Last Tuesday I wrote a post in which I looked at some of the major changes for the better that had occurred in my lifetime. In many cases they were eventually consolidated in legislation, but cultural shifts had to happen over a long period of time before Parliament was willing to formalise them in law.
Before outlining some ideas for the future, I wanted to highlight a few more changes in my lifetime. Some of these required only minimal or no legislation but the changes in culture were nevertheless significant.
- Mental illness was considered deeply shameful and patients were locked in large mental asylums.
- Many parents thought it was not worth educating girls beyond the age of 16.
- Stories about women drivers, mothers-in-law and busty blondes were standard comedy material.
- Seat belts were not fitted in cars. (Ironically, when they were introduced Jimmy Savile fronted the government “Clunk, click, every trip” campaign)
- The general view was that women who were raped were asking for it.
I repeat what I wrote in that earlier post:
As Liberal Democrats we must not lose sight of our role in this kind of long-term change over the years – being in Government is not the only way to extend liberal democracy within our country.
So what needs fixing in the UK now? In which areas of community life can we help to generate a shift in public attitudes? Here are some initial thoughts:
- Children are overprotected, and need to be able to take more risks.
- There is huge income inequality in pay, which goes way beyond bankers’ bonuses.
- Prisons don’t work as they are, because a huge proportion of inmates go on to re-offend. Proper training, rehabilitation and aftercare would be cost effective if they brought down crime. There are far too many people with mental health problems in prison.
- Looked after children leave care at 18 and are often cast adrift; they are much more likely to turn to crime, or to suffer mental illness, than other young people
- Social workers should be given greater public recognition and esteem.
- Far too few rape allegations are brought to court.
- Human trafficking into the UK, which results in forms of bonded labour or prostitution, must be stopped.
- Female genital mutilation is horrific and should never happen here.
So what would you campaign for, to help bring about a more humane and fairer society?
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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12 Comments
You just slipped in that social workers one didn’t you?. Respect has to be earned. Social workers don’t earn it.
Mary, thank you for this post. It isn’t until you reflect on the past that your realise our way of thinking has always been the future and in many ways our Party has been ahead of the curve in so much of what you described. I think part of our collective psyche at the moment is influenced by the fact that we cannot believe we are in Government and that we have this short window to enact as much of our policy as we can and this is frustrating to us. I don’t think we forgive ourselves enough for the fact that we are working with the Conservatives (not know fort heir acquiescence) and are the minority party. I’m not sure some our voters understand that either and we must tell them more often about the good we are doing.
I also feel confident that we will be in coalition again in the near future if you look at the way the electorate is fracturing and so we need to panic less. We, as you suggest, need to plow on regardless of the political weather. In government we have greater opportunities but you are right that we also achieved a lot when we were not. As a young candidate in the party (Oxford West and Abingdon) I welcome this long term approach to change. Progressive does not have to mean revolutionary. Evolution is often much more profound and enduring in its effect. As you rightly say, much of the progress that has been made was a process of slow attrition of the negative. Most of the time, this cannot be achieved in one fell swoop, but I am proud that we are pushing the cause along much more quickly given our influence in government.
I’m surprised you don’t mention the trend to demonise the poor, sick, elderly and any other convenient minority that is so popular these days with politicians and the press, frequently under the claimed heading of unfairness to one or other part of the very community that they are seeking to divide and conquer.
As a longstanding liberal, it cuts to the heart of my conscience to see these sort of lies perpetrated by the government.
A truly liberal government, if we ever get one, would need to address these deeply ingrained and government promoted harmful social attitudes as a priority – or, in my opinion, could never claim to be a government with genuine liberal ethics.
Mary, I am sure both of us remember the play ‘Cathy Come Home’ in 1966 which was a hard hitting television production depicting homelessness. The brought to the public’s attention the reality of loosing one’s home, ‘Rackmanism’ and squatting. Despite the strong reaction to the programme across the nation and the launching of homeless charities, the producer claimed little had changed as a result of the play, to help the homeless.
