community confusions

2011-10-18T13:00:00.001-07:00

My speech "In Defence of Multiculturalism" at the Initiatives of Change conference in Caux has just been published on their website at
http://www.caux.iofc.org/sites/all/files/cx2011_gregg_20110729.pdf
It was a wierd summer. We left for the conference a few days after the dreadful events in Norway, spent a week in a castle in Switzerland, then went to Italy whose economy then started to collapse alongside that of the EU, and then we got back to see rioting breaking out across the UK.

Third Sector Research blow to Big Society

2011-10-18T02:52:00.001-07:00

In soon to be published research the Third Sector Research Centre casts doubt on one of the central tenets of Big Society - the notion that volunteering can, on its own, improve the level of social capital in an area. Their methodology was as follows: Using the Citizenship Survey (which the Government has now cut - they don't like measurement) "a cross-classification of sampling units by decile of deprivation and region was developed so that volunteering rates could be calculated for 90 types of area.... A measure of social capital was developed and then correlated with the area measure of volunteering, but the assocation disappered once controls were introduced for area deprivation." As they say "This raises questions about whether volunteering can improve the level of social capital in an area in the absence of improvements in economic circumstances" (McCulloch, Mohan and Smith 2010)
In other words "It's the Economy Stupid!"

Big Society – Bread and Circuses for the 21st Century

2011-10-17T07:09:00.000-07:00

The Big Society has been a dominant theme for Cameron and his close followers since before last May’s election. Various attempts have been made to define Big Society in such a way that it could be identified and measured but most of these lack any rigour at all. As far as it is possible to determine them the major components of the approach can be adduced as being:

• Public service “reform” – privatising and “voluntarising” state services
• Localisation– transferring power from central government to local communities
• Volunteerism
• Publishing government data and “cutting bureaucracy and regulation”, ending Labour’s “target-driven” culture
• Supporting charities, social enterprises, mutuals and coops

Its cheerleaders see the Big Society initiative as being “a progressive, innovative strategy… based upon the principles of empowering communities, redistributing power and fostering a culture of volunteerism...(sharing) the government’s vision of a society where volunteering and community spirit become second nature”.
The Big Society Network describes its approach as one driven by “…anger and frustration at the recent behaviour of both the City and Westminster and relatively powerless to change them. We are often anonymous taxpayers without a real sense of how our money gets spent. Most of us try to be reasonably good citizens but our influence seems very small”.
There are a number of paradoxes with the notion of Big Society set out below. In the year since the 2010 election and after at least four attempts to launch or relaunch the initiative, few people are clearer now then they were when Cameron launched this strange mixture of ‘Red Tory’ ideas. The specially appointed Big Society Tsar, Lord Nat Wei has resigned from the post on the laughable grounds that he couldn’t afford to continue volunteering. The four vanguard Big Society local authorities have all had different problems introducing the concept and Liverpool (the only urban and relatively poor one of the four) has pulled out altogether because of the scale of the cuts to local authorities. A policy vehicle that has been as vague, often risible and downright dishonest as the notion of Big Society would usually have already been consigned to the dustbin of history. It is therefore worth asking why the approach has been so surprisingly resilient and why Cameron is so convinced that the concept will allow him to simultaneously detoxify the Tory Party brand at the same time as accomplishing a more radical attack on public services and the poor than that carried out under Margaret Thatcher.

I start my analysis of the Big Society by pointing out a number of paradoxes with the concept and then go on to compare Big Society to a much more comprehensive, radical and far reaching attempt to remodel the citizen’s relationship to the state - the Great Society launched in 1960s America by President Johnson.

The Paradoxes of Big Society

1. Big Society is organised chaos
In an article in the Telegraph (28/12/2010) Michael Gove compared the Government’s approach to Big Society to Maoism. He appeared to be alluding to the Government’s ceaseless push for “revolutionary” change. He hit the nail on the head rather better than he realized. The Big Society is indeed a revolutionary movement launched from the countryside - although it is more Oxfordshire after a short stroll than Yannan Province after the Long March - coupled with a hatred of urban intellectuals and nostalgia for purity and community.
Eric Pickles, the local government secretary, leaves no doubt about what that message is. "We are going to shake up the balance of power in this country. We are going to change the nature of the constitution. Be in no doubt about our commitment to localism. I know I look like an unlikely revolutionary, but the revolution starts here".
Nick Boles is the Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford and an arch-Cameroon. In his book, Which Way's Up: the Future for Coalition Britain and How to Get There he describes what he calls "Big Bang localism" – a radical decentralisation to "dismantle some of central government's most wasteful bureaucracies". Subsequently he gave this theory colourful expression by talking of “injecting a form of chaos” into local communities.
Francis Maude, the cabinet Office Minister responsible for Big Society has promised a “future that is chaotic and disorderly”.
What the Hell is Going On?
2. They don’t really want to define or measure it

Cameron and other leading Big Society followers in the Government have consistently failed to define exactly what they mean by the notion. Its philosophical forbears (David Blond and ResPublica) are equally vague. The real benefit of the concept is that it can’t be measured and in practice it acts as a broad enabling concept under which a whole variety of sometimes contradictory policies and prejudices can be found. It is the theoretical equivalent of blancmange – it is so deceptively sweet it must be bad for you, it can adopt almost any shape you want it to and most importantly it still wobbles! Such vagueness is not an accident. Big Society sets itself totally against Labour’s culture of top-down target setting as well as planning laws and regulation of all types. Another advantage of fudging the question of measurement is that it avoids the need to draw harsh statistical attention to the effects of the cuts and the growing levels of inequality throughout society. It is therefore difficult to tease out particular evidence of what success would look like for Big Society. Questions about how “Big” society should be make little sense. Instead of evidenced outcomes, the success of the approach will be “felt” rather than seen. Otherwise unmeasurable indicators - such as social cohesion and social capital - are sometimes trundled out to try and answer this question of measurement but this amounts to little more than the substitution of one secret code to clarify another.

The Tories have distanced themselves from what they consider to be top down, bureaucratic and statist New Labour targets. They have introduced a kind of contempt for measurement against targets coupled with the abolition of numerous quangos and NDPBs that have been used to control measure or regulate different aspects of society. To take just one example, earlier this year, DCLG announced that it would no longer be collecting data from Supporting People. According to its website,

‘…the Department wishes to reduce the time-consuming and expensive burden of numerous data reporting requirements imposed on local authorities [which then commission services locally] by central government’.

This is likely to have disastrous results for vulnerable people – but we will no longer be able to measure just how disastrous.

This approach is paradoxical and surprising. In the last year, there have been countless news stories about outcomes-driven contracts — from social impact bonds to payment by results arrangements — which require charities to use data to demonstrate the difference they’ve made. David Cameron has also announced plans to measure “national wellbeing” and made a commitment to open data. All these things require charities to get a grip on good monitoring and evaluation.

One of the most worrying of all of these attempts to deregulate are the increasing attacks on equalities and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. The notion of ‘equality’ that has done so much to improve life in the UK for a wide range of those groups who have so often been discriminated against is now under serious challenge along with an attack on multiculturalism. Instead a much more facile and individualised version of “fairness” is now put forward as the new commonsense – ‘it’s not fair that I should have to pay higher taxes to send someone else’s children to University’. This notion of fairness is a key part of the larger attack on solidarity and social cohesion. The rich can increasingly look after their own and those who cannot afford to go private can go hang.

Leading ‘Red Tories’ Philip Blond and John Milbank argue that a synthesis of old Tory and traditional left ideas is the only way to achieve a ‘genuinely egalitarian society’. Their response to the National Equality Panel's report was to question the whole basis of ‘equality of opportunity’. According to them the "rhetoric of egalitarian opportunity means that everyone who doesn't succeed is defined as a failure. Such contempt reinforces inequality". Who are these individuals defining people as ‘failures’ in this way? The authors assert this without any argument and then continue with the bizarre premise that "equality of opportunity is ... wholly synonymous with a market without morals and a meritocracy without merit". They then make weird platonic appeals to "virtue" as their key concept - but of course they fail to say what they mean by it:

"…the more we seek to link social and economic prestige with virtue, then the more we can hope for good financial and political leaders possessed of compassion and integrity".

A circular argument if ever there was one. (“No equality in opportunity”. the Guardian 28/1/10). However, what they fail to remember is that it is precisely those ‘masters of the universe’ who recently wrecked our economy who are best at linking their own riches - their social and economic prestige - with their own virtue. Indeed, this is effectively what ‘greed is good’ means in the modern era. The Red Tories, instead of challenging this, actually end up by celebrating "a hierarchy of excellence" which looks uncommonly like Britain's current class structure.

The demise of the Audit Commission and Central Office of Information, significant cuts to the Charity Commission, and NICE, as well as RDAs mean the end not only of the possibility or regulation but also a serious restraint on the possibility of any significant redistribution between areas of comparative richness and poverty.

Big Society purports to be about the community and society but is actually about the individual and the family. Nat Wei described Big Society as being “Primarily about citizens taking more control” and that the true test of Big Society will be a real shift of power and control to ordinary citizens. However, at the same time Big Society sets out to decimate those aspects of our social welfare and state apparatus that seek to redistribute power and resources between rich and poor. The question that we therefore have to ask is who benefits from this change of power and control? It will certainly not be for the poorest and most marginalised whose protection under equalities legislation or welfare provision will be lost. It will certainly not be those who rely on public services and are unable to choose to spend money they don’t have on privatised alternatives.

The Big Society is little more than a rather polite, version of the Tea Party that has swept across the US. It starts from exactly the same basis: Private = Good, Public = Bad. It believes that we can only be free if we are in competition with each other in a free market. Therefore all regulation is inherently bad ("socialism"). Far from being a Big Society this is a recipe for an eventual war of all against all. A dreadful Hobbesian dystopia.

3. We are already doing it

If the Big Society notion of ‘active citizen involvement’ actually means anything then surely we are already doing it. Community activism and local volunteerism are nothing new. Civil Society organisations are perhaps more developed in the UK than anywhere else in the world. The Red Tory and Big Society principle that civil society has been co-opted and endangered by the overreaching state as well as the predatory market just isn’t borne out on the ground. Indeed, I will go on to argue that a number of features of the Big Society are likely to threaten the independence of civil society despite the claim it set-up to avoid this very occurrence. Soon to be published research by the Third Sector Research Centre show that there is no evidence for the Big Society theorists’ claims that the state has crowded out the voluntary and community sector.

Hundreds of thousands of voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations are already working effectively at a local level and around communities of neighbourhood and identity. Big Society and government cuts are actually likely to make these organisations less resilient rather than more active. Many voluntary and community groups are already losing huge amounts of funding and this leads to the next paradox:

4. Big Society = big cuts = smaller civil society

Big Society is all about providing the ideological defence against those campaigning against cuts in public services at local, regional and national level. Despite all the rhetoric that Big Society will improve the conditions for success for smaller and more local voluntary organisations, all the evidence is of massive cuts to the charitable sector as local authorities, and other commissioning agencies cut back on their spending (QB). Many of those involved in campaigning against these big cuts are civil society organisations. There is lots of evidence that the ConDem government is much less tolerant of dissidence amongst civil society organisations than was New Labour. Many Labour MPs come from voluntary sector backgrounds and after nearly two decades of work developing relationships and policy with the sector there was a real understanding of the importance of the independence of the sector and the need for groups to be able to campaign (where appropriate) against local or national government even though these may be funding them. This relationship was enshrined in the “Compact” between government and the voluntary sector developed over the years of the Blair and Brown Governments. There is little evidence of a similar understanding amongst the new Tory Government. One of the many key agencies that were abolished as part of the Bonfire of the Quangos was the Compact Commission which oversaw the functioning of the Compact which was empowered to intervene in national, regional or local breaches of these agreements.

Along with cuts to funding and increasing numbers of voluntary groups going to the wall, it is likely that the remaining medium-sized and larger voluntary sector organisations will become increasingly co-opted by the Government as well as by the private sector. This runs totally counter to the rhetoric of strong and independent civil society organisations that are supposed to lie at the heart of Big Society.

5. Big Society = Big Contracts

Big Society spokespeople like Francis Maude and Lord Nat Wei have argued that the changes brought about by Big Society will operate most effectively at the local and neighbourhood level. Francis Maude said that this level of the “microscopically granular” was the level at which change would happen. Many have interpreted this as likely to lead to support for smaller, more community based voluntary and civil society organisations. Actually, this is far from the case. Aggregated contracts for public services mean that many contracts will be far too large for civil society organisations to bid for. This is the very opposite of the microscopically granular. These large contracts are going to private sector firms like Serco, Veolia, A4E, Arriva etc rather than voluntary agencies who are reduced to being sub contracted or even subcontracted. Out of 40 prime contractors for the Work Programme announced in April 2010 only two were won by a voluntary organisation. Payment by results will also privilege larger private sector organisations rather than smaller charities that are unlikely to have the cashflow reserves to be able to wait months for payments and to cross-subsidise and loss-lead so as to win contracts.

This will change the whole relationship between the voluntary sector, the state and the private sector. In the years of new Labour, local authorities and other commissioners were used to the important independence of the civil society organisations that they commissioned or grant funded. These relationships were regulated by the Compact which recognised the importance of voluntary groups as whistle blowers and critical friends. It is unlikely that Serco or Group 4 will look so gently on charities they subcontract if these same organisations represent their clients in a way that is critical or demanding. The independence of the large parts of the charitable sector is thus under threat and its ability to speak truth to power likely to be more constrained than for many years.

6. Big Society = Little England

Big society is a nostalgic and rural view of society. David Cameron says that he tracks the original idea to his thinking in his Dad’s garden in Witney – small town Oxfordshire.
Four initial 'vanguard areas' were selected to run pilots:
• Liverpool, Merseyside (withdrew from pilot in February 2011)
• Eden, Cumbria
• Sutton, Greater London
• Windsor and Maidenhead, Berkshire
With the exception of Liverpool these represent some of the most well off, rural or suburban areas in the UK. Even some months after the launch of these vanguard areas the local voluntary sector coordinating bodies in three of the areas reported that there had been no contact with them from the local authority leads. In reality there has been surprisingly little effort made to involve the organised voluntary sector in Big Society approaches at a practical level. Government has however made it clear to all the larger agencies funded as Office of Civil Society strategic partners, that they must promote and support Big Society.

I can see how Big Society might work in Eden, Sutton and Windsor as I can in Witney – like Cameron’s father, my mother lives there. If a library is closed down by West Oxfordshire Council I can imagine a group of willing volunteers trying to run it for a few months for nothing. Witney – yes possibly – but I can’t see how it will work in Wigan or Warrington, Walthamstow or Watford. Actually, the Big Society seems to be having real trouble even in Witney with the news that the only youth centre in Witney is about to close down following a sharp drop in public donations and local authority cuts (‘PM’s favourite big society youth centre faces closure’ – the Guardian 25/6/2011)

7. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be

As well as being “Maoist” there are weird streaks of anarchism and even Leninism (All Power to the Parishes) about the notion of Big Society. Both
“Red Toryism” and its more recent (and equally incoherent) mirror image “Blue Labourism” share a deeply ingrained nostalgia for a pre-Lapsarian England, They both hark back to a time before the creation of the Welfare State and the “bureaucratic and statist” NHS. Descriptions by Phillip Blond of the society he envisages can look a bit like the fictional village of Ambridge that features in the Archers – “nuns cycling to communion through the early morning mist” in John Major’s immortal quote from George Orwell. Blond is quite explicit that he hankers after an England that died out with the industrial revolution. Blond sees himself as providing a critique of modern secularism as well as the modern state. He writes in praise of the "medieval network of a predominantly horizontal communal and social order, exemplified by the church but also including guilds and agrarian communities organised around differential property relationships". Sadly, he believes, this ideal condition of society was destroyed by the rise of powerful monarchs and states. Another way of characterising his beliefs would be: 'In Praise of Feudalism' or (as The Independent 25/11/09) notes: 'Back to the Middle Ages'. This is nostalgia taken much too far!

Blond’s cure for the ills of “broken Britain” prioritises the family and marriage as central to the nation’s health. He also believes that rolling back the state so as to transfer assets to the middle classes as well as the poor is the key to a solution. In a recent article in the Evening Standard (30th June 2011) Blond tells Alison Roberts that Big Society has started to go wrong because the Government “has not thought it through radically enough”. For Blond “it’s not really about volunteering and philanthropy, its about changing the agenda for those at the bottom of our society. The great missing middle of the Big Society is the economics”. He suggests that cabinet infighting, massive cuts and the Tories’ failure to grasp the point of Big Society is leading to the policy’s increasing incoherence. What he fails to acknowledge is just how resistant the Tory party usually is to any attempt to protect the poor. He fails to understand how beguiling they are likely to find the parts of his approach which speak of an Arcadian “Merrie England” but how dispensable most of them will find his desire to radically change the status quo. Instead of the “horizontal communal and social order” of Blond’s nostalgic imagination – replete with guilds, mutuals and cooperatives, we end up with a much more traditional desire to restore the English rural class system enshrined in the hymn “the rich man in his castle the poor man at his gate – GOD made them, high or lowly and ordered their estate.”

8. The Perils of Localism

The localism agenda that might look attractive at first sight will on current indications merely magnify the differences between those neighbourhoods that are doing very well thank you, and those poorer localities that are already far behind in terms of resources (whether in social or actual capital). Spouting on about localism and empowerment without a real redistribution of resources is a lame joke rather than a viable policy.

