I think it possible that the Liberal narrative should begin with “What crime-wave?”.

One might address the extent to which a generational assumption of what ‘politically aware’ or ‘politically active’ is modifying the rhetorical map. The Broken Britain narrative relies on the idea that national campaigns fronting for larger movements, such as Climate Camp and the Stop the War! coalition, are in some way symptoms of a Broken Britain rather than symptoms of a new attitude to politics which is actually fixing Britain; slowly, steadily, and with a little, but only a very little since 2003, help from Westminster.

How about a counter-narrative based on the issue of freedom of individual action and expression.

http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/100220-sdl-scottish-defence-league-edinburgh-february-2010.html

As ever, I am not endorsing their views but arguing against the actions taken by the authorities to prohibit their expression.

The important first step is to cite the pieces in The Economist which analyse in depth and trash the claim made by Cameron:

“It has become fashionable to say that British society is in a mess and getting worse. It isn’t”
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15452811
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15452867

The credibility of egregious propaganda shouldn’t allowed to survive without challenge. Always remember Hitler’s astute observation in Mein Kampf:

“The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.”

I think it possible that the Liberal narrative should begin with “What crime-wave?”.

See I don’t think that’s enough. You can’t just try and take down your opponent’s narrative because people are instinctively likely to believe crime exaggerations.

You have to counter it with your own narrative. They could say that the Tories are ‘uncomfortable with how British society has progressed’ or something, while saying they are a positive, visionary party. But just saying ‘what crime-wave’ I think doesn’t hit the spot.

I agree with Sunny here.

Saying “what crime-wave?” like that smacks of complacency and even though backed by the numbers, the message would be lost in the hysterical rightwing finger pointing that followed.

As cynical as it is, US Republican strategist Karl Rove was partly right when he said: “when you’re explaining, you’re losing.” That’s why the crime counter punch has to be couched more in vision than in bald statements of fact.

“even though backed by the numbers, the message would be lost in the hysterical rightwing finger pointing that followed.”

You’re right, of course. But how can we be content with, well, making stuff up to pander to stupidity? Either we’re creatures of reason or not. If we’re going to rejoice at the news that the SciTech committee report has recommended that the NHS stop funding homeopathy (yay!) then surely we’ve got to be equally openly opposed to irrationality and ignorance in other areas?

But how can we be content with, well, making stuff up to pander to stupidity? Either we’re creatures of reason or not.

Well, if the aim is to win elections then just trying to appeal to reason isn’t enough, for various reasons.

For a start – the medium (the media) put in a context that just sounds like partisan bickering. So the headline will be a Tory statement blown out of all proportion – and then a statement by Labour and maybe Libdems slamming it. People will read it, but many will dismiss it as partisanship because they assume the Tories must be raising it for a reason.

And besides, it takes away the Libdem opportunity to spin their own narrative – which has to be hammered mercilessly in order to make it stick. The big question is – how can they expose the Tories and Labour with an original narrative that can stick in people’s minds?

That’s the holy grail. I don’t think being opposed to ignorance is enough. The medium used to get to people is problematic and people don’t pay enough attention to the messages. So it has to be very clear-cut.

I suppose one has to ask what exactly is broken? There are a few very unpleasant places that need a concentration of resources unheard of in modern politics to fix them.

I suspect that if you asked people about their own experiences or neighborhoods rather than hearsay or the press then “broken” would not be appropriate. A bit annoying, maybe. Needs work, maybe.

Having said that, I always feel that what I want to fix is the poverty gap, erosion of civil liberties and increasing social injustices that have got worse over generations of market-worshipping governments post Thatcher.

Perhaps the left only need to redefine what exactly IS broken and steal the narrative from the righties?

‘The big question is – how can they expose the Tories and Labour with an original narrative that can stick in people’s minds?’

By telling the truth? That Britain isn’t broke despite Tory claims and the 2000 laws Labour has introduced to ‘fix’ it?

