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‘Resilience’ has become a buzzword among a range of policy networks, wherein it serves as an ambition. People ought to become more resilient. The world is threatening: the economy, the climate and terrorism all figure as dangers against whose impacts we must resile. The fertile discourse of resilience spawns activity in research, policy development and service delivery. If we can educate our children to be resilient, if we can structure our communities to become resilient, we may survive a world of risk and then… And then what? This survivalist doctrine paradoxically relies on an image of failure as its vision of the future. We prepare against the awful things that may one day befall us and are left prepared. And no more. Planning for survival, striving for resilience, has no vision for flourishing; progress is lost, and hope with it.

Between ‘resilient’ and ‘resile’ there is something of a semantic sleight of hand as, although the two share a root, their common meanings have diverged. But the comparison is instructive. OED tells that resilient means ‘Rebounding; recoiling; returning to the original position’ and most pertinently, ‘tending to recover quickly or easily from misfortune, shock, illness, or the like; buoyant, irrepressible; adaptable, robust, hardy.’ These sound, to be sure, like positive characteristics of an individual, organisation or society. But to resile means, rather, ‘To draw back, withdraw, or distance oneself from an undertaking, declaration, course of action,’ and ‘To recoil or retreat from something with aversion; to shrink from.’ These appear almost opposed: could one retreat in an irrepressible manner? Yet in practice I think these are not so distant and, in fact, when the discourse of resilience informs policy it is more likely to produce an ability or preference for resiling than structural resilience. To see why, consider the following example.

For an extreme case we may look to the survivalist enclaves already being built by individuals and small groups in various locations. The ideal is the high-lying wilderness bunker with independent power generation and long-term supplies of water, preserved food, medicines and weaponry. Apocalypse – whether financial, environmental or political in origin – is the inspiration and a future of brutal competition for scarce resources is envisaged. Protagonists could certainly conceive of their preparations as planning resilience though clearly a world of armed enclaves is not the one sought by current policy trends. But the reasons that good citizens ought to recoil in horror from survivalism should also give us pause to reconsider the discourse of resilience.

Firstly, the orientation of the survivalist is decidedly inward. Whether the individual, kinship group or like-minded community plans a secure future they do so in competition with all others. Survivalists scramble now for resources so that they can keep them to themselves in a future in which they become increasingly scarce. The targets of policies to increase resilience are also typically relatively small groups, communities or even individuals and there is no reason to suppose that reliance requires a more outward-looking approach. The resilient ‘I’ cares little about the other.

Secondly, even the most positive notion of resilience has as its best outcome the ability to persist in the same manner. We survive the shock and return to normal: we continue to live in the bunker. The allure of normality is sharpest when set aside the destructive potential inherent in the global risks we face. But it is normality, precisely normality, that has produced those risks. We must identify the causes of our multiple crises within the structures and the culture of contemporary global society and we must overcome them through far-reaching social change. The direction of change is open, but it must be change. ‘Returning to the original position’ is not an option if our ambition is to be for anything more than the constant experience of surviving shock.

Finally, then, the doctrine of resilience lacks an inspiring vision for progress. To return to its paradoxical nature: its only long-term vision is of its own failure which produces the short-term objective to avoid the seemingly inevitable. Yes, to be capable of resisting crises is a positive characteristic but it is one that should develop alongside an alternative model of a society in which risks are dramatically reduced. To target resilience truly is to resile from that most traditional characteristic of human societies: the attempt to improve one’s lot and that of future generations.

The ConDems incessantly justify cut after cut with reference to Labour’s supposed welfare profligacy. So maybe its time to remind ourselves why the budget deficit has increased dramatically…

Here’s a useful graph (from the BBC) that shows the fluctuations in the budget deficit since the 1980s, with the deficit expressed as a proportion of GDP. Prudence was Gordon Brown’s watchword as Chancellor and when Labour came into power in ’97 they quickly turned their inherited deficit around. It creeps up again after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but remains less than the 7.5% peak seen in the Major years. The deficit only went wild after 2008. What could possibly have prompted this uncharacteristic change in policy? Oh yes. The government spent $850 billion, or 51.7% of GDP on bailing out the City (world bank data, converted roughly). There is of course no justification for this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich, which is why ministers so often repeat the lie that the cuts are in some way related to overspending on the welfare state.

Of course, the 3-400,000 marchers in London yesterday know this already, I hope their efforts will stop the lie becoming received ‘wisdom’.

Jesse Norman MP was on last week’s Politics Weekly podcast at the Guardian talking about his new book on The Big Society (Indy review). He said that the Conservatives weren’t trying simply to shrink the state in order to replace it with the market, but instead wanted to harness and ‘unimaginable reserves of social energy’ to do good. This energy apparently exists in institutions outside of the state and the market: ‘the local church, the local school or even Manchester Football Club; the things that give people purpose and meaning’.  For the record, Polly Toynbee rightly took the Tories to task on this because the effects of the cuts are sending voluntary institutions to the wall. But I’d like to think about something else…

Taken together with the announced intention that the ONS will now start regularly measuring the happiness of the citizenry there is something new in these conservative ideas – something small and fuzzy and liable to be squashed by the weight of tradition and vested interests – but something new nevertheless. There’s signs here of a real move away from the market as The Solution for all ills and perhaps an attempt to finally shrug off Thatcher’s ludicrous view that ‘there’s no such thing as society’. The economic depression of the 30s helped swing the political-economic pendulum from laissez-faire to Keynsianism, while the crises of the 70′s sent it in the direction of neoliberalism. It seemed likely that the latest crash (coming on top of the massive corporate scandals in the early 2000s and general weakening legitimacy of corporate power) might swing the pendulum back towards the state. But the confluence of this historical moment with an exhausted Labour Party confounds things in the UK. Perhaps then, the scene is set for the pendulum to stop swinging between state power and market power and take in a new dimension?

