Years ago, when I was a child of nine or ten-this must have been about 1960-I went out to play with my friend John. His father opened the door, and said that he wanted to talk to me. Apparently I'd been using "bad words" in front of John, and he'd repeated them to his little sisters. John's father, a kind and gentle man, was furious. He marched me back home to tell my parents of my misdeeds. Apart from a deep sense of grievance-40 years on, I'm still convinced that it was John who taught me the swear words-I knew what was coming next. It duly came; a full-scale dressing down from my mum and dad; suspension of privileges, which meant that I couldn't go and watch Tranmere Rovers for a few weeks; and, on my part, deep, deep guilt.
I wonder if such scenes happen in Britain today? It's hard to imagine that they do; after all, what would be the point? Watch the television, read the newspapers, listen to conversation in the office, at the pub, on the buses and words which not long ago were almost taboo, tumble out of mouths unchecked. When I was a child, we once had a crisis when I said "Jeez!" (I'd been acting in an American play and one of the characters used the expression all the time.) My father thought it was short for "Jesus," which was banned at home, of course. Now, Britons seem to use the word "fuck" with about as much sense of seriousness as an earlier generation would have said "blast." And language is only the half of it. Britain has become a society whose standards of civility seem to have collapsed and where much public behaviour has become astonishingly coarse-a place where aggression, vulgarity and drunkenness are commonplace. Here are a few random incidents from last year:
I'm walking across a side street in Clerkenwell after work, minding my own business. A car screeches to a halt in front of me; the driver winds down the window and screams: "Either cross the fucking road or get out of the fucking way, OK?"
I'm being driven down Curzon Street in the middle of the afternoon, at walking pace. A man in a three-piece suit, obviously drunk, steps in front of the car, which stops. He then whacks his umbrella across the bonnet of the car, leaving a dent; the driver gets out and they have a fight on the pavement.
I'm at Arsenal, watching them play Liverpool. Where I'm sitting, there are as many women and children as men. Behind me, a group of Liverpool supporters keep up an unbroken tirade. Patrick Vieira is a "black cunt," everyone else is a "fucking gobshite."
I'm watching a Channel 4 show one Friday night. Contestants are playing "Mammary Memories." The rules: five women stick their breasts through holes in a screen, and a man has to match the breasts to a face. (The catch: one of the pairs belongs to his girlfriend.)
The sense that incivility has become a distinct social problem is growing. In a recent ICM poll for the Observer, people were asked "What makes you most embarrassed when you think of Britain?" By far the most common response, mentioned by 33 per cent of those polled, was "hooligans/lager louts." In the criminal justice system, there is growing interest in the "broken windows" theory of crime generation-the idea that if you leave small acts of anti-social behaviour untended, they will metastasize into genuine issues of public order. The public security measures in the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 and Jack Straw's determination to address drink-related crime (in the last British Crime Survey, more than half of all violence inflicted by strangers was said to happen under the influence of alcohol) suggest that incivility has become a genuine issue of social policy.
That makes sense; a society which is rude, aggressive and yobbish is a place in which sooner or later, people will become fearful and unwilling to trust others to behave decently. There's an obvious link here to the burgeoning literature on the importance of social capital, with its modern roots in Robert Putnam's seminal 1995 article "Bowling Alone" (now expanded into a book of the same title). Putnam identified the extent to which traditional American forms of civic and political association had atrophied in modern times. For him and his followers, trust-the sense of reciprocal, generalised dependence-is a crucial attribute of successful societies and economies. Trust thrives in conditions of civility and social capital in conditions of trust. So civility matters. But, as I quickly found out when I started work on this article, it's easier to dislike anti-social behaviour than to measure its impact; and it's easier to do either of those than to figure out how to persuade people to behave better. This is difficult stuff.
