the respect initiative

I'm not sure whether in principle legislating can ever really produce a respect-based society or not. If families and the church aren't taking their responsibilities seriously enough, ie if they are failing to bring up their members to behave in a civilised and moral way, then perhaps I can see a case for a concerned government to start taking action and living up to their responsibilities even if no one else is.

But: I have a major qualification to add here. This particular government has not particularly excelled itself in being either civilised or moral so far. Instead, it treats the electorate with contempt, lies to us on a variety of issues in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, introduces its own legislation unasked to further devalue the norms and traditions of a once-respectful society, and is intent on chipping away at our civil liberties (mostly in the name of safeguarding us against a threat which they themselves stirred up against us by their deceitful ill-judged illegal conduct a couple of years ago: don't get me started). All this adds up to make me say that Mr Blair's "respect" "agenda" deserves to be every bit as much of a laughingstock as Mr Major's "back to basics" campaign was before it, because of the same hypocrisy that produced it (the same in kind, much grosser in degree).

There's also the small issue of what particular kind of legislation we're talking about. As it happens, I've had a minor rant in the pipeline for a while about the stupidity and liberty-infringing nature of things like Asbos, and never got round to writing it down. (It would have basically centred on the wrongness of criminalising people for doing things that are not actually criminal, and of using mere hearsay evidence, eg.) But the proposals of the "respect" policy go much further. On-the-spot fines, for example, it seems to me, are a really serious matter: they do turn the principle of innocent until proven guilty on its head - and in addition they hand over to the police the authority not just to decide whether a person is guilty or not, but also to punish them if judged guilty. Leaving it up to the person to appeal against the fine afterwards, is back to front: it's a presumption that the person deserves to be fined and a giving of permission to appeal, whereas what it should be is the presumption that the person is innocent, and that it's their guilt that needs to be proved.

This isn't really ultimately an issue about spitting at old folks and playing music too loud - it's really an issue about the extent of the powers that the government (or indeed the police) are awarding themselves, and the magnitude of their right to control individual citizens. It isn't right that we should become so vengeful against our disruptive fellow members of society that we don't have any way of responding except to fine/evict/disperse them first and ask questions later - in exactly the same way that it isn't right to make ourselves so safe from terrorists that we end up with no freedoms left either.