hudson was in full agreement on the importance of being disagreeable. She talked about how being civil is not the same as being polite. (This makes a lot of sense. We’ve all met people - usually the unbending, officious sort - who weaponise politeness.) We ‘sometimes need to be impolite’ she said, if we are to strike up ‘true, authentic relationships’ with each other. Manners, social norms and etiquette are always changing but they and their ‘moral underpinnings’ matter, she explained. It is what democracy, human flourishing and the pursuit of the good life are built upon. That shared sense of who we are.
In making the case for civility, Hudson insisted she was ‘not asking that we respect all ideas equally’. Only ‘that we accept all people equally’. She described civility as ‘a way of seeing others as our moral equals’. At a time when we are instead encouraged to see each other as different or damaged, this was really good to hear. It also suggests our own society - obsessed, as it is, with skin-deep diversity and competitive victimhood - is constitutionally opposed to the fostering of civility and badly in need of moral levelling up. Alastair Donald, our host, asked whether she was over-reaching somewhat and treating the idea of civility as if it could solve all ills. He had a point.
The book is subtitled ‘timeless principles to heal society and ourselves’. Hudson rowed back a little on that. Civility ‘starts in the home’ she said. It ‘can’t be scaled’ - by which I assume she meant it can’t be imposed from on high as prime minister Tony Blair did with his misnamed Respect agenda all those years ago. The agenda failed. We can’t be made to be more civil anymore than we can be made to be less anti-social. The sense of a society struggling with various forms of normative breakdown has only got worse in the quarter century since Blair first started blaming parents, yoof and the folk next door, for all our problems; and introducing illiberal laws to supposedly deal with them.
What has been lacking in respect all these decades is people’s ability to make their own decisions, run their own lives; and stand up for themselves and their communities. Which is why I rather admire the ‘pro-Palestine’ activists who we could hear on the street below as we had our civilised discussion. They are, at the very least, misguided in my view; and at worst, poisonously malign in their Israelophobic intent. But still, I was left wondering whether the protestors were as much contributors to, as disrupters of, the collective project of civility. Either way, I offered, they were engaged in the public sphere - what’s left of it - and that, in itself, is probably a good thing.
Donald wondered if there was something missing in her account. For him, it was the absence of politics. I agree, that would be welcome, as long as its not more politics of behaviour. For me though, the gaping hole in this discussion is the disconnect with what is actually going on (or rather not going on) out there on our high streets, and on buses and trains. As one audience member rather bluntly put it: ‘We’re not really members of communities anymore so what’s the point of being civil?’. I’d welcome more bad tempered, even violent disagreement, over what we have at the moment. It might not be very civil but it sure beats withdrawing into ourselves, our heads bowed in contemplation of the latest TikTok meme, our fellow citizens muffled by earbuds.
Image: Policy Exchange