National Life: Shared Values and Public Policy Priorities

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and I could not agree more with everything he said about LGBT. Something I will never understand is the awfulness of a young person having to choose between their religious faith and their sexuality; I find that incomprehensible.

I am very grateful to have this debate and congratulate the most reverent Primate on bringing it to the House. What are our shared values? I know what I would like them to be—openness, tolerance, inclusiveness, fairness, kindness, honesty, liberty and community—but the world does not appear to work like that. Brexit, as many have said, showed what a divided and somewhat nasty country we can be.

The political backdrop against which our lives play out inevitably colours the atmosphere of our day. Public policy on health, crime, employment, housing, education and the environment all contribute—and, clearly, a more equal society is vital in addressing the current malaise—but public policy can do only so much. It is both society and its governance—and religion—chicken and egg, that set our value system. There is an underlying rationale for malaise and misery when loss, divorce, unemployment, crime or ill health come our way; but there is relatively low unemployment and a relatively decent health service, and crime has been dropping for some time, but there is still malaise and misery. The old structures that held our society in place—marriage, religion, law, class or a virtual, unwritten but universal understanding of acceptable behaviour—are now far less certain, uniform or permanent than used to be the case. That is thankfully so in some of those instances, as they did not always embody values that I might wish to share.

How can we balance what is good for “me” with what is best for “us”: the aspiration for the common good, as opposed to selfish individual advancement? What role does government have in all this? This is tricky territory to tread, as with one false slip in the sentence, you open yourself to pastiche as wanting a ministry of fun and state-regulated, force-fed humour courses.

The deal was always that we behaved well because the Church and other religious establishments, parents, teachers, the police and our Government—pillars of society—said we should. They, at least theoretically, set an example of good behaviour and expected us to do the same. If we did as we were expected to, we were rewarded with approbation from our family, friends, teachers, the community or God—depending on our proclivity—or even an inner feeling of positivity or well-being, because we can actually as human beings universally distinguish right from wrong.

From our establishments, institutions and leaders came a code of social conduct that we all understood. There was either a penalty for deviating from the expectation of good behaviour, such as social exclusion, civil or state punishment or excommunication; or the simple reward of doing the right thing to fulfil our own expectations of ourselves, stemming from our innate sense of good behaviour.

That is no longer the case. This ordered existence has been disintegrating for years. Church attendance and belief are dropping, teachers’ position and authority is diminishing, parents are not exercising the level of control or influence over their children that they used to, and we have had the scandal of MPs’ expenses, banks defrauding us, paedophiles in the Catholic Church, sportspeople cheating, and so on and on. There are feet of clay all over the place, and the media feed the frenzy of this downward spiral and catalogue the cataclysm. The media themselves emphasise the negative, the nasty, the banal and the low-grade, let alone the 24-hour news cycle that is a monster that has to be fed. What about us? We shop on credit, we drink, we take drugs, we numb ourselves by sitting in front of one sort of screen or another and we blame everyone else—generally the Government or foreigners.

This is decline and fall. Governments have allowed a society to develop in which inequality, exclusion, stress and low-level tension are the norm. Mutual support and neighbourliness have declined; isolation is increasing, mental illness is more prevalent, and the signs of day-to-day anger and tension are everywhere. So we should look at policies to reduce stress and inequality, with much less emphasis on status and much more on co-operation and friendship. Status and friendship have their roots in fundamentally different ways of resolving the problem of the competition for scarce resources. Status is based on a pecking order, coercion and privileged access to resources, such as we in this House enjoy, while friendship is based on a more egalitarian basis of social obligations and reciprocity.

Of course, we need to re-establish trust in the state, and in the behaviour and nature of the state—perhaps even in experts—and they need to lead by example. In fact, that is the terror of Trump right now. In the grand sweep of policy, there are obviously “big picture” items, such as tackling poverty, reducing social exclusion, cutting crime and building more homes. But so often now the remedies that we apply to keep us on the straight and narrow are legal rather than social boundaries. However more stringent our laws are, with surveillance, rules, regulations, targets and punishments, they achieve so very little in terms of changing behaviour for the better. The exposure of the level of paedophilia in sport this last week, the Savile scandal and the sexual exploitation in Rotherham are not, I sadly suggest, scandals of the past alone. I suspect that, if we were to look under any rock, anywhere in this country, we would still find these horrors—and there are no values that I share with those who are the perpetrators of such horrors.

Public policy may set the tone for change of behaviour, but we all have a responsibility for behaviour change, and we cannot leave it to public policy or the Government. We must all learn to intervene and all challenge unacceptable behaviour. This is not authoritarian; this is social liberalism—and, ultimately, we must all take responsibility for our own behaviour.