At the outset there's a problem of subjectivity: things that offend some of us may not get a rise out of anyone else. The incidents mentioned above left me feeling at best uncomfortable, at worst, threatened; others may have shrugged them off. In a Home Office research paper, "Policing Anti-Social Behaviour," published last year, the authors found that police officers often suggested that "tolerance of certain types of behaviour differed among different sections of the public... middle class areas had different perceptions about what constituted disorderly behaviour than did working class areas." There are similar differences between generations. Although some anti-social behaviour will show up in official crime statistics, much of it will not; there's no law against failing to offer your seat to a lady on the bus. Indeed, even where there are relevant statistics, they won't always capture a wider social phenomenon. It is well known that "aggressive drinking" has become a pervasive feature of modern British life, not only in the city centres of Manchester and London, but in smaller towns, too. Yet it's hard to document the phenomenon. Although there was an increase in the number of young people who consumed alcohol in the 1990s, British alcohol consumption per head is stable; it comes in the mid-range of the European countries. Police convictions and cautions for public drunkenness fluctuate wildly in number, changing, presumably, with local police practice. The number cautioned in 1994 (57,890), for example, was almost exactly the same as in 1955 (54,210), but much less than in 1975 (104,452). Make of that what you will.
Doubtless we're all prisoners of our past. I was born in 1951 and grew up in suburban Merseyside. My father was a schoolteacher, my mother a housewife. Their life revolved around local churches-Baptist for my father, Presbyterian for my mother. The house was teetotal and we didn't have a television until Liverpool got to the Cup Final in 1965, though we often watched television at neighbours' houses. So my upbringing may have been a little more decorous than most. Moreover, these days I'm no more than a frequent visitor to Britain; I've spent most of my adult life-and almost all of the last 15 years-in the US. That has coloured my judgments, and not just because, by comparison with London, New York is a rather well-mannered city. There's something about periodic visits to a once-familiar place that heightens your sense of what has changed-changes which, like the slow accretion of rust on exposed metal, may not be noticeable to those closest to them. I've twice written articles about being shocked by the yob culture in Britain, and each time it has been fellow expatriates in New York who have called to say how much their experience mirrors mine. We could all be thin-skinned prigs; but the American journalist who, after five years in Britain, returned to New York last year certainly isn't. I asked her why she left. "In the end," she sighed, "I just got tired of all the drinking."
In any case, the statistics, or lack of them, prove no more than good reporting does. Travel outside Britain and you start to see us as others do. Most Britons regard football hooligans and drunk holidaymakers as aberrant mutants of the genus True Brit. But for many foreigners, the authentic representative of the nation is a young man with a St George's cross painted on his face, wrecking a European caf?; or a lobster-red holidaymaker throwing up on a street somewhere in the sun. It doesn't matter where you go-Las Vegas, Florida, Spain, Bangkok, Verbier-bartenders and shopkeepers will tell you that they detest the sight of a group of young British males descending on their establishments. (They're not much keener on British women.) Reporting the handover to China of Hong Kong in 1997, I was ashamed by the reaction of Chinese and American friends when I suggested that many of the young Britons in the territory were interesting examples of a new form of global adventurism. Those who lived in Hong Kong saw something different-a loud, aggressive group who would finish work (whether on the construction site or in financial services) and head for a bar to get legless. There is no other country whose people, when they get together abroad, are so well-known for vomit and violence-not the Germans or French, not the Americans, not the Swedes. That too is a subjective judgment, but when one's own experience is backed up by those of countless others, it takes on the attributes of fact.
Those of us who think that incivility matters face one more objection: is today's anti-social behaviour really that new? Plainly, it isn't. You don't have to go back to Hogarth or Dickens to know that booze, mayhem, and riot are as much a part of the national character as cream teas at the vicarage. So are moral panics; each decade since the 1950s has been scandalised by the behaviour of its young: teddy boys, mods and rockers, punks and skinheads, lager louts. And in some respects prosperity has made Britain a more pleasant place. I didn't like the language when I watched Liverpool play Arsenal last year. But the crowd was all seated, and at half-time everyone trooped off to the toilets. When I used to stand on the Kop at Anfield in the 1960s-packed like sardines with 20,000 others-the half-time ritual was rather different. It involved a rolled up Liverpool Echo and warm rivulets of piss would be cascading down the terraces within minutes. (One other change in football: at half-time at Highbury, the scallies I was sitting with fired up enormous joints, right under the noses of policemen. We didn't do that in the 1960s.)