Treat people like adults and they’ll respond like adults. Tell them bogeyman stories and they’ll stop voting.

Thanks for the comments.

John,

Good point, however, I do tend to agree with Sunny’s assertion that there needs to be more substance based narrative to tackling the generalisation of crime and the Tories’ use of atypical examples of ‘symptoms’ of ‘Broken Britain’ – it has to go further to address the flawed ideological and factual nature of the Tories’ discourse.

Pagar,

Totally agree. I think that key to a counter narrative the Liberal Democrat’s would have to put forward more clearly their case for being the party of liberal values, however, making sure that they clearly state that they are not purporting anarchy! I agree with your comments on the EDL, as long as it is a peaceful protest however, but a lot of the time it is the police who have the uncanny ability to turn it into a fight! If we allow the BNP to be elected legally we cannot then selectively shut out views we do not like to hear. This selectivity is exactly what the ‘Broken Britain’ policies would help support, as for example – take marriage tax whilst that is not the same as racial violence it is still pushing an ‘ideal’ discourse and type down people’s throats – the Liberal Democrats needs to counter this more thoughtfully!

Bob,

That is a good idea too – using academically sound sources would add further weight to the arguments. A lot of the time, however, sources that are not easily open to generalisation from the media are not really reported, or are misrepresented. Thus, simple flawed ideas such as ‘Broken Britain’ catch on with the media, especially when stories such as Baby P occur as they crudely sell newspapers – so we would have to try and break through this too.

Yurrzem,

That is actually a really idea – a counter narrative reclaiming the word ‘Broken’ within a left perspective might work! I think that is actually the best idea for a counter narrative I have heard.

I certainly don’t claim to be any kind of authority on the extent of social “brokenness”, whatever that is. For reasons posted on previously, I also regard the whole notion of “society” as deeply suspect. IMO Mrs Thatcher was very nearly correct when she said, “There is no such thing as society . . ,” because the concept is a construct, not some specific entity to be observed – how many societies are there in Britain and how can we tell?

That said, as best I can gather, there are (at least) three important social concerns we can identify in media reports. I post these here, along with relevant links, to generate comment and, importantly, to see what legislative or policy reforms might address the issues raised:

- “A UNITED Nations report has labelled Scotland the most violent country in the developed world, with people three times more likely to be assaulted than in America. England and Wales recorded the second highest number of violent assaults while Northern Ireland recorded the fewest.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1786945,00.html

- “The survey of 35 countries found the UK had the third-highest number of 15 and 16-year-olds with an alcohol problem.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5054380/Britains-chronic-teenage-binge-drinking-problem-highlighted-by-European-poll.html

- “Sweden has the highest incidence of reported rapes in Europe – twice as many as ‘runner up’ the UK, a new study shows.”
http://www.thelocal.se/19102/20090427/

Bob,

I have to disagree with your view that there is no such thing as a society. That is a very destructive view, without society there would be no individuals – society is how we learn our values, norms, language – these are all social not individualistic products. Removing society as a valid concept and replacing it with a collection of fluid individuals does little to promote a more stable and equal society. Yes, society is a nested concept, there are societies within societies – but that for me only strengthens the concept, it doesn’t make it redundant.

“I have to disagree with your view that there is no such thing as a society.”

Please respond on these basic questions then: “How many societies are there in Britain and how can we tell?”

And recap on what the late Prof Sprott wrote:

“The answer to the first question – ‘What is a society?’ is that it is a figment of the imagination. . . The fact is that in physics and chemistry you start with lumps of matter; you then analyse things into their chemical elements, into different combinations of entities, protons and the like. Far from being directly acquainted with the elements, it is not unknown for philosophers to question the existence of them. Equally nonsensical is it to say that we have a direct acquaintance with society. We do not. We have direct acquaintance only with people interacting, ie the elements of society, in so far as as it exists at all, is constituted. So I say that society is in some sense a figment of imagination. But we do in fact have in our minds models of the society in which we live. You can, if some foreigner asks questions about your society, refer to your model – not a very clear one perhaps; ‘scheme’ would be a better word in use. . . ”

[Source: "Society: what is it and how does it change?" from The Educational Implications of Social and Economic Change (HMSO 1967), reprinted in: DF Swift (ed): Basic Readings in the Sociology of Education (Routledge, 1970)]

I defer to Prof Sprott.

