What our grannies taught us

The government cannot enforce respect when it has failed to earn it
Just a phrase? In the Queen's speech, the government declared that its big idea for this parliament is "fostering a culture of respect". In this parliament we will see two pieces of legislation aimed at making us a more respectful nation. Police will get new powers "to tackle knives, guns, and alcohol-related violence"; the government will reintroduce an old policy "to tackle those who incite religious violence".

It doesn't seem much. But throughout his career Tony Blair has worried about how government might enforce morality. He put his worries most strongly when he spoke to the Women's Institute in 2000, invoking "respect for others, honour, self-discipline, duty, obligation, the essential decency of the British character". It sounds like your grandmother, but she heard it from her grandmother.

In a more rigid age, respect meant deference. Society rather than government legislated respect, and the social rules for deferring to your elders or betters, or to authority figures, were not one-sided; people shown respect were expected to return it; "manners" named the rituals that enabled this exchange - mostly small things, such as giving a seat to old people on the train, but they added up to a strong social bond.

Today deference has lost its cultural value, and perhaps rightly so. It doesn't suit a democratic age. But with the decline of deference has also gone the exchange; when government legislates respect it makes a one-sided gesture, and the gesture rarely changes behaviour. In punishing people for expressing religious hatred, government does nothing to stop them hating; the hatred simply goes underground.

All attempts to legislate morality founder on this rock. But the phrase "a culture of respect" should imply more than curbing offensive behaviour. People need to feel that they matter to others; they want honour - another fine, old-fashioned phrase; more, they want to look in a mirror without self-loathing. Money and power hardly guarantee respect; the mogul with his millions might live in fear that obsequious minions sneer behind his back. So the problem is how to earn respect.

That is this government's particular problem: it has not proved very good at earning respect.

Its response to the public's hatred of the Iraq war was a case in point. The government often battered its opponents into verbal submission; when that failed, it acted as though what people thought didn't matter. Indifference insults, indifference divides. People often say that Blair himself does not know how to listen, but this seems to me too personal. There is a distinctive New Labour style, very good at arguing and explaining. It puts these strengths on display, expecting others to admire. Being clever is hardly a way to earn respect, though, if you treat others as merely passive spectators to your performance.

Being treated with indifference arouses complex emotions that extend far beyond the precincts of Whitehall. Condescension or smugness arouses feelings of anger that people seldom know how to manage. In offices, I've seen the insult of indifference prompt people to acts of petty sabotage that wind up only harming themselves; in schools, particularly working-class schools, young people become rebellious "for no good reason", though the reason is often that their superiors don't bother about them one way or another.

The structural problem is that modern institutions are bad at dealing with individuals who are ordinary - at according them respect even though they are nothing special. Schools and workplaces are obsessed with discovering exceptional talent - the "new meritocracy" that Blair proclaimed as another of his goals when he first came to office. The social issue concerns what happens to those left behind. The meritocrats are held up as an example to the losers. The very word "losers" denies the masses their dignity.

Respect based on loyalty or service is increasingly alien in work; civil society cannot make up the lack. Hard-pressed parents have little time for community affairs; communities themselves in Britain increasingly operate like revolving doors. So ordinary life does not provide much of a forum for people to establish mutual respect.

In government the "culture of respect" is a label that today covers over the deeper problem of how the governing classes can re-establish their own authority. In society the "culture of respect" names a greater difficulty: how can mutual respect be fostered in an age of inequality, an age as class-ridden as that of our grandmothers' grandmothers, without its glue of manners. Politicians might restore their authority by learning better the manners of modesty. If the theme for this new parliament is really serious, however, they would have to embark on a sweeping transformation of the institutions of everyday life.

· Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at the LSE and the author of Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality