Many people feel instinctively that something has gone wrong with British society.  Everybody appears to be busy doing their own thing, but in the process we seem to have lost our sense of unity and community – lost the shared conviction that we owe something to each other and that society is a whole lot better when we pull together.

But what is the truth of the situation?  Is “society in Britain broken”, as 70% of respondents in a 2010 opinion poll said?  Or is all this exaggerated, a harking back to a golden age that never existed, reflecting an inability to come to terms with change?

And if society really is in some way “broken”, then what can be done about it?  Do we merely cruise on, regardless of mounting evidence that we may be on a self-destructive path, or is some kind of a ‘u-turn’, in a modern democratic and liberal society, actually possible?

And how did we get to where we are today?  For, understanding what brought us here might help us better to chart a way forward.

These are some of the questions that Uturn UK seeks to answer.  This website, as you will see, has lots of articles on a variety of subjects, but they seek to build into an overarching analysis of why we are where we are – and what can be done about it.

We are not about offering a quick fix (although it is our conviction that the Street Associations Initiative will make a profound difference where it is applied); but we are wanting to raise subjects that have been almost taboo, obscured in a haze of denial (on the one hand) or aggressive blame-mongering (on the other).

We have come a long way in the last 50 years or so and many things are genuinely better than they were.  Society is less harsh and judgmental than it was, less class-bound and opportunities are offered far more widely.

But that is not the whole picture.  First, in this summary, we turn to the question: is our ‘social ecology’ really in trouble?

The trouble with Britain

Statistics can mislead.  However, under the heading of The Problem, in this website we bring together a mass of evidence, from many sources, that something has indeed gone seriously wrong.  The evidence covers almost every indicator of social wellbeing, from family breakdown, to loneliness, to addictions, to violence and antisocial behaviour, to international comparisons in the

social field.  Take ‘the family’.  Let’s not get ideological about it.  It is a massive tragedy that today over 40% of the nation’s children can expect to go through the pain and trauma of their parents splitting up.  No-one who goes into a relationship and has children wants things to end that way.  The fact that so often they do end that way is not a fact we can pass over and say “it’s just one of those things”.  It manifestly used not to be the case and the fact that it now is needs to be faced up to.  We have inherited a much less happy society, failing its children, in this foundational respect.

Take crime and violence and anti-social behaviour.  Again, statistics can be misleading, because on some measures crime and violence have reduced in recent years.  Nevertheless, even at their reduced rate, both crime and violence are still something like six times greater than they were fifty years ago.  Meanwhile, anti-social behaviour is endemic.  The riots and looting of last August may not be typical, but they seemed to release something that we can recognise as being present the rest of the time.  Thus, British airports, hospitals and job centres all have signs up saying that ‘abusive behaviour’ towards staff will not be tolerated.  Many schools now need security guards.  Restaurants and bars that used to give you the bill when you left now routinely demand payment in advance.  And so on.

Take measures of ‘wellbeing’.  Depression and anxiety and obesity are all on course to double over a generation.   In opinion polls, something over 20% across the age groups cite loneliness and isolation as something they suffer from ‘most of the time’.  Hospital admissions for alcohol related disorders have doubled in seven years.  Sexually transmitted infections are up 63% in a decade.

There is almost no area of what one might call ‘social wellbeing’ in which there has not been a sharp worsening in recent decades in Britain.  Extensivedetails of all these indicators can be found under the heading of The Problem.

You might say: these trends are being seen all over the world.  True, to some extent.  But the fact is that, in almost every area, these symptoms of a deep social malaise are stronger and starker in Britain than in any other nation, whereas 50 years ago we were famous for strong families, safe streets and public and private integrity.  Our section on international comparisons gives chapter and verse on this, but one can summarise the situation by saying that, just in respect of our children, Britain is at or near the top of the international league for teenage drunkenness, teenage pregnancies, young people’s drug abuse, fatherlessness and more, such that Unicef now rates Britain as the very worst of 21 rich countries for child well-being.

We clearly need to seek solutions to very real problems.  Maybe Britain, which has led the world in generating some of these problems, can be the first to find solutions, to everybody’s benefit.  But the present practice seems to be briefly to nod towards a succession of eminent studies and academic reports that document these problems, but then quietly retreat into ‘business as usual’, evading what we need to be facing.

In many ways Britain is in a state of denial, allowing glossy shopping centres, celebrity culture and non-stop entertainment to divert us from considering what we need to consider.  The first step is surely to face up to what is happening.

How did we get here?

Again, this is just to touch on what is considered in more detail elsewhere (see What happened? and Driven by money?).  But it seems to us that a combination of war-time dislocation and suffering, and exciting new influences coming from across the Atlantic, led us to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’, rejecting what had gone before.  There was plenty of bathwater, to be sure, but at the same time as losing things we were glad to lose, there was a sense that any restraint, any discipline and any taboos were to be thrown out, so that freedom, experimentation and self-expression could prevail.

And the other turn of the screw came when it became clear that enticing people to cross the old boundaries could make corporations a lot of money.   Previously, that would have been ‘out of order’, because society had its shared conception of what was right.  But now, with ‘anything goes’, you could make a lot of money out of inviting young and not-so-young people to lap up cruelty as entertainment, drunkenness as a good time, (your) material goods as the badge of success – influencing a generation with the power of image, and wearing down the value-system of generations in a few decades.