I suppose that the term ‘society’ doesn’t actually bring to mind any particular representative image, here is what Giddens says on society:-

“Society is not a collective reality, nor should the individual be treated as the central unit of analysis. Society only has form and that form only has effects on people, insofar as structure is produced and reproduced in what people do”
Anthony Giddens (1976) ‘New Rules of Sociological Method’

I actually took that quote from wiki, (it’s a long time since I’ve read Giddens)
My own intepretation of this is that ‘society’ is an abstract concept and can only be observed from the effects it has upon people, I would also imagine that ‘power’ comes into it somewhere (also invisible) but it is possible to see the effect of power upon behaviour.

Bob,

I have no idea how many societies there are, but just because i don’t know doesn’t mean there is no such thing as a society.

Yes, he is right to talk about how society consists of individuals interacting, however, there is something larger than individuals that consists of structures, culture and so forth.

Steveb,

Thanks for that. I do Sociology and so have come across quite a bit of Giddens. I agree with yours and Giddens’ analysis on society. Society is existent but we can only really see and understand it by assessing its effects on individuals. It is like the market, as Adam Smith helped show there are invisible laws that govern the market – Sociology advanced from this and helped show how there are social laws that help govern social interaction.

Jane: “I have no idea how many societies there are, but just because i don’t know doesn’t mean there is no such thing as a society.”

How exactly am I to know what you intend to mean when you refer to “society” when you can’t tell me how many “societies” there are in Britain and how do we decide?

Full marks to SteveB for posting that illuminating piece from Giddens on “society”.

Instead of pointless semantic disputes, why not focus on documented current issues of social concern in Britain, such as the following in addition to those posted @11?

“The UK has been accused of failing its children, as it comes bottom of a league table for child well-being across 21 industrialised countries.

“Unicef looked at 40 indicators from the years 2000-2003 including poverty, family relationships, and health.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6359363.stm

“England and Wales have the highest per capita prison population in Western Europe – 143 people per 100,000.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn1page1.stm

“Up to 12 million working UK adults have the literacy skills expected of a primary school child, the Public Accounts Committee says. . . The report says there are up 12 million people holding down jobs with literacy skills and up to 16 million with numeracy skills at the level expected of children leaving primary school.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4642396.stm

There are plenty more which can also be documented: social mobility is in decline; housing is less affordable than 50 years ago; whether the Police are out of control; affording care for the aged; the scale of harm to patients in the NHS from accidents and botched treatments; the periodic epidemics of bogus medical syndromes like “Satanic Abuse” and “Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy”; whether there’s too much or too little regulation of financial services to minimise the likelihood of a repeat crisis downstream; the incidence of taxes paid by the poorest 10% compared with the most affluent 10% . . .

I think the Tory ‘broken Britain’ argument is more about,

(1) the politics of fear. Fear of feral youth, binge drinkers out of control, everyone in some areas living off benefits, knife crime etc. It’s basically grabbing lots of tabloid type headlines/themes, and trying to put it all together in a catch all ‘we are all f***ed’ sort of story. The politics of fear works well, goes the logic, in the way that fear is always a powerful motivator to change leaders. The story is also intended to play well in the right wing press – who lap it up, and add more fuel to the fire. Sadly neither the Tories nor the press (nor Labour for that matter) actually want to think about the individual reasons why these problems exist. No one asks why the youth drink so much (if they do drink more than they ever did) so we debate the cost of alcohol, which is only a small part of the solution, if at all.

