Decency needs to be replaced at the heart of public life and public discourse. Hennessy discusses what decency looks like today with voices from politics and public life, and reflects on what they’ve shared with him.
As Peter Hennessy prepares to bid farewell to public life, he has been surveying 80 years of his country’s political and constitutional journey. And he’s left with one thought: that the essential quality of decency needs to be placed – once again – back at the heart of public life and public discourse. But what does decency look like today, where does it spring from, and how might we all play a role in re-centring it in public life?
In this book Peter Hennessy considers those questions as he discusses them with a group of people who might pick up this baton. He’s been inviting old friends, colleagues and those he has long-admired, along with younger voices from politics and public life, into his home for conversations about what decency means to them. And he’ll be reflecting on what they’ve shared with him.
Hennessy’s interest in this question springs from a concern about constitutional proprieties, but these conversations range much further afield – from the constitution to service delivery, from schooling to social media. What he hears is both worrying and uplifting: a real sense that there is a problem, a real commitment to tackle it, and ideas for how that might be done, and what role all of us can play.
Peter Hennessy is Attlee professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of several books including a postwar trilogy (Never Again: Britain 1945–51; Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties; Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties). His most recent work is On the Back of an Envelope: A Life in Writing. He is a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. He sits in the House of Lords as an independent crossbench peer.