Successive governments (Tory and Labour) have failed to provide enough properties to house the people. In the 1990s I was a Lib Dem District Council housing spokesmen, Vice-Chair and Acting Chair; we did not have enough properties for a long waiting list then and the problem is so much more acute now. The ‘Spare Bedroom Tax’ will see many once again packing up and moving away to find affordable housing. This depressing and predictable outcome may well be a latter day ‘Cathy Come Home’ for the 21st century. As Tony Greaves put it in another thread on this website discussing that legislation “the suggestion is that the higher orders can treat the lower orders as lesser beings who can be moved around at will”
Surely if anything in this society needs fixing now it is the provision of enough affordable housing for the people and the changing of the public’s attitude to those without an adequate roof over their heads? And this is at a time when the Lib Dems ARE in a coalition government.
It didn’t feel like it at the time, but maybe in the 60s the issues were easier to campaign on because so many of them were about equality: racial, gender, homosexual, disability. Obviously in none of these areas have we achieved all that is necessary, but the principles are almost universally accepted. Mary’s shopping list of areas where a change in the culture of our society is necessary is one we can all add to of course: I would suggest that for all the progress that has been made on animal welfare in the past 50 years we are still very much too dependent on the products of animals for our sustenance, to the detriment of both our health and that of the planet.
The more fundamental problem, though, is the extent to which our education system creates people who are passive consumers (or, in the case of those rejected by it, angry, destructive nihilists). I remember a cartoon of a man saying to a small child: “Now that you’ve learned to speak, shut up!” Global capitalism has so far done a fine job in keeping populations quiescent despite their declining living standards as a consequence of its failures. George Orwell believed that the reason we did not have a revolution in this country in the 1920s was because of football pools and the radio: today that might be Sky TV and the Lottery, but it is also because we have educated several generations not to question – not authority exactly, because authority per se is no longer widely respected – but their essential powerlessness in a globalised world. Liberals believe in globalisation (whether they should in the manner in which it has developed is a matter for debate), but for there to be the remotest chance of global capitalism operating essentially to the benefit of the world’s citizens rather than to that of the owners of capital then the citizenry has to be informed and empowered: recognising the problem and implementing solutions is a major challenge to Liberals.
Capitalism has indeed many problems, but, like democracy, to date it appears to have been the most successful means of bring people out of poverty, and therefore the suggestion that there is some sort of conspiracy by global capitalists to keep populations quiescent is reminiscent of Marxist rhetoric, though of course Marx himself said that it was religion which is the opium of the people, so perhaps we would be better aiming our ire at organised religion.
However, many on the right would agree that our education system is to blame for producing young people who lack self esteem and lack the self confidence to challenge authority, For instance, the recent report on entry to the Russell Group of elite universities has identified the weakness of comprehensive schools in promoting aspiration – compared to the public schools and grammar schools. While many of the new academies are essentially the same schools but with a new branding, the example of the Hackney academies in pushing bright students from a socially deprived area towards Oxbridge entrance demonstrates that with the right leadership young people can be encouraged to aim for something more than merely accepting their pre-determined lot.
Thank you everyone for all your comments and great ideas.
Rob Watson : you are quite right, of course. I didn’t claim my list was exhaustive, but just a list of things that were uppermost in my mind at the time.
Steve Griffiths: I believe Shelter was set up in direct response to ‘Cathy Come Home’, so it was not ineffective.
Tony Hill: Yes, I realised I hadn’t added anything to do with animal welfare, or any environmental issues either.
Dear Mary,
Since I presume your lifetime and my lifetime to be broadly coterminous, you should add changing attitudes to gay and lesbian issues and racism as big positive changes in our culture. I would also add changing attitudes to social issues such as sex before or outside marriage, single mothers and abortion as positive trends. The decline of deference in the face of privilege, wealth and religion are also works in progress.
All of these are profound and important achievements of a liberal society, and in many cases there is further to go. However I think there is also a sense in which we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Three particular areas of our collective life are out of kilter and I will speak only about these: sex, age and social cohesion.
Since sex was invented sometime around 1966 we have gone from a society which couldn’t even acknowledge such things to one where there are no taboos whatever, save the one great evil of paedophilia. Today we sexualize children, especially girls, from an obscenely early age. Sexual imagery is everywhere from TV and movies to magazines, billboards and pop videos. Teenagers today routinely absorb better porn from a Rhianna video than I, represented by my teenage self, could have found in weeks of searching, and believe me I did try!
