The Politics of Decency

Surveying eighty years of his country’s political and constitutional journey, Peter Hennessy is left with one abiding thought: that the essential quality of decency needs to be placed – once again – at the heart of public discourse. In a series of conversations with old friends and those he has long admired – along with younger voices from politics and public life – Hennessy asks what decency means to them. His interest in this question springs from a concern about constitutional proprieties, but these conversations range further afield: from community projects to service delivery, from schooling to social media. What he hears is both worrying and uplifting: an acknowledgement of the problem, a commitment to tackling it, ideas for how that might be done; and a sense that we all have a role to play in re-centring decency in public life.