The architecture critic in the Observer (19/12/2010) sets out why the Government's localism bill is bound to lead to trouble. Eric Pickles, he says, "seems to have an idea of a 'community' as being a harmonious entity, sharing common aims and hopes, and civilised ways of resolving differences". The reality is far from this and there are bound to be feuds and bitterness as well as eccentric decisions when communities (i.e. parishes and villages) are given the right to produce their own development plans and propose or veto housing developments within their boundaries; a NIMBYism charter by any other name. The correct term for this kind of policy is "atomisation" rather than "localism". Without the countervailing pressure of Government ensuring that views and interests beyond the parochial get some sort of look in, chaos will ensue. Of course, the Government has said that they see "chaos" as a positive product of the Big Society approach - a necessary by-product of their ideological desperation to destroy as much of the State as they can. It is bound to lead to a post code lottery where the rich areas prosper and the poorer areas sink.
Unacknowledged nostalgia can be a fatal component in bad social planning. This is another case where it is worth ‘being careful what you wish for’. The notion of localism can so easily descend into parochialism just as community can descend into communalism - a war of tribe against tribe; all against all. Only active and viable state institutions (in partnership with civil society) can provide a counterbalance and check on this tendency as well as providing the kind of material and monetary support for some of the most deprived neighbourhoods - without which they would collapse in ways that could bring everything else down with them. Parts of the US are already in this kind of catastrophic tailspin. Blond's good intentions (if such they are) would only make this hell more likely to happen here in the UK. Only the state is able to regulate and redistribute resources away from the richest to some of the poorest areas. Without such strategic intervention a very different and even more dangerous atomisation would break out between different neighbourhoods or localities setting those with fewer resources in direct competition with each other as well as the richer ones. In this sense Blond's approach is akin to a kind of communitarian anarchism.
It is no surprise that the key arguments underpinning Blond's Red Toryism are more theological than logical. He is an unusual convert from Catholicism to the Church of England and religion is at the root of all his political beliefs - including his opposition to abortion in all but extreme cases and his rather stuffy critique of permissiveness.

9. Ideological or a way of avoiding ideology?

The notion of the Big Society must be understood as the death-knell of the Welfare State as we have known it. In seeking to reduce the deficit over only 4 years by making massive cuts the Government is subjecting the UK to round two of the shock doctrine, otherwise known as Thatcher’s unfinished business. In the process it will seek to break up any remains of the solidarity that still resides in our political culture and substitute for it an impoverished and attenuated notion of “community”

Big Society is the Tories way of using ‘the community’ (including voluntary and community organisations) to dismantle the welfare state. It achieves this directly by getting Third Sector organisations to join the private sector feeding frenzy as the NHS and public services are forced to sell themselves off to the lowest bidder. The voluntary and community sector is simultaneously being used as a smoke screen to make it look like this is a cuddly and humane process rather than a selfish and destructive pillaging of the real social capital that we stand to lose - our welfare state.

One of the consequences of us being so vague and ambiguous when we use the word ‘community’ has been the ability of both New Labour and the Tories to hijack the term and set it against the notion of public and state provision. As the marketisation of so much of our public services proceeds ever faster we are increasingly losing the vocabulary to identify and discuss what is actually happening to us. This is a very dangerous development for all of us on the Left but in many ways we have played into the Tories’ hands through our fetishisation of the concept of community. Similarly, the voluntary and community sector has had little to say about the way in which New Labour has used the concept to disguise and collude with its attack on public services. There is a real danger that “cooperative councils” will end up offloading responsibility to local people (“communities”) rather than really unlocking their participation and involvement in a model of mutual service provision that is really responsive to different local needs and that builds a really inclusive solidarity rather than a vacuous sense of community.

Big Society notions of ‘choice’, ‘fairness’ and ‘community’ look unexceptional, commonsensical and cosy but in fact carry a deep ideological content as well as having dangerous practical consequences. The greater the attack on public services by the market – whether by direct privatisation or ‘voluntarisation’ or through the rich and middle classes opting out of them – the more unequal and unfair our society will become. Appeals to community and localism and indeed the notion of Big Society itself, are just smokescreens that can be handily used to disguise this process.

The Big Society actually represents an atomisation of our society and could easily descend further into an anomic and chaotic locality-based version of the devil take the hindmost. The state and localities need to be kept in some sort of balance. Whilst it is true that many aspects of the UK state were too centralised under New Labour, the pendulum could be about to swing so far to the opposite extreme that there will remain no effective mechanisms to allow for equitable distribution or redistribution between rich and poor families, localities and regions.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats have successfully managed to deploy an impoverished notion of ‘community’ so as to mount a direct attack on both the state and society. The notion of community they seek to impose and which they see as the locus for involvement and voluntary activism is a notion of community that may make sense in Witney or even parts of Notting Hill. In Hackney or Tower Hamlets, Worthington or Wigan however, it is likely to be seen as a largely middle class joke – cutting local services on which poor people rely (both as recipients and producers, clients and workers) whilst encouraging local people to compensate by getting together to volunteer to provide them for free. It amounts to little more than a kind of glorified neighbourhood watch scheme and is being used as a smoke screen to hide the withdrawal of resources and public service from the hardest pressed neighbourhoods. Of course the one sort of cohesion that they clearly don’t want to stimulate is the kind of collective action which people in their localities and work places are likely to take when they realise what a con-trick this Big Society nonsense really is.
11. Big Society – the end of the Welfare State?

The Big Society might seem at first sight to carry echoes of the Great Society - the massive attempt by President Johnson in the US in the 1960s to address urban poverty and racial discrimination. What is becoming rapidly clear is that it actually represents its exact opposite. On every index the idealism of the 1960s in the US or of the Welfare State in Britain from the late 1940s is set to be replaced by its opposite in the Big Society whether in terms of fairness, income distribution, gender and racial equality, investment in the arts and sciences, access to legal advice, spending on health and education and so on.

The Great Society was an ambitious and partly successful attempt to move the US out of a looming slump by seeking to address inequality and stimulate demand. Perhaps the only similarity between the Great and Big societies is that the US is currently still embroiled in an unwinnable foreign conflict in Afghanistan just as it was in the 1960s in Vietnam. Sadly it was the increased expenditure on the Vietnam debacle that hobbled and then reversed much of the Great Society in the US.

Expenditure on schools and other public projects was a key feature of the early welfare state as well as of the US in the 1960s but contrast this with the current demise of capital spending on school buildings by the ConDem government and their refusal to support industrial employers such as Sheffield Forgemasters. The Welfare State and particularly the NHS was introduced at a time when the country had a national debt quite as large as today’s. In the US, Medicare and Medicaid, whilst not perfect, were at least launched as a safety net for the old and the poor as a key part of the Great Society. By contrast the coalition government is now smashing up the National Health Service despite its pre-election promise that there would be no more major upheavals in the health area. Access to the Law for all was a pivotal part of the Welfare State. Similarly, the first attempts to fund legal services for the poor as part of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” were launched in the US. Currently in the UK we see the final death-throes of Civil Legal Aid, as well as cuts to Housing and Welfare Benefits on a scale that could be described as a new ‘War on the Poor’. Even the US 1960s investment in the Humanities and the Arts contrasts with huge planned cuts by the ConDems to Museums, Libraries and Arts organisations. The demise of Regional Development Agencies as a way of stimulating employment and economic growth as well as the destruction of regulatory bodies like the Audit Commission will make any serious attempts to share the pain across the regions and between localities impossible.

Affirmative Action in the US in the 1960s resulted in a more than halving of the numbers of African Americans defined as living in poverty. This was mirrored in the UK in the 1960s by the Race Relations Act and real advances in a climate of multiculturalism. By contrast the Big Society has taken no firm steps to ensure that massive public sector cuts won’t systematically damage both women and ethnic minority employment and hard pressed black and minority ethnic communities. Cuts to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and constant attacks on multiculturalism are all part of the project to return nostalgically to a pre-immigration England which never really existed. The prospects for social cohesion in this new ‘Big Society’ are truly dire. Just look at the proposal to cap Housing Benefit in London which seems likely to result in an even more comprehensive social and ethnic cleansing of the richer parts of the City then that achieved by Shirley Porter’s corrupt ‘Homes for Votes’ scandal on Westminster City Council in the mid 1980s.

The localism agenda that might look attractive at first sight will on current indications merely magnify the differences between those neighbourhoods that are doing very well thank you and those poorer localities that are already far behind in terms of resources (whether in social or actual capital). Spouting on about empowerment and community without a real redistribution of resources is a lame joke rather than a viable policy. This type of communitarianism is the philosophical equivalent of Morris dancing or 'Scouting for Boys'. It is a way of avoiding the real issues of inequality, discrimination, class and exclusion that continue to scar our society. It is certainly not the kind of theoretical background on which one might base any sort of sensible social policy towards dealing with the serious issues that actually face us in the real world.

At times Big Society proponents even proffer the weird and naïve view that somehow if we all got together as individuals in our local ‘communities’ to share festivals and have “Big Lunches” then divisions of class and race can mysteriously be overcome. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against street parties, festivals and cultural shows as such. I am just not convinced that by eating samosas together we are really going to build sufficient social capital to overcome the real differences in power and status that do so much to injure our fractured and unequal society. The notion that a society in the middle of being blown apart by huge market forces can be put back together by ‘a bit of shared quiche and a few games of pavement Twister’ is just a silly conjuring trick to amuse or bemuse the revellers even further. Big Society is bread and circuses for the 21st Century.

The word "communities" means poor people

2011-09-17T03:43:00.000-07:00

Society Guardian's recent interview with Neil Johnston of Paddington Development Trust (14/9/11) threw up some fascinating questions about the Big Society and the nature of "communities". Shortly after the election PDT was declared by Nick Hurd to be "the Big Society in Action" only to have its funding cut massively by Tory Wetsminster City Council within weeks. Johnston rightly takes umbrage at politician's patronising language: "The word 'communities' means poor people - big sopciety means poor people ... this whole thing about broken Britain, but then people ask 'does that mean I'm broken'"

Lenin + Ambridge (All power to the parishes!)

2010-12-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

The architecture critic in last Sunday's Observer set out why the Government's localism bill is bound to lead to trouble. Eric Pickles, he says, "seems to have an idea of a 'community' as being a harmonious entity, sharing common aims and hopes, and civilised ways of resolving differences". The reality is far from this and there are bound to be feuds and bitterness as well as eccentric decisions when "communities" (ie. parishes and villages) are given the right to produce their own development plans and propose or veto housing developments within their boundaries. A nimby's charter by any other name. The correct term for this kind of policy is "atomisation" rather than "localism". Without the countervailing pressure of Government ensuring that views and interests beyond the parochial get some sort of look in, chaos will ensue. But then of course the Government has said that they see "chaos" as a positive product of the Big Society approach - a necessary by- product of their ideological desperation to destroy as much of "The State" as they can. It is bound to lead to a post code lottery where the rich areas prosper and the poorer areas sink.

Social Capital - Samuel Smiles "self-help" raised from the individual to the collective

2010-11-24T12:59:00.000-08:00

A great lecture by Ben Fine from SOAS - one of the few courageous critics of the concept of "social capital". This is a concept that is designed to mystify and confuse us. As he says it is "definitionally chaotic" but actually serves to focus us away from looking at the real relations of power, privilege and inequality that we should be confronting. Social capital is nonsense - the rich have real capital (and don't need social capital) whilst the poor are condemned for not having enough "social" capital. Their networks are not elaborate enough, they don't know the right people or enough of them - in other words they are not part of the elite. But then that was true by definition in the first place.

Language is denuded of meaning and devalued with vague talk of "cohesion" rather than solidarity, of "fairness" rather then equality. Conflict, power, context (as well as race, gender, class and politics) all mysteriously disappear in this cheap conjuring trick that tries to convince us that we would solve all our problems if we only had more street festivals, royal weddings or other excuses to eat somosas together. God forbid that we might instead actually challenge or criticise anything real!

Big Society - the end of the Welfare State

2010-09-19T09:49:00.000-07:00

The Big Society might seem at first sight to carry echoes of “the Great Society” - the massive attempt by President Johnson in the US in the 1960s to address urban poverty and racial discrimination. What is becoming rapidly clear is that it actually represents its exact opposite. The notion of the Big Society is best understood as being the death-knell of the Welfare State as we know it. In seeking to reduce the deficit over only 4 years by making massive cuts the Government is subjecting the UK to round two of the shock doctrine, otherwise known as Thatcher’s unfinished business. In the process it will seek to break up any remains of the solidarity that still resides in our political culture and substitute for it an impoverished and attenuated notion of “community”

The Big Society looks at first sight like a harmless, cuddly and rather vacuous concept. Far from it. On every index the idealism of the 1960s in the US or of the Welfare State in Britain in the late 1940s is set to be replaced by its opposite in the Big Society whether in terms of fairness, income distribution, gender and racial equality, investment in the arts and sciences, access to legal advice, spending on health and education and so on.

The Great Society was an ambitious and partly successful attempt to move the US out of a looming slump by seeking to address inequality and stimulate demand. Perhaps the only similarity between the Great and Big societies is that the US is currently embroiled in an unwinnable foreign conflict in Afghanistan just as it was in the 1960s in Vietnam (the UK was sensible enough to keep out of Vietnam whilst it is now haemorraging blood and treasure in fighting the Taliban as America’s junior partner). Sadly it was the increased expenditure on the Vietnam debacle that hobbled and then reversed much of the Great Society.

Expenditure on schools and other public projects was a key feature of the early welfare state as well as of the US in the 1960s but contrast this with the current demise of capital spending on school buildings by the ConDem government and their refusal to support industrial employers such as Sheffield Forgemasters. The Welfare State and particularly the NHS was introduced at a time when the country had a huge national debt. In the US, Medicare and Medicaid, whilst not perfect, were at least launched as a safety net for the old and the poor. By contrast the coalition government is now smashing up the National Health Service despite its pre election promise that there would be no more major upheavals in the health area. Access to the Law for all was a pivotal part of the Welfare State. Similarly, the first attempts to fund legal services for the poor as part of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” were launched in the US. Currently in the UK we see the final death-throes of Civil Legal Aid, as well as cuts to Housing and Welfare Benefits on a scale that could be described as defining a new “War on the Poor”. Even the US 1960s investment in the Humanities and the Arts contrasts with huge planned cuts by the ConDems to Museums, Libraries and Arts organisations. The demise of Regional Development Agencies as a way of stimulating employment and economic growth as well as the destruction of regulatory bodies like the Audit Commission will make any serious attempts to share the pain across the regions and between localities impossible.

Affirmative Action in the US in the 1960s resulted in a more than halving of the numbers of African Americans defined as living in poverty. This was mirrored in the UK in the 1960s by the Race Relations Act and real advances in a climate of multiculturalism. By contrast the Big Society has taken no firm steps to ensure that massive public sector cuts won’t systematically damage both women and ethnic minority employment and hard pressed black and minority ethnic communities. The prospects for social cohesion in this new “Big Society” are really dire. The localism agenda that might look attractive at first sight will on current indications merely magnify the differences between those neighbour-hoods that are doing very well thank you and those poorer localities that are already far behind in terms of resources (whether in social or actual capital).Spouting on about empowerment without a real redistribution of resources is a lame joke rather than a viable policy.

Its cheerleaders see the Big Society initiative as being “a progressive, innovative strategy …. based upon the principles of empowering communities, redistributing power and fostering a culture of volunteerism..... (sharing) the government’s vision of a society where volunteering and community spirit become second nature”. The Big Society Network describes its attitude as: We feel anger and frustration at the recent behaviour of both the City and Westminster and relatively powerless to change them. We are often anonymous tax-payers without a real sense of how our money gets spent. Most of us try to be reasonably good citizens but our influence seems very small. This is of course the same anger and inchoate anti-state rhetoric used by the Tea Party movement in the US
The Big Society actually represents an atomisation of our society and could easily descend further into an anomic and chaotic locality-based version of the devil take the hindmost. The state and localities need to be kept in some sort of balance. Whilst it is true that many aspects of the UK state were too centralised under New Labour, the pendulum is about to swing so far to the opposite extreme that there will remain no effective mechanisms to allow for equitable distribution or redistribution between rich and poor families, communities and regions.

The Tories and their Liberal Democrat quislings have successfully managed to deploy an impoverished notion of “community” so as to mount a direct attack on both the state and society. The notion of community they seek to impose and which they see as the locus for involvement and voluntary activism is a notion of community that may make sense in Witney or even parts of Notting Hill. But in Hackney or Tower Hamlets, Worthington or Wigan it is likely to be seen as a largely middle class joke – cutting local services on which poor people rely (both as recipients and producers, clients and workers) whilst encouraging local people to compensate by getting together to volunteer to provide them. It amounts to little more than a kind of glorified neighbourhood watch scheme and is being used as a smoke screen to hide the withdrawal of resources and public service from the hardest pressed neighbourhoods. Of course the one sort of cohesion that they clearly don’t want to stimulate is the kind of collective action which people in their localities and work places are likely to take when they realise what a con-trick this Big Society nonsense actually is.

Broken society nonsense

2010-07-18T11:04:00.000-07:00

The Tories insist that "Britain is Broken" and that everything used to be better before the permissive society and the welfare state interfered. This of course is absolute rubbish as a recent Economist article (6/2/10) points out: "the broken-Britain myth is worse than scaremongering - it glosses over those who need help most……..Nevertheless it is an idea that resonates. Every week serves up a new tragedy or outrage to be added to the pile of evidence” A few months after this article was written a man went on a rampage with a couple of guns through Cumbria shooting family members, acquaintances and total strangers alike. Interestingly this was one occurrence when the usual rubbish about a broken society was not trundled out again. Why? Because this carnage did not happen in an inner city area amongst the “feral youngsters” and “welfare scroungers” who are the usual denizens of this mythical Tory dystopia. Instead another myth, of a “quiet rural community” where “nothing like this had ever happened before”, came into play. Virtually every single observer was said to be shocked that this “could happen around here” in such a “quiet and close-knit community”. Actually, if one looks at the last major shooting spree occurrences in mainland Britain – Dunblane (1987), Monkseaton (1989), Hungerford (1996), and now Whitehaven – it is precisely these rural villages or suburban small town “tight-knit communities” where such dreadful outrages do seem to occur. Of course this may be partly because there are relatively few controls on rural gun ownership as opposed to urban gun crime. But I suspect it is not just this. The sense of a tightly bound and restrictive community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where the pressures of status and respectability are far more extreme than those in Britain’s cities, seem to me to be precisely the kind of place where men will sometimes lose their bearings and lash out in this crazy way. Certainly we should stop being so surprised that it is in these picturesque and quiet “communities” that occasional eruptions of such dreadful anger and madness sometimes occur.

