Faith in the Community¹, 2 October 1993.

footnotes: ¹ The Daily Telegraph

The question that haunted the 1993 party conference season was the one no one asked. Do we have faith in the political system any more? Do we believe that a government – any government – can solve the problems by which it is beset?

In my lifetime political authority has rarely seemed more tenuous than it does now. The leaders of the major parties face internal divisions. Survey after survey reveals disenchantment with politicians of all shades. Newspaper columns are filled with meditations on the nature of the elusive quality called leadership. And if one message has sounded more loudly than any other, it is the call for a political vision, domestic or international, that would lend coherence to what otherwise seems destined to be a troubled and confusing decade.

I sense among the young people I meet in schools and youth groups something I have not met with before: cynicism and an absence of hope, as if, every political alternative having been tried and failed, an expectation of things getting better is bound to be disappointed.

Beneath this disillusionment is a specific and seemingly unanswerable dilemma. The 1980s were the decade in which we lost faith in the State as the vehicle of salvation. Neither socialism nor communism delivered what they had promised. Collectivist economies inhibited growth, which alone could pay for the services provided by the State.

There was an alternative, and it captured imaginations not only in Britain and America but even, dramatically, in the erstwhile Soviet Union precipitating its collapse. What we could not achieve collectively as states we could achieve privately as individuals. The State would withdraw, leaving private initiative and the free market to produce and distribute goods. Most people would benefit from greater wealth and the freedom to spend it as they chose. The minimalist State would limit itself to providing a safety net for those in dire need.

For a time this was a compelling vision. But the 1990s have been marked by a growing sense of its shortcomings. Major social ills continue unabated. Unemployment is high. Crime figures still rise. Our expectations of health and welfare services outgrow our ability to fund them. The inner cities still fester. There are persistent, even growing sectors of underprivilege and disadvantage. And despite the best efforts of race relations policies, ethnic tensions remain.

Not only this, but the institutions which framed our public life and gave us a sense of national belonging have come under massive assault. None has been spared: the monarchy, the government, the Church, the courts. A decade of individualism has taken a heavy toll of the traditions by which our collective identity was given shape. It would be hard, today, to describe what being British is, in any terms other than nostalgia for a long-vanished past.

From where, then, is a new vision of Britain in the 1990s to emerge? Neither collectivism nor individualism seems to have worked. We are caught between the interventionist and the minimalist State, knowing the failings of both, and without a third alternative. The major parties battle, internally and against one another, over the precise balance to be struck between the two. But this is not a debate from which we can expect a new language of politics equal to the challenges of the 1990s.

In 1990 I argued, in my Reith Lectures, for the third and missing term in our political vocabulary. I called it community, by which I mean any voluntary association of people larger than the individual and smaller than the State. The smallest unit of community is the family, and it extends to cover such diverse phenomena as charitable organisations, religious congregations, neighbourhood watch schemes, local race relations groups and parent-teacher associations.

The community is as potent a factor in the life of society as either the individual or the State. But it has been given short shrift in our political discourse. Unjustly so, because it is in these associations that we acquire the virtues that sustain our common life: duty, honesty, service, self-sacrifice, integrity, neighbourliness, fortitude and civility. Without these, the workings of the market are too impersonal and arbitrary to sustain a sense of shared belonging.

Society as the arena of private choice is a very harsh place for those who make the wrong choices. The shift from State to individual at a time when communities are being eroded has carried a high price in poverty, homelessness, broken families and the drug abuse, vandalism and violence that accompany the loss of meaning. The political domain becomes a place where there are winners and losers, and where there is nothing to give the losers hope.

The Thatcherite vision which so dominated the 1980s had power because it spoke lucidly to one source of human motivation: economic self-advancement. The drive to work, create and retain the fruits of one’s activity are immensely energising. The prospect of lower taxation, and more widely distributed home and share ownership spoke to the real concerns of an entire generation.

But Thatcherism was vague, even self-contradictory, at a critical point. Margaret Thatcher herself knew, along with democratic capitalists since de Tocqueville, that liberty, democracy and the workings of the free market are built on moral foundations larger than self-interest. They are sustained by the family and other institutions and traditions which humanise the effects of competitive striving and provide a critical counterbalance to its unequal rewards.

Margaret Thatcher herself placed immense weight on the family as the matrix of social as well as individual responsibility. In this, I believe she was right. But at the very time she was doing so, the family itself was disintegrating at unprecedented speed, with cohabitation, divorce and single-parenthood rapidly becoming not the exception but the norm. Nor was this accidental, for it was a direct consequence of the individualism that so marked the Thatcher years.

The time has come to re-explore the moral basis of society as a community of communities. Such an exploration would focus less on the two terms that have dominated modern political debate – liberty as against equality – than on the neglected word fraternity. It would speak less of rights than of duties, and less of justice than of citizenship. It would see the political order as founded on something stronger than a social contract, namely a covenant, a commitment to the common good. It would see homo politicus as something other than an economic animal, driven by production and consumption.

What those involved in communities know is that there are other sources of human motivation no less powerful than self-interest. I am regularly amazed at the sheer motive force of the human desire to help others and to be involved in projects for the common good.

I have seen a secondary school of streetwise teenagers transformed by a challenge to provide help for a mother in need of assistance for an operation for her child. I have seen senior, hard-pressed businessmen devote large sections of their time to welfare, educational and medical causes. I have seen congregations turn themselves into support groups for the unemployed, giving them hope and practical expertise. These are sources of energy which Britain badly needs if it is to remain a society in which we feel proud to live.

For the foreseeable future, we will be beset by social problems which will yield neither to State intervention nor to private initiative. The missing third alternative is the new partnership waiting to be forged between politicians, religious bodies and voluntary organisations to empower local associations where the civic virtues are practised and learned. Underlying it would be a concept of society as the place where, in local contexts, we bring our diverse talents and traditions as gifts to the collective good.

There are problems that neither the State nor the individual can solve. Our political vocabulary must now widen to encompass a vision of Britain as a community of communities.