Still, we all know that something has changed over the last few decades. In trying to figure out what that might be, George Orwell's wartime essays on England remain a fruitful starting point. When a contemporary politician or commentator, from John Major to Jeremy Paxman, adumbrates on national character, they parse Orwell. So they should; "The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941) and "The English People" (1947) are astonishing works: written in simple declarative sentences, with themes subtle yet understandable and sentiments recognisable even at distance.
Yet Orwell's world is not ours. The evidence he cited to support his ideas-like that famous passage on "the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill-towns...the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of an autumn morning"-is about another time and place. Just as removed from our experience are the judgments he drew. "The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic," he wrote. "It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers." The spread of middle-class ideas and habits to the working class, Orwell thought, had led to a "general softening of manners... In tastes, habits, and outlook, the working class and the middle class are drawing closer together."
Think about that claim. Orwell, a man of the left, was describing a process of levelling up with obvious approval. And it's not hard to think of real-life examples: Roy Jenkins, the son of a Welsh miner, became chancellor of Oxford University with an accent as fruity as a summer pudding. The idea that there was something reprehensible about this-that Jenkins and others had lost something by turning their backs on a world of "collarless, unshaven men, with their muscles warped by heavy labour"-would have struck Orwell as absurd. Softened manners were better manners; this was progress. Yet sometime in the post-war years-between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP?-this received wisdom was turned on its head, at least by the left. For the working class to aspire to middle-class manners now became a betrayal. Middle-class children-Mick Jagger, for example-consciously aped working-class habits. I know; I did it myself. My brother, born in 1944, educated at the local grammar school, left for university in 1963 with perfect received pronunciation (which he still has). I left the same school in 1969 with an affected Scouse accent (traces of which I still have.) God knows what our parents, who had gratefully left the two-up-two-downs of Anfield for a semidetached in the Wirral, thought of it all.
Unlike those conservatives who appropriate him for their own purposes, Orwell found no unbroken line of civil conduct stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times. "The prevailing gentleness of manners," he wrote, "is a recent thing. Within living memory it was impossible for a smartly dressed person to walk down Ratcliff Highway without being assaulted, and an eminent jurist, asked to name a typically English crime, could answer: 'Kicking your wife to death.'"
So the "prevailing gentleness" had not been of long standing. But it was there then-and now it is not. (Try saying "The gentleness of the English civilisation is its most marked characteristic" with a straight face today.) Why did civility go into decline?
The central reason, I think, is the success of consumer capitalism. Civility is one of the Roman virtues, along with restraint, thrift, honour, selflessness and so on. But modern capitalism is far from Roman; the sheer abundance of consumer goods, the boundless pleasures available to us, when coupled with a decline in religious observance, have changed patterns of behaviour all over the developed world. Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1978) remains the classic analysis of the shift. American capitalism, Bell argued, had once taken its moral compass from the small-town Protestant ethic, which prized the values of thrift, effort, and restraint, and which held in check the hedonistic impulse of capitalism-the urge to get and enjoy more things, now. But the link between capitalism and a moral ethic was broken by metropolitanism and modernity. "The Protestant ethic served to limit sumptuary (though not capital) accumulation," wrote Bell. But by the 1960s, "the Protestant ethic was sundered from bourgeois society, only the hedonism remained, and the capitalist system lost its transcendental ethic... The cultural, if not moral, justification for capitalism has become hedonism... pleasure as a way of life."