The Big Lunch is just a small Tea Party

2010-07-18T03:51:00.000-07:00

In a fascinating piece in yesterdays Guardian ("A legend in its lunchtime" 17/7) Joe Moran threw cold water over the Big Lunch idea that street parties and sharing samosas will actually help us "rebuild communities" and somehow overcome the fragmentation caused by free market globalisation. On the contrary, David Cameron's Big Society (of which the Big Lunch notion is just a small course) is actually a cover for unleashing yet further privatisations and free market fragmentation.

Big Society is the Tories way of using "the community" (including voluntary and community organisations) to dismantle the welfare state. It achieves this directly by getting Third Sector organisations to join the private sector feeding frenzy as the NHS and public services are forced to sell themselves off to the lowest bidder. Almost as bad as this is how we in the third sector are simultaneously being used as a smoke screen to make it look like this is a cuddly and humane process rather than a selfish and destructive pillaging of the real social capital that we stand to lose - our welfare state.

The Big Society is nothing more than a rather polite (very English) version of the Tea Party that is sweeping the US. It starts from exactly the same basis Private = Good, Public = Bad. It believes that we can only be free if we are in competition with each other in a free market and therefore all regulation is inherently bad ("socialism"). Far from being a Big Society this is a recipe for an eventual war of all against all. A dreadful Hobbesian dystopia - and they would prefer it without even gun control. This kind of Big Lunch is so poisoned we should steer well clear of it in case its seductive nostalgia leads us ever closer to complete madness.

As for all those street parties and Big Lunches, the notion that a society in the middle of being blown apart by huge market forces can be put back together by "a bit of shared quiche and a few games of pavement Twister" is just a silly conjuring trick to amuse (bemuse) the revellers even further. Bread and circuses for the 21st Century.
The last word to Joe Moran:
"It is heartening to observe at close quarters all this feverish and largely thankless activity, most of it done by women, to hire ice-dream vans or hang homemade decorations from lampposts. And then on Sunday evening it will all have to be cleared away - leaving, perhaps a more convivial neighbourhood, but with no guarantees or firm evidence. There is something touching about so much time and effort being spent in search of the ephemeral and the intangible; a moment of togetherness which, like an incantation, hopes to become true by announcing itself"

From the horses mouth!

2010-07-15T06:05:00.005-07:00

Stephen Bubb in his inimitable blog admits quite rightly that communities are not always the places where people are empowered and that they are sometimes the sites of people's exclusion rather than inclusion. He goes on to argue that if the Big Society is just a front for cuts to the voluntary sector as well as other public services then it will not just fail but be highly damaging on its way down. What he fails to see is that the central purpose of the Big Society idea is just this kind of assault on the welfare state. He is far too quick to agree with the Tories plans to "refashion public services" and fails to see that this drive comes from a deeply ideological hatred of the "Big State" rather than a sensible approach to partnerships between the public, private and voluntary sectors to improve the lives of users of services.

The War on the Poor

2010-05-03T04:48:00.000-07:00

Tony Judt in his excellent new book "Ill Fares the Land" shows how perverse and amoral our language has become when we talk about how "proud" we are to be taking the "tough choices" involved in imposing welfare cuts on the poorest in society (whilst doing nothing about tax dodgers, non-doms and bonuses for bankers). Just how hard are these choices? As Judt says:
"the poor vote in much smaller numbers than anyone else. So there is little political risk in penalising them. These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others. If an older usage were still in force, whereby being tough consisted of enduring pain rather than imposing it on others, we should perhaps think twice before so callously valuing efficiency over compassion"

So there is nothing hard about proposed Tory cuts to benfits or tax credits. Hard-hearted yes - principled and moral - no.

2010-04-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

Islington evidence

2010-04-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

Community is not something that is just "there" - rather it is an activity or a set of activities that has to be performed. It is not just about living in a particular neighbourhood or locality or being defined as a member of a group with a particular identity or common characteristics. In other words it has to be seen as an active process rather than a passive state. It is not just about being but is actually about belonging and becoming. In some cases it literally has to be fought for. It is not something that can be imposed and it can rarely be "regenerated" from outside.

The Cripplegate Foundation has just published an excellent research report on volunteering in Islington called "Unlocking the Potential". As you read many of the quotes from the active volunteers you realise that these people are actively creating a sense of community as they go along through their volunteering rather than uncovering something that was mysteriously there before their activity took place.

"I have done no volunteering and didn't know any neighbours at all and I've lived here for ten years before I joined and it's quite incredible that I can't leave the house now without bumping into people, which is lovely. And that's what I got from it more than anything else, the kind of community feeling, it's very nice"

Another volunteer says:

"The volunteering is actually what makes people talk to each other and work together. It's just that we started talking to people that maybe we wouldn't normally talk to .... it's a catalyst"

A striking finding from the Islington research is that volunteering can have the biggest impact on the most vulnerable and excluded people. When people are able to make a contribution to something bigger than themselves through volunteering they feel valued and worthwhile. Many of the volunteers were from refugee or migrant backgrounds and did not think of themselves as part of mainstream society and used volunteering in part to avoid the isolation that comes with exclusion.

2010-04-03T02:25:00.000-07:00

Current discourses about “community” have usually been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. “Community” has been used to fracture and differentiate, to divide and control. Its misuse has resulted in a legacy of communal identity politics rather than a legacy of real political solidarity. Far from being a word or a concept that has been used to promote real challenges to racism, discrimination and inequality, "community" has often been the mechanism through which divisive and exclusionary identities have been imposed on people. The concluding chapter of Arun Kundnani’s tremendous book “The End of Tolerance” is called “Community: Theirs or Ours” and sets out a whole range of concerns about current community politics. He starts by pointing out that there has been a movement away from solidarity and the notion of anti-racism as a collective struggle by and for “black” communities and instead a break down into the politics of ethnic difference, of competing religious and ethnically defined communities. He draws attention to a “double state strategy of seeking suitably compliant community leaders who can act as surrogate voices for their community, while at the same time, demonising that community and systematically violating its civil rights”. This as he correctly points out “is the worst possible combination for creating a genuinely cohesive society. Its effect is to generate a permanent state of fear, anger and resentment among the ‘suspect community’, while suppressing any kind of constructive public expression of those feelings”

Some of Kundnani’s analysis is worth quoting in full. He points out that the thinking behind this naïve and quiescent community relations approach is that “communities consist of ready-made identities, which need a layer of representative organisations to be imposed on them in order that dissent and unrest can be channelled away ineffectually. This creates a climate in which different faith-based organisations compete with each other for state patronage by attempting to establish themselves as the authentic representatives of particular communities. These organisations have little interest in mobilising at the grass roots in struggles for social justice or civil rights; it is rather the state that they aim to mobilise to intervene in the community on their behalf - for example by funding educational and cultural activities that endorse their ideology. The result is , often, the closing down of spaces , particularly for the young and for women, where communities can come together to tackle the injustices that they face …. One measure of the bankruptcy of this kind of communal politics is the lack of solidarity and support that has been extended to asylum seekers, refugees and other new migrants.”

Centre for Social Cohesion - what a joke!

2010-03-25T04:16:00.000-07:00

The so-called Centre for Social Cohesion claims to be a non-partisan think-tank that studies issues related to community cohesion in Britain. So you might expect it to publish sober and well argued and rather dry studies exhorting us all to greater efforts towards living together across cultures in a spirit of tolerance and mutual respect. Sadly this is not the case. The Centre for Social Cohesion is actually a neo conservative pressure group that promotes vicious islamophobia and outrageous attacks on moderate muslims like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and those who support a multicultural and anti racist approach. Yes the CSC does leaven this constant diatribe with occasional attacks on the racism of the far right but this is the exception and does little to camouflage the real project of CSC which is to promote a war on islam under the disguise of a war on terror. The deeply unpleasant and bigoted Douglas Murray who pops up every so often on Question Time to make a fool of himself claims to provide a rigorous argument against Islamic extremism. However, in doing so he fails to make any serious distinction between Islam (a diverse and inclusive faith followed by millions of people world wide for 1400 years) and Islamism (a sectarian, xenophobic and ultra-reactionary sect sponsored by reactionary arab regimes and itself a product of modernism over the last two hundred years)
Yet again the terms “community” and “cohesion” are being used to legitimate divisive and reactionary approaches to our increasingly hyper diverse society. It is no surprise that the BNP calls its activists “community champions”. The often facile community cohesion projects sponsored by the current government in response to the outrages caused by violent Islamism often fail to make a distinction between muslims on the one hand and islamists (who believe in Islam as a political project) on the other, and worse with potentially or actually violent jihadists. As Ed Husain says: “if extremist Islam is the problem then it may well be that moderate Islam can be the antidote”. The Centre for Social Cohesions approach makes this sensible approach well nigh impossible.

Community is where the guns and gangs, the drugs and pimps are.

2010-02-28T06:11:00.000-08:00

Last week on the Radio 4 Today programme there was a very moving interview with a young woman (lets call her Sarah) who was about to go to University and who spoke articulately about her hopes for the future. A few months before this interview the same woman had been addicted to heroin and crack and had been prostituting herself out to maintain her habit. What was absolutely clear from this interview was that the community was not in any way part of the solution – indeed it was the problem. Sarah’s ability to come off drugs was because she had been lucky enough to be sent by her local authority to a residential rehabilitation centre in the countryside many miles away from the inner city neighbourhood where she lived. She readily agreed that it was only when she was able to get away from “the community” that she could summon the strength to recover. Had she continued to live in her local neighbourhood she would have continued to be plagued by the pimps and pushers she needed to get away from. These same pimps and pushers would have been waiting for her the moment she left any local rehabilitation centre and that this is why drug treatment in the community is a non starter.

Sadly the residential centre was now closing because so few local authorities were prepared to spend the amount necessary to secure effective rehabilitation outcomes but rather preferred to spend less money on “treatment in the community” despite the fact that it has a far less successful record. Far less successful it may be, but by adding the cosy, trendy (but utterly vacuous) words “in the community” to the notion of treatment, these local authorities are able to disguise their miserly and counterproductive penny pinching. They were able to use the term “community” to make it sound as though they were buying a service that would be effective just by virtue of being capable of having this sanctifying (but really sanctimonious) description applied to it.

The Market will set Community against the State

2010-02-26T09:17:00.000-08:00

One of the consequences of us being so vague and ambiguous when we use the word “community” has been the ability of both New Labour and the Tories to hijack the term and set it against the notion of public and state provision. As the marketisation of so much of our public services proceeds ever faster we are increasingly losing the vocabulary to identify and discuss what is actually happening to us. This is a very dangerous development for all of us on the Left but in many ways we have played into the Tories’ hands because of our unthought through fetishisation of the concept of community. Similarly the Voluntary and Community sector has had little to say about the way in which New Labour has used it to disguise and collude with its attack on public services. There is a real danger that “cooperative councils” will end up offloading responsibility to local people (“communities”) rather than actually unlocking their participation and involvement in a model of mutual service provision that is responsive to different local needs and that builds a really inclusive solidarity rather than a vacuous sense of community.
Notions of “choice” and “community” look unexceptional and cosy but in fact carry a deep ideological content as well as having dangerous practical consequences. The greater the attack on public services by the market – whether by direct privatisation or “voluntarisation” or through the rich and middle classes opting out of them – the more unequal and unfair our society will become. Appeals to community and localism are often just a smoke screen that can be handily used to disguise this process.

Even old bones are now "former members of the community"

2010-02-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

In a wierd piece on Newsnight today we heard about a Pagan campaign to rebury ancient bones held in Ipswich Museum (and thought to be Pagan relics). Because these bits of skulls and shards of bone may have been dug up around the Ipswich area they are from "former members of the Ipswich community" according to a senior curator at the Museum.
Blimey! The word community here is being used in a way that even science fiction writers might have problems with - a transhistorical, transcultural "community" based solely on where a number of people over thousands of years may have died or been buried. This takes communing with the dead rather too far!

More Red Tory Rubbish

2010-01-29T07:31:00.000-08:00

Leading "Red Tories" Philip Blond and John Milbank were responsible for an utterly bizzare article in yesterday's Guardian (No equality in opportunity 28/1/10) in which they argued that a synthesis of old Tory and traditional left ideas was the only way to achieve a "genuinely egalitarian society". Their response to the National Equality Panel's report was to question the whole basis of "equality of opportunity". According to them the "rhetoric of egalitarian opportunity means that everyone who doesn't succeed is defined as a failure. Such contempt reinforces inequality". But who is it who is defining people as failures in this way? The authors assert this without any argument and then go onto argue the even more bizarre premise that "equality of opportunity is ... wholly synonymous with a market without morals and a meritocracy without merit". They then make weird Platonic appeals to "virtue" as their key concept (but of course they fail to say what they mean by it): "the more we seek to link social and economic prestige with virtue, then the more we can hope for good financial and political leaders possessed of compassion and integrity". A circular argument if ever there was one. But what they fail to remember is that it is precisely those "masters of the .universe" who recently wrecked our economy who are best at linking their own riches - their social and economic prestige - with their own virtue. Indeed this is effectively what "greed is good" actually means in the modern era. The Red Tories, instead of challenging this , actually end up by celebrating "a hierarchy of excellence" which looks uncommonly like Britain's current class structure. I can't understand why anyone takes them seriously!

2010-01-26T06:07:00.000-08:00

Right on target
‘It may be unfashionable to say so, but targets have repeatedly been shown in fact to work’. So says Peter Preston (Guardian 25/1/10 "In defence of box ticking"). So targets and regulations do work in some situations - horror of horrors! Yes of course some targets can introduce perverse incentives (taking the wheels off trolleys and calling them beds, keeping snowed-in schools closed because of Ofsted etc.) Targets also need to capture quality as well as quantity and serious damage can be caused when they don't or when they set one against another. Yes box ticking and bureaucracy can be a pain in the arse but actually it is almost always a great deal better than nothing. Indeed sometimes it is the only sensible way of recording and then describing what you are doing so that you can improve it.

There is such a reaction by the Tories to the notion of regulations and centrally decided targets and the "target driven approach" that we should smell a rat and look for the ideological prejudice that is making such a smell under the floorboards. This suspicion of targets and “box-ticking” has become a central part of the current Zeitgeist. Actually I think it is part of an overall attack on public services as a whole. As Peter Preston points out cutting this kind of red tape is the Tories holy grail (and like the grail it is of course wholly unobtainable). This drive "against bureaucracy" as Preston says comes from a world 'where painless cuts may somehow magically be made as control potters down from Whitehall and nestles in the snug heart of "community"' As he goes on to say: ''nobody meaningful anywhere on the political spectrum dissents from community sanctification these days' (this blog is I hope an honourable exception!) and yet the evidence from a substantial study conducted by the Economic and Social Research Council shows that yes, in fact targets do often work. The recent Nuffield Trust's report showed that where there is more target-setting (England and Wales) NHS services are measurably more effective than they are where such targets are less prevalent (Scotland)

Where targets are sensible and designed to produce strong performance management, measure real quality and promote success they are an indispensable tool. The increasing Tory (and sadly New Labour) rhetoric against central government and the state has as a core project the attempt to get us to deny this and to seek solace in "the community" and local “choice”. Targets are seen as centralised and bureaucratic obstacles to "choice" and "flexibility". But on further analysis much of this choice and flexibility is only for the rich and results in a growing post code lottery for everyone else (which actually is deeply unpopular). One reason the Police don't like keeping records and "would rather be out on the beat" could also be that the data not only shows little that is reassuring about their performance but also pinpoints many of their biases for all to see - differential stop and search across ethnic groups for example. Record keeping confirms that some Police authorities are very much better at clearing up certain types of crime than others. This box ticking provides vital information if good practice is to take root – and in my view is time and money much better spent then Police officers cruising around aimlessly in squad cars or carrying out stop and searches on hundreds of thousands of people resulting in only a few arrests.

As Peter Preston says 'communities aren't much of a help when hard decisions have to be made'. And this is especially the case when “communities” are allowed to make crucial decisions and judgements about their own performance. Prison Officers, Police, newspaper proprietors and bankers all spring to mind as “communities” who seem incapable of sensible self-regulation. Without an external regulating mechanism that has access to real, targeted and accurate information we know how things are bound to turn out and who will end up in charge again! Of course we all would like good services to be provided for local people and we would like them provided equitably and effectively. However, the answer to this is not just radical localism and choice but rather it is targets and standards that can be enforced. Service providers will only work effectively in the long run where there is an active civil society to call them to account and a strong state to regulate them and redistribute resources between them.

Why don't we see the state as "good"

2010-01-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

Tony Judt is quite right (Guardian 9/1/10), over the last 40 years western democracies have forgotten the positive virtues of collective action. "We've lost the ability to talk about the state in positive terms". We have privatised the notion of change and have lost the notion of social solidarity: "This is the second generation of people who can't imagine change except in their own lives, who have no sense of social collective public goods or services, who are just isolated individuals desperately striving to better themselves above everybody else."

I think that a key part of this privatisation process has been the promotion of a spurious and nostalgic sense of "community" as a core organising principle, the primary mode of description for how people associate with each other within the confines of the market. It is only in this attenuated world of "community" (which characteristically rules out social or state action) where any kind of mutuality or cooperation is held to operate. Rather than a dynamic and collective notion of the state and a wider society acting as a redistributive and regulatory check on the worst excesses of individualism, we end up with a quasi-religious intermediate realm of nuclearised and marketised community that acts to discourage real change and social or international solidarity. This is not to try to reinstate a kind of Stalinism. It is merely to point out that local activity based on neighbourhood, locality or "community of interest or identity" is only going to be effective in achieving real change in partnership with an enabling, active and redistributive state. An active and vibrant civil society is a necessary but not sufficient condition for progress. Even if we are no longer "bowling alone" but associating actively with others in our localities and neighbourhoods does not mean that we are doing so in ways that produce positive change. After all this is what a gang does - associating with others is as likely to be destructive or ineffectual as it is to be constructive and progressive. It is the social purpose of these associations - what they are for, what they do - that make them productive or not. Without a supportive state many forms of association will either continue to exhibit a desire to keep things just as they are or exhibit all the worst aspects of powerless oppositionalism.