(2) A broken Britain narrative is a contrast to the pre 97 years. It creates a myth of ‘things used to be like this in the good old days’ (without ever actually defining when these days were) and illustrating how much the country has changed since Labour came to power. In this sense it works well as the country has changed in recent years (though that is as much cultural and as a natural result of globalisation than any govt. policy). Broken Britain as a narrative seeks to suggest that things were more or less okay before Blair and Brown, but they have messed things right up.

“Sadly neither the Tories nor the press (nor Labour for that matter) actually want to think about the individual reasons why these problems exist.”

IMO that’s an important insight into the regular mechanics of politics in Britain.

The fairly standard response of a Labour government when challenged on some manifest policy failing is to announce an inquiry or a review. The effect of this is to kick the issue into the long grass where it will, hopefully, be forgotten about.

Conservatives generally prefer a less costly means of recourse.

Traditionally, they have appointed a “sound” man – it’s usually been a man – to come up with a solution. The big advantage of this course is that it avoids the necessity of anyone else having to think.

The downside is that the Conservatives become entirely dependent on what the chosen “sound” man turns up with. He becomes vested with a mantle of supposed expertise on the issue which no one else can challenge – not least because challenging his authority would implicitly raise questions about the competence of the leadership in selecting him in the first place. The predictable effect is to quell dispassionate research and open discussion, which is probably what’s intended.

Sadly, I’ve not noticed what the LibDems do.

@10

Thanks. I first came across the strategy in a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers cartoon in the 70s. It probably wasn’t new then. Funny old world…

To several, particularly Sunny;

I’m not sure how, but my previous comment seems to have given people the wrong impression. I said start with challenging the crime-wave rhetoric, I certainly didn’t say end with that. Alix agrees with me above; my first line was intended to put the case for the LibDem narrative being based around “we’re the only people in politics who bother with accuracy”.

My second paragraph presented a possible clause in that narrative; Britain looks broken to one generation, who happen to have been the same group that have defined the Overton window of mainstream politics and cultural mores for the last 40 years.

As a group, they are largely defined by nostalgia for the 1950s (which most of them experienced as children or teenagers), puritanism, xenophobia, industrial-era paradigms of class, and the legacy of bigotry about the left wing from government propaganda campaigns during the Cold War. Modern Britain certainly looks broken to them; it’s far, far too liberal, has too many gobby women in it, and involves far too much freedom of choice (for people who are younger than them).

Quite soon, within the next four election cycles, those people will no longer be a necessary and sufficient demographic for winning elections. This is because they will be dying out; but that’s too long. If generations X and Y want to save the planet, and save the nation, they have to wrestle power from the dead hands of the past and offer it to the future without prejudice.

I initially assumed that while I could get away with making a couple of points here, to push the whole of my personal narrative on someone else’s blog might have looked arrogant. This is particularly relevant since this article is about Liberal Democrat, i.e. partisan, narratives (which brings in the problem with electoral strategy that Sunny mentions). I’m not a member of the Liberal Democrats, though I sometimes vote for them. I have a liberal narrative to offer; I’m not convinced I have a Liberal Democrat one.

Someone mentioned Karl Rove above. Yes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. In America. We’re not as ill-educated yet, nor is our politics, yet, as much of a stuffed-shirt shuffle as American public life has become in the television era. We’re not as zealously partisan, and at least one of our two main parties is of 20th Century origin. The situations do not correlate as closely as one might think. In Britain, it is still possible to make political hay with intellectually sharpened scythes; in America, the slightest hint that you are competent is seen as making you unelectably elitist.

A much more appropriate aphorism from US politics is “The left won’t stoop to the tactics of the right. That’s why the right wins”. I see that as particularly relevant to modern British politics. New Labour were not a party of the left, ever. They always stooped to the tactics of the right; it’s the reason they won.

