 We're coming to the end of our series of Just Society Facebook Live chats, so I'm here with colleagues with Helene and Paula and Michelle, and I've brought a cake along, partly to celebrate this series of conversations about justice, partly because, as we heard the other week from Jackie Gabb, it's the 50th anniversary today of the Royal Ascent being given to the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalised male homosexual acts in private. Between consenting adults, and that's an example of the journey that we've come as a society. And that phrase, Just Society, obviously can be taken in different ways. We're primarily interested in how we develop a fairer society. But sometimes people say, oh, it's just society. That's what happens. People have got attitudes to people who are different, and that's just the way it is. And then sometimes they say, there's no such thing as society. Most famously Margaret Thatcher said there's no such thing as society. But she didn't really mean that. She used to say there's no such thing as lots of things. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's no such thing as government money. It's taxpayers' money, she meant. What she was trying to say was, there's only you, you and me. There's us. So rather than say society's got to do something about the child who's being neglected, what she meant was somebody's got to take some action. And if all else fails, the state should step in. But she was actually praising the NSPCC, the children's charity that does so much good work. And so although she's criticised for that, she's also part of this conversation about what kind of society are we in, what kind of society do we want. And we've heard from a number of Open University academics, researchers in this area of citizenship and governance. For instance, my colleague Rob Herrin talking about how can we have fairer elections given that we live in a digital age. There's all that technology there. Can we use it to make elections fairer? Jackie Gabb has spoken to us twice about just society. First of all, talking about her own research into sexual relationships and family kinship relationships in a time of crisis. How does it feel if there's Brexit happening or President Trump being elected if you are in an unusual family setup, for instance? We heard from a new colleague, Eduardo Ongoro, who was talking about how people in the rest of the European Union view Brexit, view us, and what they think about how the UK looks at Europe. We heard from Les Budd about the possible breakup of the United Kingdom. Will there still be a United Kingdom or Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, England go to some extent separate ways? We heard from Jane Roberts just after the election on what it's like as a politician on losing office. And we heard from Hugh MacFall about legal aid and the question, can you have a just society if we haven't got fair and free access to legal aid if we need it? Actually, the Supreme Court decided this week, very much in Hugh's favour, that the government had done the wrong thing in trying to put a high hurdle in there if you wanted to take your employer to a tribunal and charging over £1,000 to deter people. But the Supreme Court said that's unfair, that's unjust, that's not a fair society. So, in my role as director of the strategic research area for citizenship and governments, I get to have the opportunity to have these conversations all the time. It's a privilege, it's important, and obviously my colleagues and I are going away and reading and thinking and listening to people in between times. So, for instance, Hugh and I carried on our argument and I said to him, well, he was saying that just because some lawyers are very rich doesn't mean that other lawyers shouldn't be supported from the public purse to help poorer people. For instance, in the Grenfell Tower tragedy, and I said, well, it is another way of putting that, that there are top chefs, celebrity chefs, TV chefs, Nigella, Delia, Mary Berry, Jamie Oliver, but the fact that they get lots of money doesn't mean that we shouldn't pay those who run a soup kitchen or a food bank who are helping disadvantaged people because the stars aren't going to come and do that anyway and there's not enough of them and they wouldn't necessarily have the mass catering skills. But surely the volunteers who are helping, they're doing great work, but shouldn't they be recompensed for their time. And so the same with lawyers, there are great lawyers you hear of doing high profile cases, but they're not the people who are going to be helping the resident of a tower block who says, I don't feel safe. And so we have these conversations and we wanted this series to get you thinking and please do give your responses to us on how we can create a more just society. But picking up the chef theme, one of the things which comes through in a lot of discussions is this metaphor of a cake. Here's one I made earlier, well actually my wife Patricia made this cake and the reason I brought it in is that I've often heard this in philosophy seminars that society's wealth is like a cake and the issue is how do we slice it up and the assumption is that we slice it up equally. Now in fact there's a whole book on equality and cakes by a couple of people, Keith Joseph who was a colleague of Margaret Thatcher and Jonathan Sumption who at the time was a young history don in Oxford. This was in 1979, the year I took my final exams. Jonathan Sumption has now become a Supreme Court justice. He probably wouldn't necessarily like to be reminded about this book, but anyway there's lots of stuff on cakes. Cakes, they're use and abuse and what they say is the assumption always in politics is you cut the cake equally and there are four of us here. That would be a very big slice wouldn't it, but let's say you divide it up into let's say eight. That's the way you do it if there are eight people in your little society and they say that's absolutely wrong. Now if you think they're wrong then it's good to read this book or to be provoked if you like to think well is that right? Now in my last job which was director of the Cambridge Theological Federation I went along to a residential seminar of people who wanted to become Anglican clergy. So they were doing an online course a bit like the open university but they had the equivalent of a summer school and they were in groups of eight and they all had a cake in front of them and there were about eight groups of eight and they were asked to divide the cake up fairly to have a just cake distribution and really they all