Community Philosophy?

2009-12-13T09:43:00.000-08:00

The distinguished philosopher of language J.L.Austin remarked that “words are not …… facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realise their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers” (Papers 182). If ever there was a word that this statement is true of it is the word “community”. The concept of community is used almost ubiquitously in all areas of social policy as if by its very use alone, we are saying something true and good about the world. Using Austin’s theories of speech acts and perlocutionary utterances to analyse common uses of the term community shows up many fruitful ways of analysing the concept and confirms many of the concerns about both its ubiquity and its confusedness which I have expressed elsewhere in this blog.

In Austin’s view, language is not merely a passive way of describing or picturing a given reality, but rather a particular practice that invents and affects those realities. The words we use need to be seen as containing not just descriptive or propositional content (which can be either true or false) but also other elements designed to signify different types of activity and to affect and influence the listener. In his famous book How to do Things with Words, Austin outlined his theory of speech acts and the notion of performative language - in which to say something is to do something. He concludes that most utterances are actually performative rather than propositional in nature. When people say or write things like ‘I promise that x’ or ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ they are not attempting to describe the world let alone make true or false statements about it. They are in fact creating new social realities within a defined social context. In the first case by promising something and in the second case by carrying out the action of marrying two people. According to Austin, once “we realise that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly be any longer a possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act” (139)

So what are we doing when we use the term community so promiscuously? In 1955 Hillery identified at least 94 different definitions of the term community in the literature over the previous sixty years. He then attempted to distil these down and concluded that four common components occurred in 69 of these cases: people, common ties, social interaction and place and that the only component common to all 94 was people. Other more recent commentators and researchers (Hamman 2000; Poplin 1979) have also tried to desperately shoehorn all possible definitions of the term community back into these four core components.

Community Capers (an “online community” concerned with “community building”) thinks that this performance will allow us to “get a snapshot of community that might be used to begin recognising it” (http://communitycapers.wordpress.co/tag/definition/) Having conjured up this trick (ask the question you want so as to get the answer that you want), Community Capers then spends significant time and effort trying to define the term “virtual community” – which one might have thought veered towards being oxymoronic given their previous prioritisation of people, common ties, social interaction and place. Many paragraphs are then spent discussing how you might tell when online activity could be seen to have become a "proper virtual community". Howard Rheingold, the man who coined the term "virtual community" (and later suggested that that might have been a mistake!) offered in his book, The Virtual Community, the following definition "Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." From a philosophical point of view this definition is complete rubbish. The definition has at its heart a hidden circularity: What makes these discussions "long enough"? What is this "sufficient human feeling" and how much of it do you really need? The answer is that this is what "community" does! In seeking to define one highly nebulous concept (the community bit not the virtual bit) he just substitutes a whole line of even more indefinable and unquantifiable concepts and thinks he has done something useful.

Community Capers’ attempts to set out a similarly strange kind of reductive definition ("it's about people") is blown apart just by looking at the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s current definition of the term community: "In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment". Well it is clear that however these organisms may be interacting and sharing their environment they are not necessarily people. The word has already escaped from the clutches of the defining characteristic (people) that was supposed to have given it its meaning. This is what the concept of community does - like other words of power it is constantly shapeshifting! Community Capers' whole approach is redolent of the old argument (connected with the problems of inductive logic and falsifiability) that “all swans are white” (well they were until a black species of swan was discovered in Australasia!)

The trouble with the word "community" is that it can be applied like whitewash across so many areas of human activity that it is constantly over-reaching any attempt to give it a finite and final definition. The only question then is: why do so many people waste so much time trying to find an essentialist or reductionist denotation of community – “a snapshot so that we can recognise it again”? The only sensible approach is to look at the way the term is actually used. We can do this by looking at the way in which the word is used in the “language games” where it frequently occurs, rather than seeking its meaning by trying to find the thing out there that it pretends to refer to. We are then more likely to consider asking interesting and useful questions of particular uses of the term such as:
‘is this way of using the word community helpful?’
‘does it actually explain or help us explore social reality in the way we hoped (or does it merely confuse us even more then we were before)?’
‘What ideological and perlocutionary effects does this use of the term have in this particular context?’
‘why do we want to use the term “community” here, rather than another less emotive and ideological concepts like “locality”, “social group”, etc.’

In short we will be in charge of our usage of the term rather than it fooling and befuddling us into thinking that we are saying something more than we actually are.

The problem is that the use of the term community shares many characteristics with those other difficult and powerful human ideas such as “God” and “Love”. There is something inherently indefinable about these terms – indeed it is this characteristic that gives them their power - and the term “community” is no different in this respect. This is because (to use Austin’s approach) these words are not primarily descriptive (even if their grammar makes it look as though they are) but actually performative. They are usually used consciously or unconsciously to do something perlocutionary, to achieve an effect, intended or not, that is achieved in the listener by the speaker’s utterance of the word – to sanctify, to reassure, to persuade, to inspire etc. In short the use of the term is used successfully (Austin calls this a “felicitous” use) not when it describes something but when it achieves an appropriate psychological or even ideological effect – some object is sanctified, someone is reassured or persuaded or inspired etc.

Lets go back to JL Austin here: “Why should it not be the whole function of a word to denote many things?" (Austin papers 38). Quite so – and this is definitely true of “community”. However I suspect that the 94 different definitions or uses of the term community are rather more than even JL Austin would have countenanced (leaving alone those newer definitions that have surfaced more recently or were left out of the original search). This is because we are barking up the wrong tree. What we need to do is to analyse how and why the word “community” is used (or abused) in certain real contexts to convey powerful feelings about the world (and to try to get others to share them). Instead we prefer to pretend that by including the term community in a sentence we are actually adding something propositional that can be true or false. We use the word community to sanctify our talk about various aspects of society. The grammar of the word makes it look as though it contributes a weighty, scientific, descriptive content to the sentences in which we use it. In fact there is usally nothing in reality that actually corresponds to this. For example consider the difference between the two sentences:

The community in St Albans is against the building of a new Tesco superstore
People in St Albans are against the building of a new Tesco superstore

Why is there always a tendency, especially in campaign or political literature to use the first formulation rather than the second one? The answer is that the “grammar” of the term community makes it sound as though we are saying something general, unanimous and absolute rather than piece meal and particular. Unlike the first sentence, the second feels more tentative and less absolute – the residents, the people, may not all agree and we could go and ask a number of them. The “grammar” of the sentence makes us want to ask the question: “Is it most residents or all of the residents?” How does one actually ask “the community”? (We can only ask people) The first sentence carries with it the presupposition that there is some superordinate thing called a community in St Albans that is greater than and somehow different from (or “above”) the people who actually live there.

Central to my argument then is that we are allowing ourselves to be bamboozled and browbeaten by our own confused use of the term community. We think that by using it we are actually describing something important in the real world. In fact what we are doing is using language to do something which we are usually unaware of – to convey powerful ideological views of the world which are more about how we want it to be rather than how it really is. We have confused words for the World. We have managed to fool ourselves with our own conjuring trick.

Red Tories - Tall Stories

2009-11-30T13:32:00.000-08:00

Recently there have been some weird new philosophical rumblings emanating from a group that have been dubbed “Red Tories”. This is the group that has been behind David Cameron’s oxymoronic declaration that what we need is “a small state but a big society”. An analysis of their arguments shows why the ubiquitous use of “community” as the primary and central (but ultimately unanalysed) explanatory concept can be so dangerous. As John Harris points out: “Red Toryism boils down to a slightly utopian belief in the revival of community spirit”. Yet again the nostalgia for “community spirit” raises its head as a kind of undefinable but utopian end-in-itself. The leading exponent of Red Toryism, Philip Blond, sees himself as providing a critique of modern secularism as well as the modern state. He writes in praise of the “medieval network of a predominantly horizontal communal and social order, exemplified by the church but also including guilds and agrarian communities organised around differential property relationships”. Sadly, he believes, this ideal condition of society was destroyed by the rise of powerful monarchs and states. Another way of characterising his beliefs would be: “In Praise of Feudalism” or (as the Independent 25/11/09) notes: “Back to the Middle Ages”. This is nostalgia taken much too far!

Blond believes that Labour’s post war welfare state destroyed the key components of working class “community cohesion” or mutualism – cooperatives, guilds, friendly societies etc. He believes that a fatal concoction of the permissive society and Thatcherism then took this process of atomisation even further, resulting in the “broken Britain” that the Tories love to trumpet at every opportunity (whilst they are still in opposition). His “radical communitarian traditionalist conservatism” thus rails against both the state and market monopolies: “Monopoly capitalism needs the state to disempower ordinary people’s institutions and lives……..We are creating an oligarchical elite structure where moneyed elites, the elites of industry cohabit with political elites and they move in each other’s regimes and spaces. So we have now produced what I would call a market state, and the market state really just exists for the benefit of those at the top”

It is impossible not to have some sympathy with his notion that individualistic capitalism is a central part of the problem. Thatcherism did smash up much of the working class social solidarity that she hated so fervently as the “enemy within”. However Blond’s argument presupposes that it is “both the unlimited state and the unrestrained market that have destroyed civil society”. But there is no evidence that civil society has been destroyed even if some parts of it have been under attack from both new Labour and Thatcherism before it. Civil society in Britain is a much more resilient animal then he tries to pretend. Indeed some have pointed out that it is probably more developed here in the UK than almost anywhere else in the world. Arguably under New Labour the state has shrunk considerably as large sections of it have been privatised or “voluntarised” by the growing encroachment of charities and social enterprises (which are usually understood to be a core part of civil society). The notion that the state has been “unlimited” is quite bizarre and sounds as though he believes we live in some kind of Stalinist state. The real issue is surely that the state has never been used to the full extent of its capacity to alleviate poverty or deliver opportunity. More egalitarian Scandinavian societies have made much greater attempts to redistribute wealth through direct taxation and these have been at least partly successful in bringing down levels of inequality. Surely he would not accuse societies like Sweden of being totalitarian?

Blond’s reification (even fetishisation) of community is perhaps preferable to the small state Thatcherite individualism that George Osborne seems to favour. However, it will never provide an answer to the real issues of power, poverty and inequality that are the actual causes of social breakdown. Attempts to bring in (or bring back) a world characterised by radical localism and community self-help are a classic case of mistaking a set of tactics (albeit sometimes useful ones) for an overall strategy. Such a “community centred” approach can only make any sense within a strong but flexible state system which has the power to regulate and redistribute – something which of course the Tories claim to hate. If there is to be only a shrunken and powerless state; if there are to be no effective overarching ties of social solidarity and common purpose beyond these localities, then we are back again at that old Thatcherite notion that “there is no such thing as society” by a different route. Instead of empowering localities, neighbourhoods or even “communities” within our most deprived cities, we would be setting up warring ghettos, left to 'stew in their own juice'. We would end up with a kind of medieval war between the cities and the countryside allied with a parochialism and communalism that really did characterise the worst of the Middle Ages.

Unacknowledged nostalgia can be a fatal component in bad social planning. This is another case where it is worth 'being careful what you wish for'. The notion of localism can so easily descend into parochialism just as community can descend into communalism – a war of tribe against tribe or even all against all. Only active and viable state institutions (in partnership with civil society) can provide a counterbalance and check on this tendency as well as providing the kind of material and monetary support for some of the most deprived neighbourhoods – without which they would collapse in ways that could bring everything else down with them. Parts of the US are already in this kind of catastrophic tailspin. Blond’s good intentions (if such they are) would only make this hell more likely to happen here in the UK. Only the state is able to regulate and redistribute resources away from the richest to some of the poorest areas. Without such strategic intervention a very different and even more dangerous atomisation would break out between different neighbourhoods or localities setting those with less resources in direct competition with each other as well as the richer ones. In this sense Blond’s approach is akin to a kind of communitarian anarchism.

It is no surprise that the key arguments underpinning Blond’s Red Toryism are more theological than logical. He is an unusual convert from Catholicism to the Church of England and religion is at the root of all his political beliefs – including his opposition to abortion in all but extreme cases and his rather stuffy critique of permissiveness.

The Anglican notion of communion can often be seen as underlying the English concept of 'community' even if it is sometimes in heavy disguise. Behind the use of the term community one can often discern a slightly desperate nostalgic desire for a supposedly authentic Englishness that has disappeared forever. Thankfully, life in modern multicultural Britain can no longer be reduced to or understood as Anglican parishes operating as they did in Edwardian times – “the rich man at his portal, the poor man at his gate – this is the way God made them, each to his own estate”. Everyone knew his (sic) place in this classless society beloved of John Major: “ the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist'.”

This notion of community is a like a fetish – the original power of the institution has disappeared but the tired old symbol is still wheeled out on special occasions to throw a veneer of importance and numinosity over proceedings. This type of communitarianism is the philosophical equivalent of Morris dancing or ‘Scouting for Boys’. It is a way of avoiding the real issues of inequality, discrimination, class and exclusion that continue to scar our society. It is certainly not the kind of theoretical background on which one might base any sort of sensible social policy towards dealing with the serious issues that actually face us in the real world.

Thankfully Cameron is no more likely to be able to get his party to adopt this approach then Blair was able to carry into power the similarly dangerous “communitarianism” that surfaced at the same early stage of his political trajectory.

Cameron’s “Big Society” the next Big Lie

2009-11-11T11:01:00.000-08:00

Now lets get this right. It is not the Big State that has made inequality worse (as David Cameron suggests in his creepy Guardian article today). Actually it was New Labour’s refusal to use the state to make any serious redistribution of wealth away from the rich to the less well off that effectively stymied equality and social mobility during its term of office. Any attempt by the Tories to try and cut the role of the State even further than New Labour managed will hugely increase inequalities. Selfishness and individualism did not start in 1997 (as Cameron seems to claim), rather it continued under New Labour after Thatcherism had comprehensively and deliberately blown most elements of social solidarity apart. In this sense Blairism was Thatcherism by other means - with no serious attempts to undermine status, privilege and ever growing income differentials. Sadly the few good things that they did do (minimum wage, tax credits etc.) they seemed almost embarrassed about.
Cameron’s suggestion that it is the overweening state that has promoted selfishness and individualism is simply laughable. The real culprit lies in the realm of the market not the State. For Cameron to cite “the Spirit Level” (which suggests that the fairest societies are the happiest) is either breathtaking cynicism or complete naivety.
Sadly, Labour’s time in office was also characterised by outrageous attacks on “the undeserving poor” - asylum seekers, migrants, welfare benefits claimants and council tenants. At times this looked more like a war on the poor rather than a war on poverty. It is Labour’s catastrophic failure in this respect that has allowed Cameron to make his audacious attack on them from the left. As the Guardian’s leader says, Cameron is putting forward “a bold argument with dangerous consequences”.
An incoming Cameron Government will be able to use the fashionable rhetoric of community to undermine the state (and society) even more than New Labour has managed. As Michael White observes, whilst this is not Thatcherism in full cry it is “a more emollient formula for promoting local and individual responsibility, private and voluntary sector activity and shrinking big government”
There is a desperate need for leaders in the voluntary sector to start a discussion about whether we want to carry on colluding with this process under an incoming Tory regime. Do we want to be merely a mechanism for further undermining the State? Do we want to be used as a smokescreen disguising huge cuts to public services with a thin veneer of voluntarism, community and philanthropy? Do we want to bid for every contract going – charities running prisons and asylum detention centres, voluntary groups forcing people with disabilities off benefits etc.? Are we really prepared to so easily forego our critical and campaigning missions to rush headlong into the market?
If we continue to collude in this process then what will happen to the people (“the communities”) we were actually set up to serve? As Kate Green of Child Poverty Action Group quite rightly says: “all of society has a responsibility to end child poverty and charities have a role to play in alleviating the pain of poverty, but only governments can redistribute to the poorest”

"certain communities" to be targeted for surveillance

2009-11-06T05:49:00.000-08:00

The recent speech by Nu Labour insider Kim Howells was truly worrying. Using the term "certain communities" (we know who you are and where you live!), Howells was able to get away with a deeply racist and dangerous suggestion that "the Muslim Community" should be targeted for a far more intrusive level of surveillance at the same time as we should pull troops out of Afghanistan. Rather than being clear that he meant to target Muslims he was able to use the term "community" to disguise any such suggestion. In doing so he has taken the (ab)use of the term community to new ideological depths. The term community is dangerous because it can so easily be used - as here - to mean much more (or conversely, sometimes much less) than it might seem at first sight. As Rizwaan Sabir says in the Guardian: 'at a certain point, turning "certain communities" into terror suspects becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy'

Polly Toynbee sums up the danger of community nostalgia

2009-11-01T08:21:00.000-08:00

Near the beginning of her book "Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain" (published in 2003), Polly Toynbee describes the "Estate" that she lived on whilst writing the book:
"The only place to be was inside the safe familiar, private space of your own flat. That's how it felt; safe up here looking out, but with a desert down below to cross to get to the streets and the bus stops of the outside world. Estates are curious places, locking the poor out of sight, their housing not arranged in streets like everyone else's. These were once architects' little utopias, designer fantasies of the good comunity life, fatally turned inwards upon themselves instead of outwards to join the bustling world beyond, little Alcatrazes remote from the swirling urban streets outside".
There are few better descriptions of the many disasters of post War local authority planning than that these estates started off as "little utopias, designer fantasies of the good community life".
Here again, the way in which the concept of community has been used can be positively dangerous - whether in architecture, town planning, youth and social services, race relations or social policy.
Later on in the book she also has a go at social capital/community cohesion approaches to regeneration:
"This target for community involvement struck me as an impertinence. 75% of the people must feel involved in this community? How and Why? It is strange that it is always the people with fewest resources, struggling hardest against the odds who are the ones who are expected to galvanise themselves into heroic acts of citizenship .... there is a curiously Victorian notion that 'community' activity is a good of its own or at least that it is good for the poor on council estates".
As I have said elsewhere, noone is likely to accuse Tony or Cherie Blair in Millionaires Row in Mayfair of having "low social capital" because they haven't been round to borrow sugar from their neighbours.

continuing community conundrums

2009-10-27T10:02:00.001-07:00

In an otherwise excellent letter in today's Guardian, Veronica Ward comments on Deborah Orr's argument that inequalities of income complicate the picture of diversity. She uses the word "community" three times in the letter and each time it would make much more sense if she hadn't. Sadly the letter is a great example of how the self-important (and yet ultimately empty) term leads us astray and makes us think we are saying something much more meaningful than we actually are. The letter is worth quoting at length as it rightly sets out how appalling everyday representations of the working class have become:
"what is shocking is the lengths some communities will go to ensure they are cut off from communities not comfortably like theirs. In education, particularly, they ensure that their children do not meet their counterparts on lower incomes. This avoidance and stereotyping of large sections of our community .... is insidious and shocking". This is absolutely right - but why has she felt the need to use the c word not once but three times here? What does it add? It would have been just as clear if she had used the term "people" instead of the first two uses of the term "communities". This would at least make it clear that this self-segregation is both potentially an individual as well as a collective choice.
Had she used the term"society" rather than "community" it would have been clear that this is actually a societal problem rather than one "within sections of a community" (whatever that means)

The language of community has gone on holiday

2009-10-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein notes that "Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday". Our frequent (ab)use of the term "community" seems to me to be a case of language being on permanent vacation or even a kind of "gardening leave". We become bewitched by our own misuse of the language of community in ways that I have tried to describe in this blogspot. At one and the same time it is both "cosy" and unquestioned as well as actually being "distancing" and discriminatory. It sounds as though it is an uncomplicated concept that points to a real set of social relations when in fact it is the intellectual equivalent of blancmange. It conveys a special, even "unified and holy" state of affairs even when it is actually only being used to describe the people who live in a particular area or who share a common and often arbitrary characteristic (such as ethnic background, type of profession - "the business community", hobby - "the golfing community" or disability - the"deaf community"). It is often used where it literally doesn't exist "a gated community", a "virtual community", "the Islington community" etc. In these instances almost any other term is less mystificatory - why can't we just say "business people", "golfers", "deaf people", "Islington people" etc.?

