THE TELEGRAPH: Our political leaders are falling short as we sink under a tide of vulgarity and sleaze, says Jeff Randall.
Earlier this year, the BBC broadcast a two-part documentary called The Death of Respect. It went out late and would have been missed by many. For those who did not see it, there was compelling evidence this week that the social decomposition chronicled in John Ware's programme is very real, when film of a Sheffield student relieving himself on a war memorial was shown in the same news bulletins that covered the murder of five British soldiers in Helmand.
It's hard to think of a more offensive image than booze-fuelled urine flowing over poppies, on a day when courageous servicemen are being slaughtered in order, the Government claims, to keep the rest of us safe. Hard, but not impossible. The front-page story from my local newspaper, the Brentwood Gazette, came close: thieves stole the Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal collection box from St Thomas's church in the town centre. In the week of Remembrance Sunday, low-lifers had plumbed new depths.
Do not tell me that these are isolated incidents. Anxiety over the collapse of respect in modern Britain is not, as some liberal sociologists would have us believe, the creation of news-hungry tabloids and suburban reactionaries. Examples of guttersnipery are all around: from unpleasant vulgarity (spitting and swearing) to the contempt with which a sleazy political class treats its electorate. We are, one fears, in danger of becoming inured to disrespect.
On the way to the train station each day, I trudge past a trail of sweet wrappers, sandwich boxes and drink cans, discarded on the grass verge by children walking to school. Every morning they litter the streets, seemingly unaware of the mess piling up, while eating breakfast on the hoof. I once challenged a twerp who was poking an empty crisp bag into a neighbour's hedge. He seemed shocked that anyone would care.
Litter is annoying, but in the grand scheme of a society that has traded personal responsibility for blame transfer, it is little more than a pointer to a deeper malaise: the corrosion of deference in our schools, the abandonment of manners on our streets and, yes, the death of respect for civility and integrity. We are close to the point where ethical behaviour is regarded as an affliction to be pitied, a loser's burden. >>> Jeff Randall | Thursday, November 05, 2009
