It should offer general principles for society to which the majority can subscribe because more people will benefit than suffer from

It should offer general principles for society to which the majority can subscribe because more people will benefit than suffer from the results. So that is principle number one: no bans based on impulse or mere whim or prejudice.Some time ago, I discovered that a group of friends and acquaintances gathered annually to debate and discuss the Good Society. Believing that they had to start somewhere, one of their number – Professor Alan Milne of Durham University – drew up a set of definitions for them Conceived in 1990, they already have a sadly dated look. They called for a society without gender or racial discrimination – yet recorded racial attacks in Britain now run at the rate of tens of thousands each year. They believed that a good society could not be indifferent to the plight of the poor, the unfortunate and the helpless in its midst. With an underclass of some 10 per cent of the population, with the fruits of Care in the Community wandering in a bemused way around the nation’s streets, with absolutely no proof that growing wealth at the top will trickle down to the poor below, six years on our society gives a passable imitation of indifference to the poor and helpless. At the start of the decade, this group of idealists could assert: “If all are to enjoy modest prosperity, some will have to forego part of the greater prosperity they could otherwise have achieved.” Today, the suggestion that the tax rate might be raised in any category is derided even by Labour as punitive on a Crippsian scale.

The pips will squeak but they are not the squeaks of the well-to-do. Can this be a Good Society?If a Good Society is to exist, then legislation and a government’s actions should be judged on its skill in balancing rights, duties and privileges. The language of rights alone has long become meaningless and led only to distortions in the debate. From human rights to women’s rights, to children’s rights to animal rights, the catalogue of public rights that are asserted for each category has lengthened and sophisticated. Detached from any sense of the cost involved in providing these rights, still less the consequences for others of providing them, the unbalanced emphasis on rights has produced occasional gains but then run into resistance, practical and theoretical. Every right is a claim; how is that claim to be met?Increasingly, the emphasis on rights has been elbowed aside by a counter- offensive from the more old-fashioned concept of duties or responsibilities.

From errant fathers pursued by the Child Support Agency to indifferent parents who must enter into a contract with a school to which their children go, responsibilities will be codified, formalised and legalised. But will this new single-minded emphasis on responsibilities rather than rights in its turn achieve what it is hoped to achieve? Each batters the other into the ground. A good society would judge measures according to the extent that they conferred rights but answered the calls of duty at the same time. Elevating one over the others leads to bad laws, bad social practices and distorts the workings of society.The Good Society cannot be constructed on the basis of a single criterion, a kind of social “one club” economics for which Chancellors of the Exchequer have been excoriated. Here too the choices before us are polarised as lying between the market and the community. At present, the model of the market is held up as the unchangeable and the moral foundation on which a good society should be based. Markets allow freedom, swap information, generate innovation, stimulate economic activity, allow competition, motivate enterprise and are the best form of social activity devised by man.The language of the market has now taken over most other human transactions.

Any organisation worth its salt is supposed to exist by an internal market. This means that each and any transaction must be costed and should only occur if a price is put upon it. Advocates of the system would prefer the transaction to be costed in theory and not used rather than take place on an imperfect cost basis. But human transactions in a good society are precisely those that are not costed: those concerned give because they believe that the spirit of such uncalculated giving is essential to making a good society work.Within the narrower confines of an organisation, to turn relationships – especially creative ones – into market transactions, to put a price on them, misses the point. It reduces co-operation between individuals; creates administrative and bureaucratic barriers; sets a price on ideas; destroys a sense of corporate community, and fragments a sense of corporate belonging.

It dehumanises because it materialises the human traffic of feelings, of curiosity, the satisfactions of mutual working together. In the BBC World Service, we were encouraged to set a price on each use of the Library and Information Service on the grounds that it cost a lot of money and some members of staff used it too much. “Using it too much” meant that some used it more than the average. The possibility that this reflected their diligence, their professionalism, and their concern to maintain standards was brushed aside.