Not surprisingly any attempt to construct a sensible social policy based on this woolly nonsense(especially around "cohesion" or "regeneration") is doomed to both failure and incoherence.

"Community" is neither cohesive or coherent. There is a sense in which the concept is highly "adhesive" - it sticks around and cannot be got rid of . Like a bad penny it keeps turning up. It has a sort of cloying desperation when it is used by politicians. It gets stuck in almost any inappropriate situation so that it ends up becoming oxymoronic or tautologous. It is abit like getting chewing gum in your hair - the more you try and get rid of it the more tangled it gets - best to chop it off!

Confucius was once asked how he would deal with a particular problem for the administration of his government and instead of replying at the level of social policy he called instead for a "rectification of names" - a clarification of the langauge used to describe the situation: "If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone. If this remains undone, morals and art (ie society) will deteriorate. If justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above all." (Analects 13.3).

Well Amen to that!

Lets try and avoid this dangerous and ideologically loaded concept of community where we can, rather than bring it into every possible conversation as if to bless and sanctify the proceedings. Otherwise we are going to keep spinning around like Alice:

"Then you should say what you mean" the March Hare went on.
"I do!", Alice hastily replied "at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing you know"
"Not the same a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why you might as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'Ieat what I see'!" (Lewis Carroll)

Mobility and community

2009-10-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

In an excellent article (http://progressonline.org.uk/Magazine/article.asp?a=4777) about the difference between a conservative and a social democratic concept of social mobility, Karen Buck MP says the following in her first paragraph:

"Beware of concepts that seem, superficially, to have politicial endorsement from across the politicial spectrum. There will be something about that concept that is slippery and hard to pin down. A few years ago the cry went up for "community". The word became the subject of endless seminars and thinktank reports, was talked about with great erudition by Amitai Etzioni and Robert Puttnam, was deemed to be the holy grail for society, and specifically as an object behind various regeneration schemes ('New Deal for Communities') and then - vanished! Where today , is the rigorous new thinking, the big money and the government programmes geared towards community building? Nowhere, and primarily because, the closer we got, the less we could define a common meaning, still less a shared approach to achieving it. Did we want communities of people 'like us', familiar with a shared culture and history? Did we mean something that bound together those very different cultures, values and lifestyles? Did we want more mobility? Or less? Did we not, perhaps, want women the traditional nurturers of family and neighbourhood, back in the home to carry on that now neglected task?"

This is absolutely right and is music to my ears! In particular she points to a growing feminist critique of the notion of community which hides a deeply reactionary view of women's role in society. She also hints at the fact that community can be used as a concept that inhibits mobility and the breaking down of inequalities. Because of course talk of community heads us off from talking about economic inequalities (class) and makes us think we are describing a static structure rather than a dynamic process that is open to change. Right on the money!

Charity and punishment

2009-09-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

It is extraordinary and deeply troubling that some charities are so desperate to enter the market that they are prepared to run prisons. (Charity and Punishment, Guardian 4/9/09). I fail to see how punishment and incarceration could ever be a viable charitable object – as Libby Brooks says this is “a troubling step too far”. Such a move distorts any sensible meaning of the term charity.
I have other concerns too. If there is no part of the public or private sector that charities might not consider operating in, then in effect their claim to special treatment as charities starts to disappear. Some of the advantages that charities have hitherto rightly enjoyed in terms of tax and gift aid then start to look like unfair distortions of the market. Why should some types of agency competing in this open market have such unfair advantages if actually they are following the money like everyone else? The whole rationale for such advantages start to disappear when charities are so keen to sacrifice their mission for the market. This starts to endanger the whole notion of charity status itself. This is why the Charity Commission must take a stand on this issue and I urge them to rule that incarceration and punishment that are core aspects of any bid to run prisons should not be subsidised by an organisation’s charitable status.

Irony is dead! - Blair says unrestrained riches are bad whilst sunning on a yacht

2009-09-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

So according to Tony Blair "without God's Truth at its centre, no community can fulfil its potential." The pursuit of maximum short term profit without proper regard to the communal good is, he says "a mistake and leads to neither profit nor good". If this is so than just where was he when his Government were making it clear that they "had no problems with people getting filthy rich"? Why was his government presiding over a continuing deregulation of the banking sector that nearly led to economic meltdown?
With his family circumstances now almost a byword for acquisitiveness this is taking his recent Catholic conversion much to far. When he finally appears as a penniless mendicant in sackcloth and ashes we might just believe him. No, after Iraq, probably not even then!
Interestingly as part of this "analysis" he distinguishes two different senses of the word community: "one to distinguish it from government, to emphasise civil society ... the other is just to describe the general community of public opinion". Both of these attempts at definition are interesting but ultimately facile. The former because it shows how in his mind the discourse around "community" is deliberately posed as being against government and the state and can then be used as a stick to beat public provision - as part of a discourse that pushes privatisation and is prepared to use the "voluntary and community sector" as a smokescreen or accomplice in this process - classic New Labour.
The notion that public opinion is itself a community sucks any possible meaning out of the word that it ever claimed to have in the first place.
And here he is making this humble submission whilst holidaying on a millionare's yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean!

2009-08-27T00:47:00.000-07:00

Way down in the hole

Now I’ve heard it all! The Tories quoting the Wire as their authority in arguing that British society is “broken” is just fabulous. Just where has Chris Grayling been if he thinks that anywhere in the UK approximates to life (and death) in the projects in West Baltimore? He has of course missed the whole point of the show whose central point is that the so called “War on Drugs” is corrupting and defiling US inner cities from the top to the bottom. Sadly this is a thesis that the Tories are unlikely to put their name to. Actually the Wire is a more sensible metaphor for where the Tories might take us if/when they come to power. If they continue to push their selfish and privatised view of society on us and increase even further the gap between those who have and those who have not then something like the Hobbesian world of Baltimore with its war of all against all could come to pass. Lets keep this devil way down in the hole

2009-08-03T02:57:00.001-07:00

Giles Fraser on this morning's Thought for the Day (Today Radio 4) commented on the Catholic church's rather silly condemnation of social networking sites like Facebook and My Space. He introduced an interesting distinction between what he called "thick" communities and "thin" communities. Noting that the type of community prioritised in the Church and government's thinking is "thick" community - highly homogenous and exclusive "congregations"- he explicitly compared these to a rural village communiuty with a pub and a church where the village worships together. He saw cities as places with a thinner notion of community but where a much wider and more diverse population could still fit in, find their place and feel at home. Quite rightly he highlighted the need for both types of interaction with virtual communities and social networking sites being vital as part of the thinner type of interaction especially for those who feel excluded or who seek to interact with others in ways that do not centre on geograhical space or "neighbourhood" but rather on other facets of people's identities.

2009-06-15T05:04:00.000-07:00

As Libby Brooks said in last weeks Guardian (1/6/09): “It is hard to decide what to object to most in the draft welfare reform bill. Perhaps it should be the clause allowing for the abolition of the fundamental state safety net of income support, or the privatisation of back-to-work services that will benefit only shareholders. Maybe it's the requirement that single parents with children as young as three should be available for "work-related activity" or face sanctions, with the adequacy of childcare provision to be judged by a jobcentre adviser. Others might choose the piloting of "work for your benefits" schemes, which will undercut the minimum wage, offering as little as £1.73 an hour to claimants who have been unemployed for more than two years.”
Brooks is right that this is an appalling attack on what remains of the benefits system at precisely a time when there are less and less jobs to bully claimants into. One might have thought that the Labour Party would still have some residual pride in its creation of the welfare state. However its attacks on legal aid and welfare benefits betray New Labour as a very different kind of animal to the traditional Labour Party of the 20th Century. Now that the architect of the draft Bill, James Purnell, has left the Department of Work and Pensions under such unhappy circumstances, we might have hoped that his successor Yvette Cooper might find more useful things to do with her time. No such luck – there is really no difference between Blairites and Brownites in their shared desire to destroy (or reform as they tend to call it) key elements of the welfare state.

2009-06-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

So here we have Nick Griffin using the old nostalgia about community to bolster his racist arguments (interview with the Independent 14/6/09). More worrying still he happily quotes Kate Gavron's book the New East End in support of these views. This confirms my earlier arguments that this book with its nostalgic and communitarian perspective would do nothing but give ammunition for racists (see previous posts):
"Historically, in the 1970s I spent a lot of time in the old east end with the old community, and it was a wonderful place: poor, rough and ready but extraordinarily hospitable and really good people with an identity of their own, most of those people, some of them are still there, and according to that book, the new east end by Katy Gavron, there's an enormous amount of really bitter hostility in the old white east end towards mass immigration they don't even vote for us. They're so alienated by the process they simply don't bother".

2009-06-04T01:08:00.000-07:00

Yes the Poison Dwarf has gone! Hazel Blears the so-called "Minister for Communities" has resigned and with characteristic chutzpah has attempted to project her resignation as an attack on Brown rather than the abject and embarrassing reaction to her expenses involvement that it really is. She says that she wants to return to political activity and community work in the Salford area. God help the people of Salford who have enough problems as it is

2009-06-03T08:34:00.000-07:00

With tomorrow's elections and the feared success for the BNP it is worth thinking about how we might really get to grips with the underlying causes of racism. New Labour has for far too long colluded with Migration Watch and the the Red Top newspapers to blame racist attitudes on immigrants or immigration (Blame the victim - it is always popular!). This is of course because they refuse to take the radical steps to attack poverty and inequality which are the real predictors of racist attitudes. The rise in racism and support for the BNP mirrors the degree to which the Labour party and the wider labour movement has neglected or even betrayed its base by promoting inequality at both extremes of the spectrum - rich and poor. In a brilliant letter to the Guardian in January (5/1/09) Professor Peter Latchford shows how the terms in which we talk about racism often set it out in ways that actually "perpetuate the divisions between groups of people." We tend to "focus on semantic niceties, rather than on the deep rooted fundamentals". The rest of his letter bears being quoted in full:
"We do know this: that being poor is a better predictor of negative attitudes to other groups - including other races - than is being white (or black, or Asian). We know that people who feel unable to influence things in their area are more likely to feel resentful towards people they see as being different from themselves. We know that people who live among, and have friends from, different backgrounds are more likely to feel that society is cohesive. There may well be an issue with the disempowered, isolated and impoverished white working class and their attitudes to immigration, race and integration. But the facts are clear: the cause of the issue is not whiteness, or even immigration - the real challenge to a cohesive society is disempowerment, isolation and impoverishment as experienced by any ethnic group.
To describe the issue as "white working class" may be a necessarily emotive media and political device, but it runs the risk of perpetuating one key myth: the myth that breakdowns in cohesion result principally from differences between races."

Not only is this bang on the money but notice he has said such an important thing without any recourse to the blancmange term "community". Whereas alot of the communitarians (Young, Putnam etc) who love nothing better than to blame the victim would have used the word community in at least two conflicting ways here: the geographical sense - for the "areas" in which people live and the population group ("backgrounds") that they are defined as coming from.

It is worth noting again that community is a word that is seldom used to describe middle class areas or population groups. It is usually used as a subtle way of "othering" particular groups. Frida Pinto the star of Slumdog Millionaires makes this quite clear when talking about her native Mumbai society. "We don't call them slums we call them communities" she says.

2009-05-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

Paul Cotterill has drawn the following quote to my attention:
‘As a political term,community - like freedom, equality and democracy - tends to mean what politicians want it to mean. ‘The community’ is invoked like a muse, to provide political cover, to imply democratic legitimacy, and to sweeten the pill….For socialists, the lack of a clear meaning for the term community is more than semantic. The confusion creates a barrier to devising policies which are in line with our values.’
Very nicely put, but you might be suprised by whom. ……big drum roll……..
Yes,it’s Hazel Blears (2003) Communities in Control: Public services and local socialism (London; Fabian Society).
Thanks Paul!
So why has she and her Department come out with such unadulterated rubbish about "community cohesion" since this quote was written? As she says the terms provides political cover. The cover provided by the term is impossible for New Labour to resist as it allows them to get away with facile discussions that avoid any real challenge at the level of class or inequality. New Labour has become little more than the Mandelson view (which is little different from Thatcherism) that the political and other elites getting filthy rich at the top is a good thing and that any attempt to rein in their wealth is a threat to "enterprise" and thus to us all. This is rubbish as the recent book Spirit Level shows brilliantly.

I'm with Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai (Observer 30/5/09) on this one:
"the elites have become predators, self-serving and only turning to people when they need them. We can never all be equal, but we can ensure that we do not allow excessive poverty or wealth. Inequality breeds insecurity"

Sandi Toksvig says it all

2009-03-29T02:12:00.000-07:00

The writer and broadcaster, Sandi Toksvig who chaired a panel on Gay Icons was quoted in the Guardian (27/3/09) as saying of the "Gay community":
"I sometimes think we're joined together not by our sexuality but other people's reaction to it". As the Guardian put it: she conceded that she was representing a gay community that did not exist, in the same way a straight community did not exist.

2009-02-28T04:09:00.000-08:00

Women Against Fundamentalism have yet again been well ahead of the game in their analysis of the dangers of religious and "faith" involvement in public services and "community cohesion". Their latest summary of the situation could not be bettered:

"In Britain, as elsewhere, there has been a rise in fundamentalism in all religions which has been encouraged by a growing move to define complex and diverse communities solely according to 'faith'. Public funds are increasingly being handed out to religious bodies to provide services to 'their' communities on behalf of local and central government. WAF believes that this increases the power of religious leaders - often self-appointed - to discriminate against women and other groups and to exclude or silence dissidents within their own communities.Women Against Fundamentalism believes that public funds must be administered by accountable, democratically elected representatives and not by religious leaders, self-appointed or otherwise"

The toxic combination of religious orthodoxy and the confused use of the terms "community" and "culture" actually serve to head off and control elements within these population groups who are seen as dissident or difficult. In particular this means women (who might want to campaign against "cultural traditions" such as forced marriages, or honour killings) and sexual and political minorities. WAF traces this approach back to the colonial era:

"In the colonial situation, as in British multiculturalism today, the views of self appointed religious leaders were taken as 'authentic' and appropriate to all sections of the communities they claimed to represent"
For a brilliant analysis of how British colonialism managed to control the restless people's in its African colonies, Michela Wrong's brilliant new book "It's Our Turn to Eat" is a revelation.

2009-02-21T03:06:00.000-08:00

Faith Communities often the problem not the solution

Why is it that New Labour and the Trevor Phillips of this world have got away with the amazing con trick of insisting that Faith and religion are issues that need to be treated the same way as other variables such as gender, class, race, sexual orientation, disability etc? At first sight this looks like it makes sense - after all one can be discriminated against for one's religion just as one can be for these other factors. We know this from Islamophobia and anti-semitism. The problem is that by insisting that Faith Communities should be at the heart of all generic equalities work we are endangering the whole enterprise. The new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights was launched in 2006 under the "leadership" of Trevor Phillips. This body claims to be an organisation "promoting equality issues across the full raft of ethnic, gender, sexual-orientation, disability and other minority interests". Under Clever Trevor this has resulted in equalities work challenging forms of discrimination being forced together with the so-called "Faith Communities". These so-called "Faith communities" are often the most resistant of any section of society to the most basic notions of equality, diversity, women's, LGBT and other minority rights. In fact this is a joke on a massive scale that serves to totally undermine the best of equalities work and involve us all in constant rearguard actions against some of the most obscurantist, fundamentalist and prejudiced individuals and belief systems on the planet!
KEEP FAITH PRIVATE!
If religious groups want to organise across their differences and campaign as such that's fine - but they shouldn't be encouraged to infect the rest of the equalities world with their appeals to their Gods or their Holy Books. These usually make a mockery of the one set of standards that can unite us in this diverse and muddled world - the notion of Human Rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration.