Exciting stuff, but, have the Conservatives really got the intellectual resources to work out what that would mean in practice? And how can they, being located in government and all, can use the state to empower that as yet mystical third realm? As self-proclaimed ‘intellectual architect of new conservativism’ and now author of The Big Society, Jesse Norman might be the one to tell us. But, his academically philosophical approach is to identify a puzzle and a critique of traditional social contract theory and to describe a ‘new’ category of associations between people.[1]  When it comes to discussing alternatives he claims,

we have well developed theories of individual rationality and morality, and well developed theories of state action and politics, but we don’t have any theory of what these institutions are in the middle and how they work. There’s a massive plurality of them … and it may be that over the next hundred years academics catch up with this pluralist view.

Here speaks a man who is thoroughly educated in politics, philosophy and economics, but who could never have, even momentarily, wandered into a sociology seminar. A flick through the references finds plenty of reference to philosophers, and especially the key conservative thinker Michael Oakeshott as well as brief reference to Giddens’ The Third Way (neither his best nor most sociological stuff) and inevitably to the communitarians Etzioni and Putnam who have already been such an influence on New Labour policies.

Of course, Norman’s ‘institutions in the middle’ matches exactly the subject of sociology: family, religion, social movements, the third sector, civil society and all have been core to sociology since the discipline first became self-aware. I can’t decide whether Norman needs berating for his tunnel vision (and really, if you’re writing a book with ‘society’ in the title you might at least consider reading some sociology) or whether really this should be taken as a signal that British sociology needs to step out of the academy much much more, maybe even dust off a soapbox. Indeed, one of the main problems facing British sociology at the moment is justifying its role and claiming that it has a positive impact on society. [2] So, if the ‘big society’ is not empty rhetoric – and in truth we need far more than Jesse Norman’s efforts to show that it isn’t – then the Conservatives need sociologists. Ironically enough, just when there’s a genuine risk of departmental closures and a general decline in citizens armed with sociological education, its ‘relevance’ may be coming to the fore. Perhaps the rhetoric should be seen as an opportunity both to defend  sociology and to feed some genuinely well thought out ideas into the political machine.

[1] Side note: the new category is apparently philic (meaning connected) rather than Oakeshott’s nomic (legal/civil) or telic (goal based/instrumental). My immediate thought here is that a philic association must be a tautology – aren’t all associations ‘connected’ by definition? But I have to admit to only having glanced at the book, instead on book reviews, notes and Norman’s interview.

[2] Hardly confined to sociology of course, it applies to all the humanities, arts and social sciences. Moreover, that’s glossing over the complete withdrawal of state funding for HE teaching in the humanities. Hmmm, there’s lumps behind that gloss.

The European Court of Human Rights today issued its judgement on the case that Penny Quinton and I have been taking against the government over section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. They have agreed that this piece of legislation offends against Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and does not contain sufficient safeguards for members of the public. [1]

The case stems from events in September 2003, when Penny and I were independently subject to stop and search under the Terrorism Act. We’d both been attending protests at the DSEi arms fair, myself partly for research purposes and Penny as an independent journalist. The campaigning legal firm Liberty agreed to take our cases and we spent several years going though the judicial review process, before finally taking it to the European Court last year.[2]

To finally win is fantastic news and sends a very strong signal to government about the limits to what is acceptable in combating terrorism. Section 44 is regularly abused by police who find it convenient for general policing. The problem is the legislation itself, which is screaming out to be abused. The Terrorism Act encourages police to perform stop and search ‘for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism’ (e.g. phones, maps, laptops, notepads, car keys) and ‘may be exercised whether or not the constable had grounds for suspecting the presence of articles of that kind‘ (Section 44(1)). When challenged by those seeking redress for misuse of these powers the constable should properly claim in court that he or she had no suspicion of the person they stopped and searched. Another reply might risk saying something that could be perceived as discriminatory or otherwise unreasonable, so why make your thoughts public? This is indeed how the officers reacted when we challenged their use of the Terrorism Act against protesters – we just don’t know why we stopped them. The Terrorism Act makes it easier to search people than any other police power and officers are encouraged not to disclose (or indeed use) any reasoning. So its hardly a surprise that hundreds of thousands [3] of stops under this legislation have created suspicion and fear of the state, while not one has led to an arrest on terrorism charges.

News reports are now available from the BBC, The Times, The Guardian, and quite a few more!

Notes
[1] The full judgement is available here: Gillan & Quinton vs. The United Kingdom (4158/05).
[2] Elsewhere I’ve written about why the judicial review process is blind to certain kinds of systematic misuse of police powers.
[3] 250,000 stops were made in 2008/9 and 117,278 in 2007/8.