were just going right I'm going to do it like that equal slices. I thought I wasn't meant to speak but they could see that I looked amazed so they tried to draw me in one of the groups and I said well at birthday parties for our children then not now but when our children were little or at weddings you don't divide up the cake just like that into these big slices you tend to cut into little squares and actually people at weddings often seem to me I don't know if this is right but they seem to have prepared more cake and they cut up into kind of little cubes for people to take away. So I was saying that there would be clergy who are meant to be very other regarding worried about the poorest in society well why don't you cut it into 16 and then give half of it away. I mean you're talking about yourselves or you could cut up different slices because people sometimes say I'd like a thinner slice please they don't always mean that but they say that. And so you could take the top off I mean you can slice it in all sorts of different ways. And Keith Joseph and Jonathan's assumptions say in any event the whole cake metaphor is completely wrong because the assumption is it's about redistribution of cake as if the cake was distributed in the first place but actually one person in this case Patricia my wife bought the ingredients brought her creativity to bear and made it. It's her cake so if she wants to slice in a different way is the stating title to take the cake off her and say no it's got to be even or put another way particularly for the clergy there. Suppose somebody's actually genuinely hungry wouldn't you expect to give them the whole cake rather than say yeah but I'm in society as well I'd like my share. And so whatever the metaphor you choose I think there's a lot in this idea of a just society that we can explore. And we do it partly by having conversations by reflecting on what these great researchers have been doing partly by reading but I think that the arguments are crucial for us to have and in our studies at the European University and elsewhere we may get insights from different disciplines so Jackie Gabb is a sociologist, Rob Herrian is a lawyer and so on. Les Budd has come from an economics background and in fact Keith Joseph and Jonathan's assumption say that the cake argument is really an economic one and it also misunderstands cakes and economics. That the issue is, and you've heard this in politics, how big is the cake going to be? How do we get more cake? And if you keep taking off the people who've got the creativity and make it then you'll find that there won't be so much cake making. What can we do as individuals then? All of the people watching and listening to this. For the man or woman out there, what are your top tips then for people to participate and create a just society? Well, unlike the government who have been saying, which is another reason for this metaphor, they've been saying that on Brexit we want to have our cake and eat it. And unlike the courts in the gay cake case in Northern Ireland where a campaigner came in and said would you ice this with support gay marriage? And the baker said no because we don't support gay marriage and then it's turned into a huge route. Unlike those, I think you have to understand when it's a metaphor, when the topic is something that is beyond what you can resolve yourself. But also, as you rightly say, you've also got to take some action, you've got to do things. And a lot of people have, for instance, adapted their lifestyles in terms of the environment sustainability. They've become greener because they eventually recognise what may have seemed a slightly outlandish argument in politics. And they've absorbed it into their personal lives. And so what I would say we can do is adapt the way in which we look at issues at problems in society. I've given a different example altogether of any issue is like when you're looking at a cathedral and you look at it from different perspectives and it looks different. But that's partly because of where you are. And so when you paint a picture of the cathedral, what's happening is you think you're describing the cathedral, but actually you're telling me whether you're painting from the left or the right politically or from the east or the west. And so every time you paint a picture of what you mean by a just society, I think I get a sense of you as a person and vice versa. And so it is important to debate it. And the final thing I wanted to quote is from another book. This is by Dorothy Emmett, The Moral Prism. And just the very first paragraph says that people sometimes think of moral judgement as some kind of shining white light. And that's it. You've either got the light or you're in darkness. But in fact, if you think of it as a prism that you've got the different colours, who's to say that green or pink or blue or red or whatever it is is the right colour. That's the way it seems to us. That's the colour we focus on. But understanding that there is a kind of rainbow coalition out there has been very important for this issue of gay rights, for instance. And we've certainly moved as a society. And one of the things I was asking Jackie about is how did it suddenly happen in the last 10 of those 50 years that we got these moves? And I think it's because the momentum comes from thousands of little conversations, little actions that people undertake. So what happens is my wife studied the law. That's how we met when we were both studying the law. But then she did a degree, a master's in ethnic musicology, the anthropology of music. And we both learnt quite a bit from that, I think, about how different societies see music. And we in the West assume it's about musical talent, it's about performing. But in some of the Pacific Islands where anthropologists were spending time, actually listening is prized. And people understand that without an audience you don't really have a performance. And so in that way you may study something, you have conversations, you have political arguments. And then maybe five, ten years on it just affects you a little. So maybe in your own family there's an issue about somebody who is gay. And you react differently to how you would have done 20 or 30 years ago, partly because you've been having these arguments about what society should do. So that's I think what this Just Society series has been about. And it's been a real pleasure to get the feedback from students and others and to have the opportunity to converse with colleagues. So thank you very much to everybody involved in working towards a more Just Society.