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Respec': New Labour's 'Respect' campaign is about filling the gap created by its withdrawal from the democratic socialist impetus of the post-war years.

Article Excerpt
He's a ridiculous character, forever on TV, a white man who wants to be black, with a ridiculous catchphrase of 'respect' and a repertoire of annoying hand gestures. If he wasn't the prime minister of the UK, Ali G could sue him for plagiarism. As Blair's New Labour heads towards a decade in power, it is launching its most wide-ranging public campaign, based around the 'R' word. Even for a government that has taken the process of cultural ideological reconstruction of British social life to be at least as, and probably more, important than institutional change or redistribution of social and economic power, it is a biggie.

Launched prior to Christmas, the 'Respect' campaign has three major features: an attack on incivility in everyday life and a perceived epidemic of street crime; a reclaiming of patriotic values in a modernised form, as a celebration of 'Britishness' (this latter has been given to Chancellor Gordon Brown to run with, to emphasise the degree to which it is a shared project--Brown has said that he would like to see a Union Jack in every window and on every front lawn); and last but not least an increase in the coercive legal mechanisms designed to enforce this new civility. The now-famous ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) are to be extended and expanded, to the degree that it will now be possible to more or less run problem individuals or families out of town (even out of their own privately owned houses) and exclude them from their home and neighbourhood for a...

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