2009-02-21T02:46:00.000-08:00

Nu Labour - Nu Verbiage

Rather than really challenging the many inequalities and the different forms of racism and discrimination that abound in our society, New Labour merely prefers to change the words we are allowed to use to describe them. It wouldn't be so bad if this was just seen by them as the cheap verbal conjuring trick that it is, what's worse is that they manage to con themselves into thinking that by changing the word they have somehow changed the world. I have pointed out elsewhere in this blog how they will use phrases like "social exclusion" so as to avoid having to talk about poverty, "community cohesion" so as to avoid talking about class and discrimination. I have shown in some detail how they use fuzzy but feel good terms like "Community" so as to avoid having to confront the real relations, the real tensions and the real inequalities that scar our society.
Doreen Lawrence points out beautifully today (Guardian "Police failing us still") how Government and the Police have started using the term "diversity" so as to avoid having to talk about race and racism and thus confronting their own complacency on the issue. As she says: "Race is just wiped out of all the vocabulary, they use the word diversity, they seem to be more comfortable with it. I would not say they have given up caring about race, I just feel they believe they have addressed it" . She has rightly identified classic New Labour doublespeak in action!

2009-02-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

Now this is what I might be happy to call "community":

'I am a Woman in Black in Israel...'
Yvonne Deutsch writes
Dear all,
I saw this morning pictures of children from what the sender called 'Gaza Concentration Camp'.

This horror, this cruelty is done in my name, a Jewish Israeli woman living in West Jerusalem.
Israel's crime against humanity in Gaza is done in my name, a feminist peace activist.
These killings are done in the name of my loved ones.
This suffering is caused in the name of my community.
This crime against Palestinian children, women and men in Gaza is done in my name.
I feel deep shame.
I feel pain.
I mourn.
I feel rage.
I feel helplessness.
I am part of an activist community.
My community is active everyday to stop this bloodshed.
My community is active against the occupation for long years My community is active for a just solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict My community acts in solidarity with the Palestinian people My community acknowledges that Palestinian people aspire to live in peace
My community is aware of the violent results of the occupation and the poverty and despair it brings.
My community is cooperating with Palestinians around ecological and economic empowerment projects
My community is active against racism My community is active against poverty and for social justice within Israel My community is active for women's rights
My community is active for solidarity among women My community is Jewish - Palestinian
My community is old and young
My community is active for human rights of the Palestinians My community is active for their economic, social, civil and political rights
My community acknowledges that our own security and well being is connected to the well being of Palestinians and their security and prosperity
My community is active against violence and war.
My community refuses to take part in war and the occupation
My community is active for justice, prosperity, ecological awareness and peace
My community is part of a global feminist peace political movement that links between war and violence against women and sees in them a base of patriarchy.
My community is active to stop bloodshed and cruelty in the service of super powers that combine militaristic, fundamentalist, capitalist and nationalist structures
My community is made of many close and far circles of activism and knowledge
My community is diverse, varied and rich in its colors
My community is of women, men and multi gendered
My community is hetero, lesbian, gay, bi, queer and transgender
My community is local
My community is global

I am a Woman in Black in Israel
The Israeli government is committing crimes against humanity in Gaza.
I feel shame.
I feel rage.
I feel helplessness
We did not stop the evil
We continue to protest in the streets everyday, to appeal to decision makers, to widespread the information, to sign petitions, to send humanitarian aid, to do direct actions, to write letters and distribute leaflets
In the south of Israel where they suffer of counter violence of rockets there are also voices for peace
Our voices are not heard
Our clear and loud voices are silenced
Our voices do not reach our sisters and brothers in Palestine
Our voices do not stop the fire and destruction
We will continue to act and hope.
We will continue to cross imposed patriarchal walls, borders and ghettos
We will continue to hear the cry of Gaza
We will continue to hear the cry of the West Bank
We will also listen to the cry of women and children in Congo, North Uganda, South Sudan, Columbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere
The suffering everywhere is connected and part of the same patriarchal political culture
We are saying out loud NOT IN OUR NAME
We refuse to be enemies
We refuse to take part in oppressive relationships
We will continue to oppose war and militarism
We will continue to create a culture of non violence, justice and peace
We will continue to serve humanity
May we learn and teach that all is one
May we learn and teach that one is all
May we find transformation, justice and healing
May we all live in Peace
May we all live in Joy.
YvonneJerusalem, 8 January 2009

Thanks to Jews for Justice for Palestinians for this

A virtuous "virtual community"?

2009-01-31T13:10:00.000-08:00

I have just started using facebook (or is it using me!) and I admit it is quite addictive - though I wouldn't go so far as to say it is actually a digital or virtual "community". During the recent Israeli attack on Gaza I have started seeing what a powerful campaigning tool it can be. In this respect those of us who tried to campaign against Israeli war crimes on line were almost killed in the rush by thousands of zionist bloggers. Every comment spot was mobbed by hundreds of their volunteers coordinated by GIYUS (Give Israel Your Uncritical Support) a website that directs volunteer bloggers (and it is rumoured) some paid staff towards any Robert Fisk article, Guardian comment spot, independent blog site, BBC discussion forum etc. They organise mass complaints about particular TV or radio programme where any hint of unsupportive coverage raises its head. It is worth going to some of their websites to see how amazingly well organised they are. One of the delights of facebook is that although it is quite open and transparent it is possible to use it to bring together like minded people away from the zionist mob to share views and campaigning news and contacts quickly. The newly launched Friends of Jews for Justice for Palestinians could become a really useful tool if more of us use it regularly. Spiderednews has made key campaign materials available at the touch of a button including unbelievable video coverage of a pro-Israeli demonstration in New York at which zionist demonstrators were calling for Palestinians and other arabs to be wiped out - the zionist final solution to the Palestinian problem. On line petitions and appeals always feel abit irrelevant compared to more active involvement but in fact they are a vital way of starting to mobilise and change opinion. The zionists take them extremely seriously and we must ensure that they don't continue to completely dominate this terrain.

Lets share ideas, views and tactics as to how we can even now start to progress in the vital cyberwars for popular opinion.

2009-01-02T00:54:00.000-08:00

In brief then, the problem with the term "community" as it is often used, is that people appeal to it as an absolute, as an end in itself, as a final justification or an answer to the question "why am I doing this?" or "why should I do this?" (answer :"for the community"). It is this totalising and final sense of the term community that is so dangerous as it allows us to avoid confronting the real struggles that go on in communities and lulls us into a false sense of security - a sense in which we feel we have actually answered a question by using the term rather than merely posed one. Communities can be bad as well as good. They are often non-existent: a "gated community", "the host community", " the ethnic minority community" are good examples of the oxymoronic use of the term.

We need to do some elementary house keeping on our use of such language in this area otherwise we will be beguiled by the dubious ideologies that lie behind many uses of the term - instead of being in charge of and responsible for what we actually mean we will actually mean nothing at all.

2008-11-20T04:25:00.000-08:00

Phil Woolas, New Labour's odious new Immigration Minister bases his borderline racist views on a constant reiteration of the term "community". Woolas was previously "Minister for Communities" during which time he fuelled tabloid headlines by making unsupported remarks about inbreeding causing birth defects in the Pakistani community and calling for the sacking of a Muslim teaching assistant who wanted to wear the Niqab. (This is what New Labour means by "promoting community cohesion")

A quote from Woolas in a recent Guardian article ("You can't come in" Guardian 2, 18/11/08) shows how easy it is for politicians to (mis)use the term community for deeply xenophobic purposes: " A large part of the reason why we had riots and we were targeted by the hard right was because we hadn't talked about it (immigration) enough and we didn't reflect what people in communities were saying and thinking and worrying about. The body politic was cut off from the communities". By "the communities" it is quite clear that he means his white constituents rather than his black ones - though the way he uses the term allows him to avoid saying this. Woolas' pronouncements on race are actually no different from those of Enoch Powell in that they both accept without question that large numbers of white people are being entirely right and sensible to feel threatened by newly arriving refugees and migrants.

Surely a responsible politician (especially one in the position of Immigration Minister) should try to lead opinion rather than just reflecting and reinforcing the dirty and dangerous views of the red top newspapers. The job of an immigration minister is not just to "reflect what people in communities are saying and thinking and worrying about". This is exactly what pandering to racism means!

The End of New Labour

2008-11-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

Jon Cruddas is right that "collective political action and the power of citizenship have been traded in for the ownership society, in which all were assured a small piece of the capitalist dream" (Guardian Nov 1st 2008). This process has taken place just as firmly under New Labour as it did under its original sponsor Margaret Thatcher.

After the recent credit crash this property-owning "stakeholder" democracy is looking incresasingly threadbare. It is important to ask how New Labour managed to take so many followers (who once knew better) down this now bankrupt route. It was not just that collective political action was given up for private "ownership" - an illusory stake in the dream. It was also the case that New Labour was able to use an ultimately empty notion of "community" to substitute for and mask its move away from solidarity, mutuality and collectivity. As Cruddas says the real question is "who will pay for this recession - capital or labour?"

2008-10-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

How about this for a crap argument:
“During adolescence and adulthood, the individual tends to develop a more sophisticated identity, often taking on a role as a leader or follower in groups. If an individual develops the feeling that they belong to a group, and they must help the group they are part of, then they develop a sense of community……If community exists, both freedom and security exist as well. The community then takes on a life of its own, as people become free enough to share and secure enough to get along. The sense of connectedness and formation of social networks comprise what has become known as social capital.”

OK so this is an extract from the Wikipedia definition of “community” but it illustrates all that can go wrong when the phrase is bandied around so freely. “If an individual develops the feeling that they belong to a group then….(etc.)” But what if the group is a gang, a criminal enterprise, a secret jihadi group or a fascist party? Does the author really intend these to be evidence of “the development of a sense of community” on a par with joining a local community centre or volunteering with a local self-help group? Of course not.

The next part of the definition reminds me of what used to be known as “the ontological proof of God” (with whom the notion of “community” shares rather too many characteristics!): “If community exists, both freedom and security exist as well”. Why? This is either a disguised tautology (community just IS freedom - which thus says absolutely nothing) or complete and utter nonsense.

How can we distinguish between the strength of the “sense of connectedness” felt by the average member of the Waffen SS and a member of a local scouts group? Both of them feel strongly (often even messianically) that they are part of a group and that they “must help that group” . Of course we can tell the difference by looking at the purposes of the group but not their sense of or degree of commitment or connectedness to their "community" group.
This is why Putnam’s argument starts to unravel – after all it was precisely his argument that areas with high levels of social capital and involvement in associations lead to more democratic, transparent societies. For Putnam social capital = social trust + associational membership. But associations can be bad (the Camorra, the Mafia, Hizbut Tahrir, the BNP etc) as well as good. Furthermore the degree of trust within these communities or associations has nothing to do with their goodness. Bad or corrupt associations can be hugely damaging to societies as Putnam himself points out in the case of Southern Italy with its numerous Mafia-type groups.

Letki and Evans in their recent study "Social trust and responses to political and economic transformation in East-Centre Europe" throw further doubt on the notion that social trust is necessary for political and economic success: "in countries where citizens positively evaluate the workings of democracy and the market and perceive themseleves as influential, they have less need to rely on networks of informal relations with others than do citizens who live in countries where the state and market institutions are largely inefficient". As Coleman pointed out in his "Foundations of Social Theory": trust is an effect rather than a cause - "trust is a result of an institutional setting, not its source".

2008-10-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Sennet in today's Guardian shows how the American Right has beguiled the working class with two "cultural substitutes" for real change - nationalism and nostalgia. This is also a common device of anti-progressive parties and movements in Europe and a whole gamut of concepts and ways of speaking are employed by them to achieve this effect. The term community could hardly be more dangerous in this respect as it is so often coopted by the Right to signify both of these aspects.

It is in this sense then that unquestioning use of the term "community" is often so dangerous and reactionary. We must move away from the notion that "community" is in itself an unalloyed "good thing". Many reactions to change or to outsiders by "communities" can be deeply xenophobic, parochial and conservative. Community responses to change are as likely to be defensive and dangerous - gangs, exclusive groups or clubs, (the BNP after all calls its activists "Community Champions") as they are to be open and progressive.

As I have argued elsewhere in this blog the term "community" is often used as a disguise for a kind of internal orientalism. "Community" is something applied to them (whether by class or race) rather than us. It actually fetishises difference rather than accentuating areas of reciprocity and mutuality (let alone solidarity). Ted Cantle's approach to the disturbances in a number of Northern towns posed the notion that there are two segregated "communities" (white working class and asian) that have been encouraged (by "multiculturalism") to lead entirely separate lives. Such an analysis presupposes that both of these "communities" are somehow homogenous and of course the very term "community" serves to delineate both this spurious internal "cohesion" and exacerbate the alleged "self segregation" between them

The well known and appalling book "The Arab Mind" which was published in the 1970's is still being used as a training manual by the US army and diplomatic elite in the Midle East. It asserts that Arabs only really recognise overwhelming and awe-inspiring force and this because they are ruled by a fear of shame and dishonour. Such clearly orientalist (indeed racist) conclusions about hundreds of millions of arabs from Morrocco to Sudan and Lebanon to Yemen are quite obviously both suspect and dangerous. They are only different in degree from some of the daily outpourings about Chavs, Muslims, Travellers and other "communities" in the right-wing British press - and sadly to a growing number of academics who ought to know better.

"Community gun"

2008-09-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

The Independent reports on 23rd September that:
'"Community Gun" used in murder after pub row'. A .22 calibre rifle used to kill a Bristol man was hidden in bushes as a "community gun" to use as needed. This gives a whole new meaning to term "community asset"

2008-09-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

Arun Kundnani in his tremendous book "The end of tolerance: racism in 21st Century Britain" sets out the new relationship between the individual and the state better than I have seen it done anywhere else.

If there is a breakdown of society (as Cameron as well as New Labour so often claim) it is because of the ascendancy of a globalised capitalism which fractures the remaining semblance of a welfare state and systematically excludes individuals by creating an underclass who are then blamed for all the ills of society: "the well being of social groups is no longer the responsibility of the state: its responsibility is to maximise the choices available to individuals. Market states engage in a Dutch auction for foreign investment, offering ever-worsening protection for their populations in the name of 'competitiveness'. Public servives shift from welfare provision to a focus on 'enabling' individuals to re-enter the labour market, through 'welfare to work' programmes ....... Welfare rights are diminished while the responsibility of welfare recipients to adapt themselves to market demands is increased... and if markets cannot find a use for an individual, then neither can society. Insecurity and vulnerability are the hallmarks of this new order, in which entire communities can be socially abandoned by the state to poverty, low-level violence and disorder. In Britain, these abandoned communities - whether marked out by race or class - are entirely disenfranchsed by the market-state and can no longer be held together by traditional working-class or immigrant culture. It is the children of this underclass, disdained as 'chavs' and 'hoodies', who are being imprisoned in their thousands under powers to tackle 'anti-social behaviour'.

It is here that we can see why attempts by New Labour and others to make these so-called "communities" cohesive simply miss the point at best and end up blaming the victims at worst. Community development work that (as it so often does) fails to confront the real causes of this fracturing of society ends up with the half baked analyses of "the New East End" where recently arrived migrants and their alleged dependence on a welfare state that preceded and 'was not designed for them' are identified as the cause rather than the result of the problem.

The language of New Labour - substituting "social exclusion" for poverty and setting forward "community cohesion" as a balm for all the (now) unspoken and unmentionable issues of class, racism and economic inequality - may have worked in a time of relative affluence but will no longer wash as we move decisively into a serious recession.

Atlantis revisited

2008-08-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

Ever since the Ancient Greeks lamented the loss of the mythical state of Atlantis, humans have been looking to the past with rosy tinted glasses and indeed "harping back to a golden age". Current discussions of the "broken society" (as Mark Lawson points out in todays Guardian) are riddled with this kind of nostalgia for a utopian past that never actually existed. Much modern sociology and political discourse is permeated with this notion that society and community is declining as we lose contact with the essential values of this perfect past.

It is not just Tory thinking that is riddled with this nostalgia for purity or "community". Michael Young's descriptions of the East End of London are a prime example of this tendency. Far from being a forward looking and emancipatory approach to society his approach harbours a deeply conservative ideology (or even theology) similar to that commonly expressed in the Tory hatred of the "permissive society of the 60s". This approach can easily descend into a disdain for all aspects of modernity and a desire whether in Christianity or Islam for a return to the fundamentals.

At its worst this essentialist yearning for a pure and perfect past becomes the engine driving racism and xenophobia. Indeed it is arguable that in Michael Young's last book, the New East End (which I criticise earlier in the blog) this tendency to blame the new-comer is manifest even in a book which purports to come from a liberal left position.

The notion that there is something inherently modern about current issues like knife or gang crime or "social breakdown" (as it is often called) is arrant nonsense. The notion that poor parenting has only suddenly and recently created a generation of children without moral boundaries shouldn't be able to survive even a cursory reading of Dickens or Dostoeyevsky. Were it not for this desire to decry the hard and contingent facts of the present and to prettify and idealise the past we might actually begin to see more of what is actually going on in the world now. Instead politicians and pundits are busy creating a fantasy world where even nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

The notion set out in Maggie Jackson's book "Distracted: the Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age" is as Mark Lawson points out riddled with this "invocation of a lost, and by insinuation better, society". The internet, emails, iPods and other convenience tools are just this - tools. They can be used do a huge range of things, some positive, some negative, some neutral. The notion that it is these tools that are robbing us of the ability to think, converse, concentrate and create is a confusion of the tools themselves and how we use or abuse them. After all, the Catholic Church said exactly the same about the early printing press. Rather it is how we use them and what we use them for - how we organise and understand their (and our own roles) in society that really matters.

I wonder whether the point of this nostalgia, this lament for "community" is that it is a superbly effective way of diverting our attention. It stops us addressing the real relations of power and privilege that provide a rather more sensible explanation for the way in which different societies actually evolve and develop, whether in positive or negative directions.

2008-06-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

For a fascinating discussion from a Muslim perspective on the notion of community and Ummah (the global Islamic “community”) see the blogsite Indigo Jo for Feb 12 2007 “an attack on the idea of community”. Having said that one of the punchiest posts in response to the discussions was presumably from a non Muslim:

“What is a community but a bunch of people with a common contempt for people who don't share their common delusions or prejudices?”