Britain never had the American folk-memory of small-town virtues. But in a brilliant essay last year in the Times Literary Supplement, Ferdinand Mount argued that, in effect, Britain had something whose impact on expected patterns of behaviour was rather similar: the empire. Britain, Mount argued, "underwent a uniquely intense experience of empire, with all its restraints and impassivities and deprivations. It was the empire that taught our ancestors to keep their chins up and their upper lips stiff, and to put public duty before private satisfaction." Some of Mount's imperial virtues-self-denial, fortitude, loyalty-are precisely those which Bell identified with the American protestant ethic. Just as metropolitanism crushed that ethical sense in America, one might argue, so did the end of empire in Britain.
A concomitant of the end of empire was this: the concept of a "ruling class" no longer made as much sense as it once had. The second world war was a great leveller in more ways than one. Not only did it enforce a degree of common austerity; not only did it expose the sheer waste and stupidity of a class-ridden society. Above all, it sounded the death-knell of empire, even if it was nationalists in Singapore and India who heard the bell toll first and understood its meaning. The war and the end of empire, in their turn, contributed to a post-1945 decline in class-based deference to figures of authority and their values. In a 1988 Centre for Policy Studies address at the Conservative party conference (later a pamphlet), Peregrine Worsthorne looked back to the days when "Almost everybody respectably dressed and speaking with the right kind of accent... was an authority figure able to over-awe merely by his or her presence." But that world did not survive the changes in Britain between 1945 and 1970: decolonisation, the welfare state, the long economic boom, the permissive society, Kenneth Tynan saying "fuck" on the BBC, swinging London, and a growing multiculturalism, especially in the larger cities. These and other changes have for most of us, in most ways, made Britain a better place to live. And here we get the first inkling of a nagging possibility to which we will return: incivility may be one of the prices we have paid for Britain to become a more vibrant, interesting, and dynamic society. Or, to quote Mount once more, "an almost insanely open-minded, casually reckless place."
That's the big picture but there are plenty of small brush strokes worth considering. To a visitor, one of the most striking changes in modern Britain over the last 20 years has been the extent to which it has become a society which takes its pleasure outdoors. Drunkenness, violence and bad language have always been with us; but until the 1980s, they tended to happen inside pubs or behind lace curtains. Now that is not the case. For once, the moment of change can be precisely dated; it came in the summer of 1980, with the opening of the rehabilitated piazza in Covent Garden. In the late 1970s, I used to walk to work through the old Covent Garden, a place of boarded- up warehouses and decrepit, gloomy streets. One sunny day, the wraps were taken off the old flower market. There they were: stalls, cafes, pubs, wine-bars, soon followed by jugglers, street-artists, restaurants, all tumbling out of the confines of the piazza. Where central London led, everyone else soon followed. From the Albert Dock in Liverpool to Canal Street Basin in Birmingham, the rehabilitation of old industrial space was accompanied by an explosion of opportunities to eat, drink and be merry. Couple this with the relaxation of British licensing laws in the early 1990s, and the stage was set for an all-day chance, gratefully taken, to down a skinful in the open air. Has this made Britain a more pleasant and relaxed place? Undoubtedly. But it's had a downside. Milanese or Parisians may know how to handle caf? society without scaring the horses, but-so far at least-Londoners and Brummies don't.
Precisely because incivility seems entwined with the modernisation and liberalisation of Britain, no serious political constituency has ever wanted to tackle its causes. The Thatcher and Major governments spoke as if good manners were important to them. So why didn't they do something about it? Why was there never a British version, say, of William Bennett, Ronald Reagan's education secretary, who loudly made the case that standards of social behaviour had slipped and that government could do something to reverse it?