This level of sexual exposure demeans women and turns them into sex objects. It robs children of their childhood and by sexualizing society it does make them vulnerable to predation by men with psychological disorders or even by boys of their own age.
The way we treat the elderly will be viewed by future generations as something of a national scandal. At what is becoming the new retirement age of 70, many people may still have a quarter of their lives ahead of them. Yet we lock them away in old folk’s institutions to be patronised and forgotten. Old people are regarded as a burden. We forget that they have wisdom, experience and other qualities that develop over time. Collectively we strip them of their humanity and wish for them to fade quietly away.
As a society we have lost any sense of social cohesion. This is not about race or religion or class but it’s about shared values. Culturally we are becoming a fragmented society. If anything the cleavage lines are about age. IPSOS Mori polls on social attitudes show marked changes between baby boomers, generation X and Generation Y on issues such as tax, welfare, overseas aid, foreign military intervention and Europe.
15% of people now live on their own, double the proportion of the 1970s. And within families it is increasingly rare for generations to eat meals together or to share entertainment, as every child has a computer/TV/smart phone in their room.
Perhaps we are in a state of flux and simply going through a transformation to a new norm, but while this fragmented state pertains it presents challenges to democracy, political participation, social order and ultimately to the legitimacy of the state. Witness the London riots of 2011, which were not confined to London nor technically riots, but a large scale rejection of property laws and traditional norms of behaviour by certain segments of the community.
These things are difficult by their very nature for liberals to address. To even raise them makes you sound like a social conservative, which I am not by any chalk. As a liberal I greatly respect individuality and the freedom of the individual to find success and satisfaction as he or she thinks fit. But a country full of individuals with little or no common ground is not a society at all. A state where everyone puts individuality and self interest ahead of the greater good is doomed to be nasty, brutish and short-lived. Margaret Thatcher was the one who said ‘there’s no such thing as society’. No Liberal Democrat would want to go down that road. Education and culture are the tools that bind people to common values and ideas.
For the future I would hope to see:
• Changes to the way we sexualize children from an early age.
• Reduction in the sheer amount of sexual imagery which assails us all from TV, pop videos and billboards.
• Changes to work to allow the elderly to continue to a make a valid contribution.
• Greater emphasis on families to allow old and young to live together and share knowledge and understanding in both directions.
• A rebalancing of wealth, income and opportunity so that everyone feels like they have a stake in society.
Pay inequality is not a problem, wealth inequality is.
Ken: Thank you for a very thoughtful contribution to this thread. I did touch on some of the LGBT issues in my earlier post, but you’ve picked up on some important concerns about the sexualisation of children. Perhaps we could also add body image to the list.
“Pay equality is not an issue, wealth equality is”: Its depends very much on how the wealth inequality has developed. While there has been much emphasis on the fact that the baby boomers have acquired wealth through the increase in the value of their homes, it should not be forgotten that early in their careers many of them made financial sacrifices to get on the housing ladder – not for them frequent and usually expensive holidays to exotic destinations – holidaying in Spain was actually cheaper than staying in the UK – nor 50″ plasma screen TVs, nor expensive i-phones, nor meals out at expensive restaurants. Many of the problems facing the country are surely the direct result of the willingness of today’s under 40s to rack up debts on consumer products. (In this regard the British could certainly learn a lesson from the Germans for whom credit card spending is still the exception rather than the rule.)
Moreover, there is plenty of evidence of how the gap between top earners and middle-range earners in the UK has widened dramatically in the past 20 odd years, much more so than most other European countries. (This is why MPs feel so hard done by in that the salaries of those with whom they might once have compared themselves have zoomed way above their own.) And this gap has led to a situation in which a privileged minority of people have been able through private education to buy access to the highest paid jobs for their children, thereby perpetuating the divisions within our society. It is all very well government ministers urging local authorities not to pay their officials more than the Prime Minister, but until the Government uses its muscle to enforce a sort of reverse Fair Wages Resolution (whereby the highest paid in an organisation cannot receive more than a specified multiple of the lowest paid) on any organisation operating in, or providing services to, the public sector, then nothing will change.
Graham, I agree it depends how the wealth was accumulated, the problem is not as simple as I made out. I just wanted to deflect the focus on pay onto wealth – we should not be the party of pay control and marginal income tax rates cannot get much higher.