Britain's civic life is fraying. Trust is thinning, participation is falling, and citizenship is too often treated as a passive status rather than a lived responsibility. In From Service to Statesmanship, Gareth Pearce argues that a free society cannot endure on rights alone: it depends upon duty, discipline, and the everyday habits of service that bind neighbours into a nation.
Drawing on British history, conservative political thought, and hard lessons from military and civilian life, Pearce traces how the post-war covenant of shared sacrifice gave way to consumer politics, professionalised leadership, and a culture increasingly uneasy with obligation. He challenges readers to recover a clearer understanding of citizenship as covenant—rights honoured, duties assumed—and to rebuild the institutions that form character and sustain self-government.
This is not a call to nostalgia, coercion, or exclusion. It is a practical, principled case for renewal: revitalised civic education, voluntary national service properly incentivised, pathways from frontline contribution into public leadership, stronger local institutions, and integration rooted in shared endeavour. The book also confronts the corrosive rise of service fraud and "stolen valour", arguing that honour is not sentimentality but the moral currency of public life.
Serious, historically grounded, and unapologetically hopeful, From Service to Statesmanship is a call to debate—and a call to rebuild a Britain worth serving.