In essence, it was because Bell's contest between hedonism and self-restraint had by then been resolved, and hedonism had won. Thatcher tried to stem the tide only once. In 1982, at the suggestion of that modern Zelig, Ferdinand Mount, then head of the Downing Street policy unit, Thatcher asked all her ministers to write short personal essays for a cabinet committee called the Family Policy Group. The idea was to find initiatives which would strengthen the family and support virtuous civil behaviour. The plan was revealed to much hilarity. Most ministers didn't have their heart in it, and those who took it seriously made suggestions-such as school lessons in how to manage pocket money-that were too easy to ridicule. The exercise was abandoned; it was, in any case, doomed. For many of the most articulate supporters of Thatcher-such as Andrew Neil, whose Sunday Times editorship in the 1980s was emblematic of the view-the whole point of Thatcherism was to produce a prosperous, classless, society in which rewards went to the able and hard-working, whether or not they threw up on the 8:50 from Liverpool Street. For those sort of Thatcherites, the case that Worsthorne and his fogeyish friends made for good manners was an embarrassment. Worsthorne hoped that the newly rich would assume the responsibilities which are the burden of wealth, helping to address "pressing problems to do with law and order, good behaviour in public places, good manners, social obligation." But such attitudes were too reactionary to be taken seriously in the hedonistic 1980s. They were regarded in much the same way as the jeremiads of Mary Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge, 20 years before.
So it has been left to the present government to tackle incivility as an issue. Should it do so? Or should we accept that anti-social behaviour and a more aggressive society are no more than the flipside of welcome changes in British life-that we're bad because we're good? Indeed, I've heard it said that London's global reputation as a wide open city where you can drink, take drugs and have sex around the clock has given it an edge over other places in the race for foreign investment. Moreover, if civility is important because it contributes to social capital, then those of us who are troubled by yob culture have a problem. There is little evidence, so far, to show that Britain is following the path that Putnam ascribes to America. In a careful study in the British Journal of Political Science in 1999, Peter Hall found that "aggregate levels of social capital have not declined to an appreciable extent in Britain over the post-war years." Surveys by the National Council of Voluntary Organisations suggest that levels of participation in community activities have not changed much in 20 years, and that charitable giving-which fell off in the early 1990s-has recovered well. (There is some data from the European Values Survey that suggests that levels of trust have declined markedly since the 1960s, but this is not conclusive.)
Perhaps for that reason, there seems little support for a substantive policy response to anti-social behaviour. You can't say that Tony Blair hasn't tried; his family has had its own brush with yob culture, and ever since he was shadow home secretary he has made a point of stressing the importance of civility, even if his ideas-such as the proposal that drunks should be marched to cash machines to pay on-the-spot fines-seem off-the-cuff. None of this has done Blair much good. For Conservatives, a Blair speech on the importance of manners and responsibility is the work of a hypocrite; for his own supporters, especially in the London media village, it is the sermonising of a finger-wagging moralist; proof, as a friend of mine puts it, that Blair is a "sanctimonious git."
I find that judgment on Blair profoundly depressing. At least he's trying to address a question which, outside the clever-clever salons of London, engages the attention of a large number of Britons. Of course, most of the ways in which Britain can address incivility are beyond the ability of politicians to shape. Legislation and new police powers will only get us so far. A number of police forces have set up "quality of life" task forces, designed to take action against behaviour which may have been tolerated before-urinating in the street after the pubs close, for instance. But police officers can't do everything and shouldn't try. In the Home Office research report on anti-social behaviour, a senior officer worried that tough enforcement of the laws might drive a wedge between young people and the police, and unnecessarily criminalise relatively harmless activity.
Yet even accepting the limits to police action against incivility, it seems defeatist to throw in the towel. Parents, teachers, friends, media executives-all of us-could make a small effort to behave in a more considerate, more polite way. If we don't, one day the image of modern Britain as a scruffy, loud, yobbish place (not to mention our crumbling infrastructure) will hurt us; and we won't get the international investment on which we depend. I'm from Liverpool, a city which, in my lifetime, has willingly changed its image from a great port to a haven for wisecracking, work-shy, hard-drinking scallywags. You don't think that hurts the city's economic prospects? That it doesn't condemn Scousers to more years of stunted life-chances?
There's nothing preordained about incivility in the modern world. Yobbishness degrades and divides us. It's the counsel of despair, surely, to argue that we've got to take the rough with the smooth; that social aggression is the inevitable consequence of an open, meritocratic, liberal Britain. We used to be better than that and we can be again.