@Bob B

Probably because the Lib Dems’ current stance on these issues is completely half-arsed and not informed by a clear liberal principle. Huhne will rightly condemn the other two for competing on who can talk the toughest and there’ll be good ideas like the Community Justice Panels. But then we also apparently back alcohol pricing (FFS) and jump on any bandwagon that’s not too unpleasant sounding, like 10,000 more police on the streets because it will *probably* do some good. We haven’t got the courage, apparently, to just ridicule the so-called “moral majority” for the nonsense-peddling, fear-mongering, hate-filled cretins they are on this subject.

It puzzles me, because it’s not like we’ve been unwilling to talk sense and get ridiculed for it on other matters – the economy, environment, Iraq being the obvious ones. Why not crime and social deprivation?

There are two things that will never get the Lib Dems votes, and that’s spending promises and bans. If people want those things, they can quite simply get a superior version elsewhere. They can get spending promises out of people who are ahead of us in the polls, and even at our most hidebound and illiberal we can’t touch the other two parties on readiness to ban stuff. One thing that, we think, does get the Lib Dems votes, is taking a strong line on a subject on which we know, eventually, we’ll be proved right. I reckon a successful counter-narrative starts with that in mind.

Bob,

I don’t have to quantify societies for it to be existent, if you agree with Giddens’ remarks then you agree that there is a thing called society. I do Sociology and Giddens is key to Sociology and he would be the last person to deny that society exists. What Giddens was saying was what i agree with, and if you look at the reply i did to steve then you will see why i agree. It is basically to do with the fact that society exists in abstract but you know it is there because of its effects on people.

I am not denying what you are posting are not concerns, but they all relate to society and how it is structured and organised.

Charlie,

I think an interesting point about fear is that it is constructed upon false truths anyway. Drinking is a problem for most generations within society, for example, it is hardly a unique example of so called ‘youth culture’. Furthermore, you only have to look at the way the Tories and Labour both misrepresent knife crime statistics to show that the figures around this are often overblown to fit political motives.

Yurrzem,

No problem. Very original idea, as was the way you found it lol.

Jane – Try Hobbes:

“For words are wise men’s counters; they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever.”
[Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (1660) Bk.1 Chp.4]
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-a.html#CHAPTERIV

To be told – as Giddens does – that “society” is “form” tells us sweet FA. I still can’t tell from Giddens’ account whether I’ve encountered a “society” or not nor whether there are many “societies” in Britain or not. And nor can I tell what you intend to mean when you refer to “society” if we can’t decide how to identify “societies” when we encounter them.

Besides, Giddens was partly or mainly responsible for all that crap about Blair’s “Third Way”.

Fortunately, whether “society” exists or is just a figment of imagination – as Sprott suggests – is irrelevant to the main purpose of this thread which is (as I understand) to focus on issues of social concern and that is what I’ve tried to do in earlier posts.

Personally, I’ve not a clue how to go about deciding whether “society is broken” or not. If “society” is “broken”, presumably there was a time when it wasn’t “broken” so I’d like to know when that was. Alternatively, how do we go about deciding which countries have “unbroken societies” and how can we tell?

Hobbes is too negative for me lol.

You can tell if you have encountered a society from his analysis. You don’t encounter society in a material form per se, but you encounter it in culture (language is related here) for example. Society exists, it is the external structural, social economic and so forth, factors that influence what we can do. However, as Giddens would argue too, we cannot assume that it is only an external reality, society is also modified by people’s interactions – so who we are is part of an external and internal reality.

Gidden’s “third way” is not exactly my favourite theory either – but the interpretation from Blair didn’t help it. Unfortunately, whilst structure and agency are shown to be important, there is too much importance placed on agency.

Yes, but i think society is also a key aspect of this blog as Cameron and the Tories think that society is broken. Thus, we must discuss and define what we mean by society to successfully construct a counter narrative.

Exactly, the point is by Cameron’s analysis of ‘Broken society’ there has never been a society and there is no society in the world that isn’t ‘broken’.

Hobbes’s main thesis is that without a powerful sovereign (central government) life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.”

I know what it is, hence why I said it is too negative for me.