2008-06-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

John Pitts, the eminent criminologist throws interesting light on the proliferation of youth crime and gang culture (Watching the boys in the bands – Society Guardian 4/6/08). He rightly shows that these developments are actually the result of increasing inequality rather than any fanciful notions of a lack of social capital. Characteristically he abjures cosy talk of a breakdown of communities – indeed he asserts that communities are part of the problem not the solution: “in a society with growing wealth inequality, the disenfranchised are not simply going to lie down and do nothing.” But “who in New Labour dares to say that it requires massive state intervention and may indeed need a redistribution of wealth”? Giving people skills and returning them to the market is not going to work – after all it was the market that caused the problem in the first place. Offered the alternative of pulling in £100,000 a year or more in the crack business or working in McDonalds or even as a lorry driver is hardly an enticing prospect.

The Government’s recurring pledge to “empower” communities to help solve their own gang problems is treated with healthy disdain and as a way of blaming the victim yet again: “I’m not a great fan of community … I think it’s a bad idea. If you live in a community where everybody knows each other, it’s one of the reasons you get shot. The places where I’m doing my research, everybody knows each other. Jesus, that’s part of the problem”. Building social capital is therefore far from the answer and tight nit communities are certainly not the panacea for gang violence that politicians would like to pretend. Pitts argues that the least troublesome places to live – leafy, middle class suburban enclaves – are good places not because of strong community ties but because they are populated by “lightly engaged strangers”.

As Pitts says: “the invocation to community is always about the restoration of … some golden age – but when was that?” Young people who are embedded in the local status and reputation-driven world of gang culture (which sadly gives them more value than they get from the “market”) find it increasingly difficult to get out of their predicament: Pitts tells of interviewing kids who say “I want to do that but I couldn’t round here. I want to step out but can’t”.

Yet again, New Labour’s attempts at answers for these problems lead in entirely the wrong direction because of the way they fetishise this notion of community and seek to avoid any real challenge to the status quo. Inequality and wealth distribution as the real causes are edited out of the picture by virtue of the language of community and cohesion.

2008-05-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

Well I'm sorry to say I told you so! If you want confirmation of just how toxic the notion of "community" can be in the wrong hands, just look at the nine BNP councillors recently elected in Stoke-on-Trent who are using classic "community development" approaches to establish themselves in the area. Says Alby Walker the BNP Group Leader: "the BNP Councillors are good hardworking grassroots councillors who are real community champions". according to the Guardian (Labour's lost ground 28/05/08) "community champions" is Walkers favourite piece of vocabulary. Says Michael Tappin, the former Labour Group leader and MEP: "the men and women of the BNP look like your neighbours... they are respectable. It's impossible to demonise them. They wear suits, they look tidy". On the estates where the BNP has established itself, there are to all intents and purposes virtually no black or ethnic minority residents (census returns show just 1.9% from BME communities). Nevertheless in the last twenty years "some say that Stoke's white working class has become and underclass". Labour has effectively abandoned the residents of these areas. As Tappin says: "Labour has not offered people a vision of how to get out of deindustrialisation, how to get its 42,000 residents on benefits back into work. It's put sticking plasters on instead of wholesale reform".

It is the nostalgic and idealised sense of community that has been such a gift for the BNP and that has allowed them a way of "getting into communities". Walker, says the Guardian, "offers a pungent mix of nostalgia and conspiratorial claims about immigrants and Islam". The BNP's most effective leaflet says Walker proudly reads "Hanley 70 years ago" above a montage of photos of the church tower, pottery kilns and smiling housewives. "Is this what you want for our city centre?" its says below, next to a silhouette of mosques and a picture of three women in niqab" etc. etc. Walker confidently expects the BNP to come to power in the city in five years. Tappin from Labour thinks it will be more like three.

It is not easy to see quite how communitarian notions of "bridging social capital" are going to be of any use here - there is virtually no different or minority group to bridge with. What is needed instead is a political camapign that challenges inequalities at national, regional and local level: that seeks to build real and positive solidarity rather than BNP tribalism. A reawakening of the progressive Labour movement of the past might be difficult but at the very least an attempt by local and national Labour to create real jobs allowing for a serious union-based alternative to the currently moribund Labour Party might be the only thing that could succeed. What chance of this under New Labour?

2008-03-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

Community cohesion is a con! They don't even believe in it themselves!

Community cohesion is a deeply ideological notion. It is the soft side of the Government's war on terror. However when New Labour tries to explain what they mean by it - vague notions of trust and social bonding and bridging, "the glue that holds communities together", "meaningful conversations for at least 15 minutes with people of a different ethnic group", community anchors in each neighbourhood etc. - the only thing that becomes clear is their own lack of clarity, coherence and consistency.

If New Labour really believed in what they call these unifying and empowering "social anchors" where people can meet as a "community" then how can we explain their mania for closing such spaces down? In fact the only explanation is that they don't really believe in community cohesion themselves - or at least not to the degree that their own definition of it has a real place in their wider policy direction. Simon Jenkins sees this clearly in his Guardian article ("Closure mania ignores the real cost of axing post offices" 19/3/08) where he points out that "the state's pursuit of shortsighted savings is ripping the heart from communities. No wonder Britain is up in arms". He traces the importance of the rural Post Office directly back to that nostalgia for a vanished world, a "sense of community" which is so quintessentially Middle English: "The village post office evokes the age of Hovis and prison mailbags, of bicycle clips and little red vans. It is the Miss Marple public service, the acceptable face of nationalised industry". Whatever one thinks of his nostalgia for a disappearing world or his views of nationalised industries, he has a point about the contradictory approach of the Government. It is not just post offices. In the past 10 years the number of police stations fell by over 20% and a further 40 are threatened, including 13 in London. Local "community anchors" such as district and cottage hospitals and local schools are disappearing faster than ever before. Changes to legal aid funding are about to decimate local advice agencies such as Law Centre and CABx. As Jenkins says: "there is no way of measuring the impact on communities of thus ripping out their institutional memories and meeting places. It must be savage". The Government, he says, is turning communities "into bleak, car-reliant dormitories, devoid of places of casual association". Local people buy into the notion of community even more than the Government do and are quite capable of using this notion against New Labour who are so confused by where they stand on this all. He notes that: "Hazel Blears, the so-called communities minister, has not lifted a finger in protest. Yet having voted for hospital closures, she herself turned tail and campaigned against them when they hit her Salford constituency".

So much for "places of casual association" as a vital part of community cohesion. There are other even more fundamental inconsistencies which New Labour so hates to have drawn to its attention. Quite how private and religious schools promote community cohesion is a question that half frightens them to death. How such "cohesion" can survive the increases in relative inequlity between the poorest and the richest in our society and the increasing death of social mobility is a question that they refuse to discuss. Of course they are very happy to blame this breakdown of "community cohesion" on too many immigrants who refuse to integrate. And here lies the latent xenophobia and racism that lies at the core of this incoherent and dangerous view of the world.

And above all DON'T MENTION THE WAR. You can level as much bile and blame as you like against violent and fundamentalist muslim jihadis. What you are not allowed to say is that the radicalisation of so many muslims (and the "breakdown of community cohesion") is a direct response to our Foreign policy and the millions of dead, injured and displaced muslims in an illegal war.

2008-02-26T03:44:00.000-08:00

Community Cohesion is completely incoherent (Part 1)

In a recent letter to the Guardian (16/2/08) Hazel Blears, the Minister for State for Communities, revealed the real thrust of the government’s community cohesion policy. Not only is the policy a comprehensive attack on multiculturalism but also on local or national state support or funding for independent self-organisation by black people and BAME organisations. Indeed worse than this, the whole of the so-called community cohesion agenda is a thinly disguised way of blaming migrants and refugees for a break down of trust and cohesion in society and thus blaming the victims rather than the racists who prey on them. Blears’ letter is an attempt to rebut a bizarre “report” by the Royal United Services Institute which argues that undue “deference to multiculturalism undermines the fight against extremism”. Instead of ignoring the RUSI report - the highest level of intellectual respect it deserves – she merely argues that the report is out of date and that the Government has already “fundamentally altered” its approach and asked local authorities to do the same. New Labour has thus already caved in to all of the xenophobic and jingoistic assumptions of the RUSI without so much as an attempt at a defence of the many positive aspects of multiculturalism.

According to Blears, “the government rebalanced its community cohesion strategy more than 18 months ago, ensuring a new focus on promoting shared British values and integration.” She claims that the Government now puts “far greater emphasis on everyone speaking English” (though not enough emphasis to ensure that there is adequate resourcing for English classes where and when they are needed) and calls for an end “to automatic translation of all public information” (as if this was happening anyway). Lastly there are “proposals for new information packs, so all migrants understand and sign up to shared values”. What she does not mention is the Government’s fullscale attack on migrants and asylum seekers. It is not clear quite how community cohesion (whatever this means) is advanced by forbidding asylum seekers from working and starving out those whose cases have failed but who for whatever reason cannot return or be deported to their countries of origin. Given these quite disgusting and morally repugnant “shared values” of the government we should take anything the Secretary of State for Communities says with the equivalent of the Dead Sea’s amount of salt.

But where does this so-called policy of Community Cohesion come from? (Actually I would argue that it is more of a prejudice than a policy). It is based on a poisonous confection of highly questionable social “science” mixed with a nostalgic notion of “communities”, a circular and mystifying definition of “cohesion” and several dashes of thinly disguised racism and xenophobia.

The fullscale attack on multiculturalism first came about as a response to two very different events. First of all the attack by “home grown” Islamist jihadis on London and more latterly Glasgow. Secondly the disturbances in a number of Northern towns between largely Muslim young people and a number of both organised and disorganised white groups and then subsequently the Police. In the immediate aftermath of the disturbances Ted Cantle, without much of an enquiry, wrote his report “Building Cohesive Communities” (2001). As John Rex has rightly shown, Cantle’s report was “a thoroughly ideological analysis of the situation” that lacked the rigour and thoughtfulness of the previous Scarman and MacPherson enquiries. “Housing and Educational segregation is seen as responsible for the breakdown of social or community cohesion and what is sought is an overcoming of segregation, though there is little in the way of detailed recommendations as to how this is to be achieved.”

There were many things that could also have been analysed but Cantle seemed to miss most of them: the behaviour of the Police; an inquiry into the historic inequalities and racism in housing allocations that led to Asian families getting the worst housing in specific areas of the towns (and then being blamed for their own self-segregation!) or any real comment on the growth of the BNP and other racist groupings as a result of a breakdown of trust in local New Labour by the White working class. Instead of this (as the Institute of Race Relations has rightly pointed out) by blaming the Muslim community for their own “self-segregation” and failure to “integrate”, Cantle began the now widely accepted practice of blaming the victim that is known as “Community Cohesion”. In starting out with a complete misunderstanding of the situation in Oldham and other Northern towns it then proceeded to set out a set of entirely wrong-headed conclusions.

In my blog at http://communityconfusions.blogspot.com/ I have pointed out at length the dangers of a nostalgic and idealized notion of community that is another key component of this dangerous new ideology. However there are a number of immediate issues which follow from the discourse of community cohesion that all anti-racists and local activists should now organize against and confront. One of these is the move to cut funding from the more radical and challenging “single issue” community groups – of which Southall Black Sisters is a good example - by arguing that they are divisive and damaging to community cohesion by favouring one group against the majority.

Some of these arguments surface in a recent publication by the Department of Communities and Local Government called “Cohesion Guidance for Funders”. This document claims to be a consultation paper. However it seems clear from Hazel Blear’s letter above that the Government’s direction of travel is already firmly decided whatever we may say in response.

The document is a quite astonishingly vacuous, circular and ultimately dishonest piece of work. The quality of the writing and the lack of any rigour in its argument would only just about be acceptable in a GCSE English exam. The conclusion of the document is that local and national Government should reconsider any funding for groups engaged in “single issue or single identity activity” (by which they mean in particular racial or ethnic groups – though characteristically they don’t say so). By contrast, elsewhere in Government guidance, faith groups (whether single or bridging) seem to become the model of good practice.

The argument (such as it is) is riddled with inconsistencies and breaches two absolutely cardinal rules of logic. Firstly it is completely circular and tautologous. In defining (or actually failing to define) “community cohesion” as “meaningful interaction between people of different backgrounds” it then goes on to assert without any further debate that “we now have strong evidence for how meaningful interaction between people of different backgrounds can directly build cohesion”. This looks at first sight as though it might be saying something important but in logical terms is equivalent to saying cheese = cheese. Again here is another example: “We know that cohesion is higher amongst those who bridge for almost every ethnic group. Analysis of the Citizenship Survey shows that having friends from different backgrounds is a strong predictor of community cohesion, even when other factors are taken into account. Bridging can therefore reinforce cohesion”. This argument follows the form of most tautologies:
C = B (because cohesion is effectively seen as the same thing as bridging)
F = C (Having friends is effectively the same as cohesion)
Therefore B = C (and C = F) Well what a surprise! But this is not an argument it is just a set of interlocking definitions that actually tell us nothing at all and certainly are not enough to allow us to conclude what the Guidelines say in their next sentence:
“For this reason, we are particularly keen for funders to use resources to promote bridging activities wherever appropriate”. The next sentence is even more bizarre: “Those who have bonding social capital are more likely to bridge BUT when this is broken down by ethnicity this only holds for White and Chinese people”. In so far as this makes any sense, how’s this for heavily disguised ethnic stereotyping? It also appears to make social capital a predicate of individuals rather than communities which seems very strange – if I have lots of friends who are like me then do I have lots of bonding social capital? If a high proportion of them are from different ethnic groups from my own then do I have lots of bridging social capital? (I wouldn’t mind knowing how to spend all this capital). Quite what happens if (as is the case) I am married to someone from a different ethnic group and my family includes children of mixed heritage the Lord alone knows!

All this nonsense about bridging and bonding is an explicit reference to the work of Robert Putnam and his notion of bridging and bonding social capital. As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, this notion of “social capital” is increasingly being questioned both in terms of its own effectiveness as an argument and in terms of the underlying assumptions and ideology that it covertly imports.

The second crime that all this commits against elementary logic is the failure to see that correlation is not the same as causality. The notion that in localities where neighbours are less likely to interact with each other (“low social capital”) there may also tend to be a high degree of “social breakdown” (what ever this means) does not necessarily mean that one phenomenon has to be the cause of the other. There are many middle class apartment blocks where the neighbours neither want or need to know each other – one would hardly describe this as leading to social breakdown. Tony and Cherie will hardly be accused of having low social capital if they decide not to visit their new Mayfair neighbours on a regular basis. Indeed I argue elsewhere in this blog that the whole purpose of the discourse about community cohesion is to lead us away from confronting the real causes of social breakdown – poverty, inequality, discrimination, racism etc. This is why discourses about community cohesion spend so much time expressing trite and vacuous truisms about “social glue that binds us together”, “the bonds of trust that make community possible” and the vital importance of having “meaningful conversations of over 15 minutes a week with people of a different ethnic group.” Don’t get me wrong, these things are all to the good in themselves in so far as they make any sense (in the US they would be described as Mom and Apple Pie). However, in terms of explanatory power – let alone the power to help us change the real relations of power and inequality that really do blight our society - they are actually worse than useless.

Southall Black Sisters under threat in the name of "Community Cohesion"

2008-02-25T06:16:00.000-08:00

Ealing Council is threatening to cut funding to SBS in the name of the government's misguided policy of single issue funding and "community cohesion". Here is Pragna Patel's statement:

'It is of great concern to us that across the country, at the local and national level, a number of policies and initiatives are being instituted which will have a profound impact on projects such as ours. We are witness to a redefinition of the notion of equality in the delivery of services. Equality no longer appears to be linked to the needs of the most vulnerable and deprived, (traditionally this has included black and minority communities). Instead it is linked to the view that all services must reflect the needs of the majority community because it has been traditionally ‘excluded’ from regeneration and developmental policies. In other words, equality means providing the same services for everyone. Under this misguided ‘one size fits all’ approach, unequal structural relations based on class, gender and race are ignored. So, for instance in our situation, due in part to budget constraints, Ealing Council has decided that only one service provider of domestic violence is needed and minority women will be able to access it if they wish. The fact that different groups cannot access the same service precisely because of their unequal social context is conveniently ignored. At the same time, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, the implementation of ‘cohesion’ strategies are resulting in the promotion of single faith (Muslim) based groups who are provided the funds to build capacity to address a range of social issues including domestic violence. For a number of reasons, this is an extremely worrying development. It also spells the death knell of secular groups like SBS. Our main concern however it that in faith based groups, social issues will be addressed from within a religious framework which will be disasterous for women’s rights within minority communities. There is already mounting evidence that this is the case. The controversy surrounding the remarks made by the Archbishop recently is yet another indication of where the faith based, cohesion approach will lead. It will close down the options of the most vulnerable in our communities including women and sexual minorities and will violate their fundamental human rights.

As you can see, the current funding threat to SBS is the result of all these often contradictory developments. It is a very worrying development not just for progressive women’s projects but for all progressive and secular groups. We must formulate strategies to challenge these complex but dangerous developments. The fight for the survival of SBS is not just about SBS but about all of us. If we don’t challenge these developments, we will be guilty of colluding in the very structures that seek to silence the most marginalized in our society.’

Council tenant shared flat with dead lodger for eight years

2008-02-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

An inquiry is now underway iin Bristol into how the body of a dead man could lie on a sofa for eight years while an elderly tenant continued to live in the same warden-controlled flat. According to the Guardian "Members of the community said they were shocked by the news and upset by the lack of community spirit in the area". The circumstances that gave rise to this tragic tale are not clarified by this wierd use of the term community. How does one become a "member" of this community and why would one bother if there is so little point - if there is "so little community spirit in the area"? Why did the journalists and local authority not just use the term "local people" or "neighbours" - why this convoluted phrase when there is clearly no community in the area (whatever this means) and therefor clearly no "members" of it either.

