Everybody needs good neighbours
January 2002
by Peter Franklin

Peter Franklin - Editor of Conservatism - reflects on Oliver Letwin's 'Beyond the Causes of Crime' speech

Oliver Letwin was wrong about one thing. In the process of drafting his groundbreaking speech on crime, he predicted that the press would show little interest. It was not that he lacked confidence in what he had to say. He simply assumed that a thoughtful discussion of conscience, community and the causes of crime would not attract headlines. Yet even before he delivered the Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies on the 8th January, the speech had not only made the news, but the feature and opinion pages too.

No doubt, interest had been generated by Mr Letwin's own recent experience of crime in which he chased two thieves down a street, recovering his credit cards in the process. Less happily, recent reports of brutal street crimes have sharpened fears in all our minds. From the teenage girl shot in the head for her mobile phone to the father of two beaten to death by a gang of thugs, the fear is that conventional law and order policies are failing to protect us. And thus when a senior politician breaks with convention the media is all ears. All mouth, too.

Their breathless descriptions of the speech range from "a significant shift" and "a dramatic retreat" to "a truly moral solution" and even "cuddly Conservatism". So have the Tories gone soft on crime? Only if your thinking is confined to the one-dimensional debate between boneheaded authoritarianism and softheaded liberalism. That debate is now dead. It was killed off by Tony Blair, who in promising to be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", co-opted both sides to his New Labour project.

Oliver Letwin's breakthrough is to leave the sloganeering behind and face a reality as broad as human society and as deep as the human soul. It is only in this context that one may discover the principles necessary for the defeat of crime, principles rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
Why do we seek the causes of crime? As the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak points out, this is knowledge which, in itself, would only enable one to create more crime. Thus just as the solution to poverty lies in understanding the causes of its opposite, i.e. prosperity, the solution to crime lies in understanding the causes of its opposite. But what is the opposite of crime? Some would say order, but that is no more than the absence of crime while what we seek is something that is in active opposition to it. Crime is a destructive force, therefore its opposite must be a constructive force.

We have no word for this force in the English language. We need to turn to Holy Scripture. In the Old Testament we find the Hebrew shalom. The inadequate English translation is 'peace', but shalom signifies much more than the absence of conflict. The true meaning is more akin to 'the wholeness of community', the totality of right relationships within communities, between persons and families and social groups, between man and his environment. In the New Testament, the early Church understood a similar concept signified by the Greek eirene.

In his speech, Oliver Letwin describes the principle of shalom and eirene as the "neighbourly society". It must be stressed that Letwin's focus on society is not at the expense of individual responsibility. Rather he recognises the crucial relationship between the conscience of an individual and the communities in which that conscience is formed. Each of us learns right relationships first from our families and then from the wider circles of human society. As we grow up each of us is free to choose whether or not to act upon that wisdom. But where families and communities are shattered, the options to choose wrongly come up more often and the sources of moral support are more distant.

We cannot deny that this is the everyday reality for our most vulnerable youngsters in our most vulnerable neighbourhoods. The image that comes to mind is of a conveyor belt, on which individuals appear stranded, pulled from one stage of degradation to the next. The state seems powerless to intervene, except at the terminal stage when long-term imprisonment takes the criminal off the conveyor belt. By that time it is too late for him, but at least the victimised community is given respite.

But for the sake of the criminal and his victims, we must intervene much earlier. The state cannot do it alone. By themselves, its agents cannot make good the deficiencies of a disadvantaged upbringing. It will take a neighbourly society in which the authorities work hand-in-hand with parents, teachers, employers, community groups and churches to provide justice with humanity.

Of course the cynics will note a previous observation that there is no such thing as society. Leaving aside the misrepresentation of Margaret Thatcher's remarks, the cynics have a point. In recent years Conservatives have appeared blind to the existence of society beyond the marketplace and have allowed others to get away with their insensibility to society beyond the state.

The future of politics belongs to those that understand and uphold what lies beyond both state and marketplace. If ever there was a centre ground of politics then this is it. All parties will stake a claim, but credibility depends upon commitment. The neighbourly society is too big an idea to serve as mere window dressing. It must come first, second and third in all that we say and do.

There will be blood on the streets again tonight. Let us pray the neighbourly society is not long delayed.