Since the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the New Labour government has offered a succession of behaviour focused policy strategies aimed at tackling urban promiscuity in its varied forms. This initially meant pursuing anti-social youths with ASBOs and Dispersal Orders. When all this effort was beginning to appear a bit insubstantial and tired at the start of its third term in office in 2005, Tony Blair launched the Respect Action Plan to breathe new life into the attack on incivility and the ‘yob culture’. The emerging respect agenda, in my view, was the most feeble of all New Labour's strategic actions in the field of criminal justice, because it was, and remains, based on a ridiculous premise that issues of culture, social norms and morality can be addressed by punitive legislation and withdrawal of welfare support. The only way issues of crime and anti-social behaviour can be countered is to address their fundamental causes which lie in the social hierarchy and social polarisation scarring our increasingly divided society, as the recent book by Wilkinson and Pickett (Reference Wilkinson and Pickett2009) has convincingly argued in relation to the data on the relationship between social inequality and social problems.

The collection of essays contained in Securing Respect on the whole take the respect agenda seriously and set about uncovering its weak foundations in poor definition, unreflective policy direction and its unintended effect of creating the kinds of divisions, or ‘othering’, which I believe are key to understanding the contemporary manifestations of ‘disrespectful’ behaviour, particularly, but not exclusively, among young people today.

The book is divided into five sections with an introduction and conclusion by Andrew Millie. The first two essays establish the context for the text. Burney reprises an analysis she has offered in several other texts on this topic reviewing the origins of the New Labour obsession with the politics of behaviour and latterly ‘respect’. Although it is familiar material, it remains useful because it sets the scene for the book. Similarly, the interesting reminder of the deep historical roots of society's intolerance of ‘hooliganism’ and ‘bad behaviour’ offered by Pearson is an updated analysis that was originally offered in 1989.

The second section focuses attention on young people and children . The essays by France and Meredith and by Woolley combine a discussion of definitional matters with an examination of particular issues in the politics of behaviour. France and Meredith comment on the absence of respect for young people as they negotiate the transition to citizenship and Woolley highlights the difficulties that children encounter in using public space. These essays raise critical voices about the absence of mutual respect and the tendency for policy to display a ‘disrespectful’ attitude to children and young people.

The third section is headed respectful communities and families. Nixon and Hunter report on their research into intensive family supervision and in particular the gendering of anti-social behaviour control. The essay by Somerville again raises the issue of the importance of mutual respect as a basis for building cooperative interaction in communities. The useful distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ trust is used here to distinguish between what amounts to the difference between basic civility and neighbourliness and the strong foundations of solidaristic cooperation, which is often referred to as social capital and community efficacy.

The city becomes the focus of the fourth section with two contributions that address the relationship between the often promiscuous use of urban space by ‘outsider’ groups and the need for tolerance in the postmodern city. Bannister and Kearns focus on the city as a barometer of tolerance, arguing for strategies to build mutual respect without reliance on the imposition of a common code of behaviour. Millie introduces the notion of ‘urban cosmopolitanism’ as a counter to the sanitised and ‘disneyfied’ urban order at the heart of the respect strategy.

The final section on respect, identity and values provides two contributions which provide, for me, sociologically interesting perspectives on the respect issue. The chapter by Flint and Powell is one which I particularly liked because they apply the sociological perspective of Norbert Elias on the civilising process to an analysis of sectarianism in Scotland. Their conceptualisation of what they call a ‘civilising offensive’ is used to describe the campaigns in education and football to combat bigotry, particularly that which manifests itself in the religious divide in Scotland through separate Catholic and Protestant Schools and Old Firm football rivalries. The attack on bigotry has been reframed into the language of the respect agenda. Interestingly, Squires too draws attention to the extension of the ‘respect’ agenda into football, particularly the internationalisation of the issue at the Euro 2008 finals. However, he more substantively focuses attention on the issues surrounding ‘street respect’ and ‘street capital’ which is an extremely important, and neglected, aspect of this topic. Government does not understand the culture of the street; it fails to appreciate that the behavioural maladies that are the focus of legislative and punitive attack are in fact the everyday and routine social and cultural practices that often ensure survival in poor communities rather than signify a deliberate attempt to annoy or offend.

What is my overall assessment of this book? Well, I think it contains some interesting analytical observations and a number of the chapters provide useful discussions of the definitional problems surrounding this area of policy. I will add it to my student reading lists and order several copies for my University library. However, I think the New Labour version of this agenda may well be a spent force and we may not have long to wait to see what the post-New Labour version contains. I suspect the language may change a little, but the behaviourist focus of policy will continue so there will be life in this book beyond New Labour.