Wisdom and protection

Those value systems had two roles – to give us wisdom and to offer us protection.  The wisdom came in helping people (especially the young) to see short-term gains in the context of long-term consequences.  Thus, for example, we had a ‘culture’ that said “don’t get into debt; save up for a rainy day”.  How did this get shifted into a stampede to “buy now, pay later”?  Advertisers and retailers produced that culture change, for their own sakes and not for ours.   The forces telling us to borrow were loud, incessant and well-funded, while the voice telling us to be careful got drowned out – with terrible consequences.

And that’s where protection should come in.  A culture should have at its centre the inherited habits, the instinctive cautions, the shared wisdom that protects the young from harm.  What protects our young these days?   What protects them from the powerful attraction of casual sex (portrayed in most movies as cool and romantic), when the harm of it is there for all to see in terms of broken hearts, sexually transmitted infections and fatherless children?  What protects them from over-the-top materialism, when we know that boredom, debt and disillusion are the likely results?  Or from ‘gangster’ culture, when we know it turns so many teenage boys against study or authority, only to find a few years later that no employer wants to look at them.

‘Anything goes’ has produced a growing mass of casualties and the heartrending brokenness we see all around us. 

Reconstructing values

Our response to this fall-out cannot be ‘carry on as normal’.   A less harsh and judgmental society has been a good thing, but a society without guidelines has not at all been a good thing.  The damage has been too great; and it is increasing all the time.  We are losing the basic ingredients of happiness and ducking our most basic duties to the next generation.

The first step, we believe, is to restore community, and all that it stands for.  This will begin to shift us, at the grass-roots, from a self-centred, lonely, acquisitive and often fearful existence, and towards a socialised, concerned, contributing, warm-hearted, fulfilled, engaged life-style, which is about other people as much as about ourselves.

There also needs to be some definition – and affirmation at the national level, in the media, education, government, in the culture at large – of what our shared, or communal, values actually should be.  We suggest:

• “People are more important than things”
• “We should all serve the needs of others”.
• “Commitment is the bedrock of family life”.
• “Truth is the foundation of trust”.

More of this elsewhere on our website, where we consider Where to find values, How to apply our values, Who is to say which values, and Is there such a thing as society? There needs to be a debate – and a lot of attention given – to the need to define for ourselves as a nation what our communal values should be.  This is not an ‘academic’ exercise.  It is fundamental to preserving what we want to preserve and strengthening what we need to strengthen.  For nothing can prosper against the headwinds of a culture that powerfully and daily blows the other way.  For at the moment our culture increasingly undermines the attempts of people ‘on the ground’ to preserve civilised conduct and build the kind of society we all want for future generations.

The ‘problems’ we cited earlier are not accidental – and nor are they disconnected from each other.  They are the result of a massive and sustained onslaught, by a money-driven and value free ‘culture’, on the very foundations of our society – on everything from family life, to behaviour, to truth, to consideration of others, to reliability, or work, or any concept of goodness.

We are, not to put too fine a point upon it, reaping what has been sown in us and around us.  It would be plain daft to carry on like this, if it were not also so heartrendingly hurtful.  It is time to wake up from the glitz-induced slumber of consumerism and get back some conception of the kind of society we want – the kind of society, indeed, that we need, if we are not to continue on a path of ever-increasing social disintegration.

The key point is: we are influenced.  Lets start re-examining what the influences are and where they are leading us.  And lets also start reaffirming the values we know we need, to give us some guidance and give young people in particular a better chance not to go off the rails.

We need values.  Crucially, those values need once again to infuse the public sphere, the very culture of this nation.  That’s when they will have teeth.  We need them to have teeth.  This is a considerable u-turn we are calling for, we recognise.  But it is high time these issues were put on the table, taken seriously, given air-time, re-established in our consciousness and, finally, acted upon.  It won’t happen overnight, but what we now need is growing determination to make a start.

Uturn UK

We see our job as being to:

• give clarity and definition to a ground-swell of opinion that knows something has gone wrong;
• stimulate and facilitate the renewal of community at the grass roots, rekindling belonging;
• help infuse those communities with an ethos that will help them to flourish;
• start to define the values we need at the local and the ‘macro’ level, so that they can be agreed and affirmed;
• begin the process of identifying the ‘headwinds’ that have been undermining our values;
• begin to chart the process of changing direction in a way that could gain widespread support and real traction.

To change a nation

It may seem absurdly ambitious to think in terms of influencing, let alone changing, a nation.  But nations do change.  Look back and see what happened to the 1960s dream of concrete tower blocks.  We discovered that no-one liked them or wanted to live in them and now we are tearing them down.  Or look back at attitudes to climate change: it was no-where in people’s thinking even a decade ago; now, it’s high on our agenda and changes are being made at every level of society, from recycling, to re-using supermarket bags, to creating more fuel-efficient cars and planes, because the damage was finally exposed.   Or take smoking, which remarkably has been halved, because we as a society concluded that it was seriously harmful and we started to take steps to reduce it.

But it’s also about ‘tone’ – it’s about turning away from the cynical, the negative and the unpleasant (aren’t we sated with all that?) and having faith for something better.

If nations can change and do change, then let us ‘step up to the plate’ and give some shape to what is already a cry of the heart, and help an unfocused mood become a strong – and ultimately unstoppable – current, restoring our communities and restoring the basis for co-operation and trust.

Click here to join with us.