The sphere of belonging
There are three ideas at work in our politics; rather, two are at work and the third lies latent, neglected, but with the power to save us.
The ideas at work are liberty and equality, represented in the individual and the state: the idea that says ‘I may’ and the idea that says ‘you must’. But what we need more of is the third idea in the famous French Revolutionary triad: fraternity. This is the sphere of belonging, association and relationship, the space between the independent individual and the coercive state, the idea that says ‘we should’.
Fraternity has been neglected in our politics because it lacks the definition, the Platonic idealism of liberty and equality. These two, in the form of capitalism and communism, have marched across the world in the materialist dialectic since the 19th century, and they even now march on, currently apparent in the scale of private and public debt built up by individuals and the state.
What would a fraternal polity look like? It would certainly be one in which financial services are seen to occupy a social context. Fraternity depends on cultural and moral agreement, in which the delicate ecology of society is understood and respected. It should be impossible for financiers to separate themselves from society so effectively that they build a mountain of debt on the backs of people who can’t afford it, or for those people to borrow so absurdly beyond their means.
Finance should be governed by more than liberty and equality, freedom and regulation, ‘I may’ and ‘you must’. Fraternity instils authority, the non-coercive social persuasion of what ‘we should’ do. This suggests models of employee ownership and far greater civic representation in corporate decision making; at the very least, it suggests a system whereby levels of executive pay are linked, by sheer force of public and shareholder opinion, to incomes across the company and across society as a whole.
Beyond finance, fraternity has most to offer in the area of social policy, particularly in relation to the parts of the community characterised by some as the ‘broken society’. Rather than seeing people as isolated individuals composed of ‘problems’ – homelessness, mental illness, unemployment, addiction or criminality – we must see them as social beings and their problems as relational deficits. People’s lives go wrong because of their negative experiences of others, particularly caregivers: where there should have been support and safety, there was neglect and abuse or messy, misdirected love.
A fraternal approach would have two effects, one for the ‘clients’ of public services and one for the public services themselves. First, it would be a step towards social policy’s holy grail of ‘full service commissioning’: a mechanism for uniting all the disparate funding streams applicable to an individual and handing that money to a provider that will help the individual, on a payment-by-results basis, in whatever way works. Second, fraternity in action would mean that public services, the institutions that deliver social goods, would be seen not as local outposts of different Whitehall departments but as meeting places with a strong local identity.
The time is right for this model. The huge cuts and efficiencies needed in the public sector are within reach, if we can alter the way we deliver services. Unfortunately, at present we have a public service culture that, thanks to our twin gods of liberty and equality, is almost exclusively materialistic.
Take two major political agendas: reducing unemployment and reducing reoffending. Lord Freud estimates that it costs £65,000 to get a long-term unemployed person into work, a similar sum to the cost to the criminal justice system of a single prisoner reoffending. This expense is the consequence of a materialistic political attitude that all an unemployed person or an ex-offender needs is work; that the problem is economic and so is the solution. Such an assumption suits both the libertarian right, with its belief in the transformative quality of capitalism, and the egalitarian left, which believes that social problems are the consequence of an unfair distribution of economic opportunities. The result is the high failure rate – and cost – of the welfare-to-work and reducing reoffending agendas.
What unemployed ex-offenders need most fundamentally is not more liberty or equality – more opportunities or better-distributed opportunities – but more fraternity. The primary challenges that they face are not in the marketplace, but within themselves and in their communities. Their disadvantages are not so much economic as relational.
As we are learning from practitioners such as Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company, and policy campaigners such as Iain Duncan Smith MP, human brains develop relationally: deficits in the early years literally stunt neural development, and only intensive relational investment – sustained positive attachments – can repair the damage.
My experience of working with offenders tells me that they need structures around them that do the job their parents should have done. They need help making the transition from child to adult, and from self-regarding to other-regarding attitudes, so that they become fluent in the formal as well as the casual register.
Yet the ‘casual fluency’ of people in poverty is an asset, too. They have qualities that would see them excel in a more fraternal system, notably a remarkable talent for belonging. While this impulse is often misdirected, which is why so many ex-offenders rejoin their criminal fraternity, it is nevertheless strong and searching for a positive expression.
We have to design programmes that work with the grain of these attitudes: more jobs, and more access to jobs, are a necessary but insufficient part of the puzzle. Above all, we need ex-offenders and the long-term unemployed to enter positive relationships with people who can help them, and help them primarily at an emotional rather than a practical level.
So, this calls for three policy shifts. First, a major transfer of power and responsibility, especially over welfare, to local authorities, on the condition that they pass on the responsibility to independent bodies, retaining the commissioning rather than the providing role. Providers should be the social entrepreneurs and voluntary bodies that best develop meaningful, nurturing relationships. This should be accompanied by a rebalancing of the tax system so that more local spending is raised from local revenue (rather than passed down from Whitehall), ensuring a renewal of the vital democratic link between local taxation and local services.
Second, a reform of the professions working at the frontline – especially advisers responsible for training and benefits – to recognise and adapt to the fraternal principle that is so strong in the communities they serve. We need fewer suits and desks and more fluid, relational ways of working: pop-up job centres, perhaps, nurturing empathy and social skills.
Third, a recognised place for the non-professional, giving ordinary citizens an opportunity to gain expertise. The recent assumption has been that society lacks the ‘capacity’ to take over social responsibilities – another way of saying that ordinary people don’t have the time or talent for citizenship. Yet I think it is the state, not society, that lacks the real capacity needed to heal the broken society: the capacity for compassion, forbearance, admonition, local knowledge, flexibility and innovation. Only by creating meaningful opportunities for local voluntary participation can we reap the benefits of these individual qualities and help make good the relational deficits that are the cause of social breakdown.
Danny Kruger is a former special adviser to David Cameron and chief executive of Only Connect. Only Connect is a creative arts company working with prisoners and ex-offenders.
Danny Kruger’s essay 'Fraternity: Politics beyond liberty and equality' was published by Civitas in 2007.
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