Here’s to “the spirit of citizenship”
In Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative Party Conference this week, one of the strongest recurring themes was the concept of citizenship. Having set up an organisation called the New Citizenship Project, this is something I’ve been studying and working with for years, and I believe there’s a whole lot more she could do with it if she wants to — although as with all concepts this powerful, she’ll need to tread carefully.
May introduced citizenship in her vision as the antidote to — indeed the antithesis of — inequality. “We want people to get on,” she said, “but we also value something else: the spirit of citizenship.”
That spirit that means you respect the bonds and obligations that make our society work. That means a commitment to the men and women who live around you, who work for you, who buy the goods and services you sell.
That spirit that means recognising the social contract that says you train up local young people before you take on cheap labour from overseas.
That spirit that means you do as others do, and pay your fair share of tax.
But today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street.
I can’t help but agree with this wholeheartedly, to the word. There is an idea of corporate citizenship in particular here that goes way beyond PR-driven gimmicks, and gets into the stuff that will really make a difference to society. May could easily use her premiership to take this further. There is mounting evidence that firms who truly embrace their role as citizens-in-society (not just consumers of society), and as such have a clear and explicit higher purpose which they exist to fulfil over and above profit-seeking, actually do better in the long run. A recent London Business School study, for example, put the potential value of clear purpose at an additional £130bn for British business. Why not, then, use legislation either to encourage (through tax breaks for example) or even to force firms to make purpose explicit, and report on this, not just their profits?
At the level of the individual rather than the business, there are also intriguing overtones of what the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, arguably the leading global scholar of citizenship, calls “equality of condition”: his view is that a precondition for a just society is to have inequality limited to the extent that people in that society can at least imagine and relate to one another’s lives. This appears to be something May also believes, and Sandel has used this principle to argue for limits on CEO pay and for greater social security, both interventions to which May appears open. The tricky bit is that Sandel sees this idea of equality as fundamentally different to the idea of “equality of opportunity”, which May champions in her meritocracy rhetoric. Equality of opportunity sees everyone as born the same, and deserving of the same opportunities, but that then the outcomes can flow from there. Ultimately, this tends to degenerate into inequality once again, not least because the judgement of merit is inevitably subjective, and is generally made on the terms of the powerful. Here again, then, I’d love to see May go further, developing her ideas about equality in the direction of citizenship.
The third place I’d like to see our new Prime Minister take citizenship further is in her ideas about the role and function of government. I am excited by her willingness to reframe government as an active participant in shaping society, not just a passive bystander limiting its role to the absolute minimum. But there doesn’t yet seem to be much of a role for us as citizens in this. In the age of open data, smart crowdsourcing, participatory budgeting, and much more, this seems a shame. If she believes in citizenship as much as she says, I very much hope we’ll see her champion the shift towards participatory democracy — not just leave us as consumers, restricted in our democratic role to voting once every five years (maybe a little more if we’re thrown the odd referendum).
This third point hints at my great concern with Theresa May’s concept of citizenship: fundamentally, I worry that she’s defining it against the wrong opposition. Following on from the quote above, here’s the very next lines of her speech:
But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.
I’m sorry Theresa, but if this is your definition “citizenship”, then it’s you who don’t know what it means.
I know who May is talking to when she says this, and I understand why she does it. But this is too narrow an idea of citizenship, and one that will too easily become divisive. It is not making a naive plea for a borderless world to say that I am a citizen of London, of England, of Britain, of Europe, and of the world. These are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually beneficial, and mutually constructive. I am all of them at once, and proudly so. My citizenship, and the solidarity May rightly identifies with the word, is not limited to the passport I hold.
This is a question of “the spirit of citizenship” — not just the law. In the modern world, I am a Citizen, and not just a Consumer or a Subject. I am capable of participating in shaping the society I live in, not just choosing between the options that someone else defines. I am capable of taking part in a conversation about what is in the interest of society as a whole, and I am motivated by that, not just my own narrow self-interest. I create, I participate, I engage — and I expect my government to enable and encourage me to do those things.
There is plenty in May’s first speech to suggest that she could be a Prime Minister who leads such a government. Let’s hope she does.
For more on the New Citizenship Project take on citizenship, read our report: This Is The #CitizenShift: a guide to understanding and embracing the emerging era of the Citizen.