The problem with this strange use of language is not just that it makes little sense. In fact it also starts to hint to us that the problem in the area is a lack of community spirit (whatever this is), a lack of "buy in" by local people to "the community", rather than issues around poverty, local mental health and other public services and the effectiveness of the wardens who are presumably expected to prevent such situations. If only we could get "these people" - local tenants - to generate some "social capital", some community spirit then it will all be allright. A former local Labour Councillor said "I do think that these tragic events reflect the lack of community spirit we see in some high rise flat blocks" - here we are again in danger of blaming the victims. I think I prefer the approach of the spokesman for Help the Aged who said: "this was an older person, and the local authority, who have a duty of care, should have responded to concerns from neighbours. The Council has some dificult questions to answer".

2008-02-07T05:52:00.000-08:00

With the publication of the Dept for Communities and Local Government's "Cohesion Guidance for Funders" we see why the Community Cohesion debate is such a dangerous one. The dangerous notion of "community" coupled with the incoherent notion of"social capital" is being used against the more radical grassroots BAME organisations who serve particular "communities" on the grounds that they call attention to difference and discrimination rather than bringing us all together into a cosy samosa-consuming world of "cohesion". I would urge all radical anti-racist and activist groups to challenge these assumptions as part of the consultation on the paper which is open till 26 May. The paper and a form for responses are available online at: http://www.communities.gov.uk/corporate/publications/consultations/

At the same time in the news, Caroline Flint's disgraceful attack on tenants living in social housing is a classic example of the hard-faced, less touchy-feely end of the communitarian approach. Coupled together these two approaches; community cohesion as soft cop and "bash the chavs" as hard cop show the janus face of new Labour. Far from being a challenge to poverty and injustice these are both part of a massive attack on the welfare state, the "undeserving poor" (Council tenants, asylum seekers etc) and many organisations that stand up for them.

Further analysis of the DCLG paper and hopefully more discussion of caroline Flint's outrage will follow on this blog. If ever you want to see the dangers of a communitarian approach this is it. Overall the Government is set fast on an approach that aims to blame the victims, hide the real inequalities, attack the welfare state, downplay racism and other forms of discimination.

2008-02-04T07:05:00.001-08:00

Is there a Community Development community? - Reflections on a Community Development Exchange event in London 31st January 2008

I attended the CDX and Change Up London Regional Consortium’s Workforce Development Sub Group meeting to see if London Community Development workers could clarify for me just what they mean by community.

The meeting confirmed three concerns of mine that can be summed up as follows:
The problem with the term community is that most of the time when we use it we don’t really “mean” it
Community Development workers frequently refer to “the community” when no such community exists
If these real communities did exist then we wouldn’t need community workers.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not against some types of community development work, especially where it sees its purpose as to explain and confront inequalities in the structural, economic and power relations of a locality or a social group. I am, however, left totally mystified by the woolly, hazy and cosy sense in which “the community” gets referred to not as something contested and difficult to achieve but rather as something essential and given. Community development workers often use the term community as though it is an unalloyed good thing. The word is clearly a “word of power” for some activists who seem to use it with a high degree of numinosity. There is an almost religious assumption by activists that appeals to community actually describe reality and that we all understand in some basic, shared and unconscious way what we mean by it.

Participants at the CDX event seemed to find no problem describing the area around the conference venue (the Nags Head area in Islington) or other similar inner urban localities as “the community” when anyone who knows the area knows that they can’t really mean this. There is no one “the community” in this area and it is not even accurate to say there are a number of different “communities” in the locality - the sense in which the different people in the area interact (if at all) is not in any practical way determined by a notion of community or communities.

Community is a very meaningful word. It does indeed have a powerful force and it carries with it an inherent sense of approval in such a way that the use of it bestows a force of approbation on what it purports to describe. In other words using the term “community” is not (just) descriptive it is actually performative. The use of the term (quite literally) commends itself.

Unfortunately “reality out there”, the state of affairs that “community” is normally used to describe (or misdescribe) is usually not in such a good, happy and cohesive state. For the many years I have known the Nags Head area I would never accuse it of this! In this sense then we almost always use the term in such a way that we do not really mean it. “The community” is often the site not of inclusion and coherence but of exclusion, inequality and discrimination. (See a longer discussion posted at http://communityconfusions.blogspot.com/ )

A Community of community workers?

One of the purposes of the day conference was for community workers to discuss the need for better and more standardized training for community development workers in London. Currently there is very little opportunity for community development learning in the capital. Accredited training would allow the discipline to be properly recognized and improve its quality and outcomes as well as its career pathways. It was clear that participants thought that such a conference was long overdue and many were happy to declare that they felt empowered and validated by such a meeting.

An interesting sub text of the meeting was around the issue of whether community development workers employed in and by local authorities should actually be considered sufficiently independent to be considered bona fide activists and therefore eligible to be members of the “network” or “collective”. Criteria for admission to this “community” of community development workers was left open for further discussion, but the strong feeling was given that there was a core type of community activism which had to be independent of local power structures and authorities. Those without this level authenticity must have felt rather excluded from this inner community.

At this point it struck me forcibly that I might be witnessing the birth of a new “community”. This emerging group wanted to define itself more clearly and have some potential say about who is in membership and who isn’t and who has or can get power within the group. All of the other characteristics used by communitarians to define “a community” were also present. Clearly the group allowed its members to gain status and resources and to network so as to develop bonds of reciprocity. There was a palpable shared interest and identity – their profession. As far as I could discern the group’s beliefs it was clear that “community” is a thoroughly good thing and that we all need more of it. Indeed there was a powerful sense at times that the group needed to “commune” more actively and often so as to further the interests of “the community”.

However, I rather expect that the participants would have been somewhat wary of being described as a community. After all, describing a group of people as a community is what they do – they don’t like it so much when it is done to them! Community is something that tends to be ascribed to others rather than oneself – and here lies another danger in the way the term is often used. Community usually has to be something to do with the people “out there” (see above blogspot for a further discussion of this). Indeed it is often used to exoticise and objectify others from a privileged position - a bit like the one that I have myself so arrogantly been adopting in this paper!

Responses from other participants:

From: Simon Vincent [mailto:simon.vincent@barnardos.org.uk] Sent: 04 February 2008 15:29To: Andy Gregg: RE: Community Development Work and Leanring in London - conference notes

Hi Andy

I agree with most (if not all) of your paper. In my experience these kind of points are regularly made in discussions between community workers, but a kind of shorthand assumption that we know what we mean by ‘the community’ tends to take over in gatherings such as last Thursday’s – though personally I didn’t hear much of that. I wouldn’t assume that community workers don’t recognise both the contested nature of many geographical (and identity/interest) ‘communities’, nor that they aren’t aware of the negativities inherent in most if not all real communities. I’m sure most of us bemoan the way the word ‘community’ gets co-opted as a ‘hurrah’ word to tack on to (national and local) government initiatives… and then we go on to do the same! Community is an aspiration rather than a reality, and a dynamic term rather than a static, closed one. As such we need to spell out what this community is that we aspire to. And yes… I think there really is a spiritual/religious dimension to it, as there is to anything that relates to what it means to be fully human!!

All the best
Simon

Hi Simon

Thanks for this. I really liked your statement that community is “an aspiration rather than a reality, and a dynamic term rather than a static, closed one”. The problem is when it is used by communitarians like Tony Blair or Hazel Blears it becomes very much part of the problem rather than the solution

Also I have no problem either with the notion that there is “a spiritual/religious dimension to it, as there is to anything that relates to what it means to be fully human!!” After all, one of the most totalising expressions of a religious community is the Muslim notion of the Ummah – the transnational, transracial "community" of believers. This clearly is a powerful motivating concept (in positive as well as negative ways).

It is clear that the term community does harp back to (or at least is redolent of) the notion of “communion” (cf Schmalenbach). However the baggage carried along with this use is a bit cumbersome when applied to a local authority estate!

All the best

Andy Gregg

So what the hell is "social capital"?

2008-01-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

Many commentators (including me elsewhere in this blog) have called attention to the many ideological and political dangers that this term brings along with it. Quite apart from these uses of the term and the discourses they arise in, it is worth pointing out a number of obvious things about the term itself:
1. It quite literally doesn't exist. Capital as it is usually understood could hardly be a more concrete term meaning money and wealth and the means to acquire more of it as well as other goods and services (especially in "a non-barter system" - Wiktionary). "Social capital" cannot be spent or banked in any normal sense (and if it is used - whatever this means - you can be left with as much or more of it than you had when you started)
2. The word "capital" has a number of key features that the word "social" just cannot be appended to. It is a quite extraordinary example of a category error on a par with "thoughtful cheese" or "colorless green ideas" (whether or not these "sleep furiously")
3. Any useful sense of the term could just as usefully be replaced by the term "solidarity" (except that this is far too political a term for those communitarians who tend to use the term social capital).
4. Whilst solidarity hints at an activity or disposition towards activity as well as situating itself within a discourse of struggle and difference, the term social capital is a reification - a thing word rather than a doing word. It is a concept (if one can even call it that) that encourages merely a passive and apolitical stance.

-----Original Message-----From: Paul Cotterill [mailto:paul.cotterill@usa-is.co.uk] Sent: 03 February 2008 12:11To: Jon Griffith; AGregg@lasa.org.ukCc: ceri.hutton@gmail.comSubject: Re: Fwd: Discussion documentandyI sense in sixth sort of way that you (and don flynn) may be interested in this new article from Natali Letki (she being polish) challenging view that diversity in itself reduces trust in neighbourhoods (in the UK). Also, here's a Putman thing and an American view as ? counterpointsI've not read them yet but will this week sometime. Never mind the detail, I agree with Letki on the basis of the abstract......................

From Jon Griffith:
hello again
A quick skim of Letki and Stolle et al suggests that, not for the first time in this extraordinary 'debate', both are fatally undermined by treating social capital as if it actually exists.
It doesn't, it's a product (in the sense it's referred to here) of Robert Putnam's fevered sociological imagination, and therefore nothing has an effect on it, nor does it have an effect on anything - it's not there.
The only way to bring sanity back into the this type of discussion - about real people living in real places - is to abandon this concept and say what one actually means - black people, white people, behaviour, money, physical resources, how people spend their money, what they do to each other, legal and illegal drugs, illness and health, inequality of wealth, education etc etc, ie all the usual old fashioned contents of political debate.
The idea of social capital, and the discussion of this idea, turns all this into apolitical mush.
I don't understand why so many otherwise intelligent people seem believe in it, but you're right about the Sixth Sensiness of it - as if the discussion is being conducted by people who don't know that they're dead.

2008-01-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

Both Cameron and New Labour exhibit the dangers of communitarian approaches to crime. In a speech in Salford Cameron declared "we are collapsing into an atomised society, stripped of the local bonds of association which help tie us together" - bonding and bridging social capital rear their heads again! (I have described this elsewhere as - it will all be allright if we learn to eat samosas together). There is indeed an atomisation that is ocurring throughout Britain and it is precisely because of the market driven policies that he and his party have always supported. Increasingly we seem to know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Status and self worth is increasingly defined by conspicuous consumption. It is the inequalities of status, power and income that have done so much to breakdown social solidarity ever since Thatcher declared that "there is no such thing as society". The fact that he makes so much of this atomisation without seeing that it is increasing inequality - a serious dose of affluenza - that fuels resentment and anger between different individuals and groups and results in the very demise of the sense of "community" that as a conservative he is so nostalgic for.

John Rentoul argues (Independent on Sunday 20/1/08) that New Labour and the Cameroonians are conducting a rhetorical dutch auction using precisely the nostaligia for an imagined past that we have noted earlier: "it is the human condition to believe that everything was better in the good old days , and to be swayed by plausible rhetoric promising a future that resembles a misremembered past." Of course this is not the human condition at all - but it is a very powerful and dangerous ideology. Just as Blair promised to be "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime" (and then forgot about the second part of this aphorism as society became even more unequal under New Labour), so Cameron is promising far more than could conceivably be delivered by any government. If, as Cameron asserts, the breakdown of society is a consequence of the breakdown of community (which itself is a consequence of the breakdown of the family) it is dificult to see what any government could do about this. Cameron in the same Salford speech is reduced to an appeal to the public to "imagine what it would be like if we had the will and the determination to change. Imagine a society where families are living together rather than being paid by the state to live apart". This imagined community is not just a cheap rhetorical device, it is a powerful and reactionary appeal to a concept which both leads us away from an analysis of what is really going on and simultaneously promotes a full frontal attack on the welfare state which still provides support for the poorest and most deprived people in our unequal society. We are back to blaming the victim again.

Whilst conceding that Labour has done some good things (at the level of tax credits as an alternative to a more thoroughgoing redistributiveattack on poverty), nevertheless Labour's facile promotion of "community cohesion" has spawned what Rentoul calls the "ludicrous situation of setting targets" for (as the Government puts it) "the percentage of people who have meaningful interactions with people from different backgounds" - with 'meaningful interactions' defined by the DCLG as "engaging in conversation or some other form of social interaction" not at work, school or college "at least once a month". This is samosas on a truly industrial scale.

2008-01-19T04:31:00.000-08:00

In an interesting article in the Guardian (Inequality is closing down our concern for others, Friday Jan 18th) Jenni Russell shows how it is that perceived and actual feelings of inequality and lower status in our increasingly stratified society are the real threats to social and community cohesion. "Everyone is aware that as the rewards for reaching the top have grown exponentially, so the penalties for failing have grown more savage. As one Labour-voting father said, inequality eats away at the spirit of community. He feels he can't risk his children falling to the bottom and he wants to use what he has to help them, rather than contributing more to the common pot".

An approach which starts with an analysis of actual capital (rather than a lack of "social capital") would surely be a more fruitful way of analysing the reasons for the breakdown of social solidarity that the communitarians and others spend so much effort decrying. Their attempts to blame the victims (cf the New East End - see previous posts) rather than looking at the real economic causes can all be tracked back to the increasing feeling that they themselves would lose by any concerted attempt by the state to redistribute wealth and get the rich to pay even an equable proportion of their wealth to the common good. Certainly the old Labour notions of redistribution through direct taxation have lost their salience with New Labour's disgraceful panderings to the wealthy. Blair's obsession with his super rich friends and Peter Mandelson's remarks about not giving a damn about people becoming filthy rich are only the most obvious examples of this trend.

What is clear is that the wealth of those at the top does matter to society as it becomes the benchmark by which even the well off middle classes assess their own status. Taxing the rich is important not just for the revenue it would raise for the exchequer.

At the other end of the spectrum Lynsey Hanley's poignant descriptions of how local authority tenants on many large Council estates (Estates - an Intimate History, Granta 2007) are made to feel like social pariahs should have more to tell us about the breakdown of "communities" and the growth in anti-social behaviour than so many of the recent attempts to blame the "undeserving poor" for their own situation. As Hanley says, we must get back to a situation where social housing is seen as an integral part of the national housing stock, and not something that is seen as shameful.

Kids going to school to be bullied for not having the right £100 trainers is not at all just a remark about fashion. Status markers are increasingly important as constitutive of self-respect in our increasingly unequal and marketised society. Local authorities decrying young people "hanging around and causing trouble" on estates where there is nothing for them to do and nowhere to go no longer seem to notice their own inconsistency - when as so often they have allowed youth and community services to atrophy.

Communitarians have noticed that in some European states there is noticeably less social breakdown. Rather than concluding that this is because these are higher taxed and less unequal societies where differentials of abject poverty and super wealth are less marked, some of them (Goodhart et al) have claimed that it is because they have less immigration. There is now a constant and appalling denigration of "chavs" and those living in council accommodation. Attacks on welfare benefit recipients and refugees as scroungers and the attempts to portray an increasing underclass as the authors of their own downfall are all ways to stop us looking clearly at the real relations of power, wealth, status and inequality that are the real causes of social breakdown. Blaming the victims has now become a leading component of social policy.

Reply to Don Flynn

2008-01-15T06:43:00.001-08:00

Hi Don

Thanks for this which was really helpful and most of which I very much agree with. Particularly your views on the role of politics in community action. I think though there is an issue about what sort of politics – the term has been eviscerated down to the notion that politics locally is done by political representatives – Councillors or even community/regeneration workers rather than being “the lynchpin of activity” in the way you describe. This of course is not helped by the tendency of some Councillors and the orthodox political parties that they represent seeing representational politics as somehow more authentic and real (and therefore their own powers as more legitimate) then the involvement that grows from the grassroots through local or interested people’s involvement in what are sometime called “community organizations” . Yes of course such communities do retain the potential to be self-critical and oppositional – at precisely which point they very often lose their funding or are sidelined by the local Town Hall or its inhabitants!

My point was not that we should never use the term “community” but that we should be far more suspicious and alive to our almost ubiquitous use of the term which actually devalues it as a currency. We should use it more judiciously and avoid facile or tautologous uses such as “the local community” when we mean local people or “the black community” when we are thereby lumping together such completely different groups as 3rd generation African Caribbeans, recent arrivals from the Congo or the Horn of Africa and the growing number of mixed race people in the capital. My objection is not to the term “Black” , especially where it is being used (as it was in the 60s and 70s) as a political term, but rather to the notion implied in the term “community” that there is some substrate that unifies and homogenizes black people apart from their collective struggles

2008-01-15T06:39:00.001-08:00

From Don Flynn (Migrants Rights Network)

Thanks for this interesting paper Andy - I hope it's sparked off the discussion you want to see underway.

I entirely agree with your central argument - that the constellation of terms and concepts about 'community' and 'community cohesion' has given rise to a set of apolitical, bureaucratic practices which, at their worst, close down the space which might otherwise exist for actitivites which provide a critical apprasal of the real power structures which underpin concrete, actually existing communities. Where I think you might be creating a hostage to fortune is in centring so much of your criticisms on the word 'community' itself - almost to the point of suggesting that it be jetisoned in favour of another term, or group of terms, which better convey the fluctuating and contingent nature of actually existing communities. The problem is there isn't an obvious candidate for this role, wihch conveys what we know is relevant to this discussion, about those incidents where the features of geograpthical location or sectional interest do generate a sense of 'community' which is reasonably coherent and has the potentional to be self-critical and oppositional. The position of the mining communities in the mid-eighties is a case in point.

For me, the nub of the issue is what you describe as the need to see "the creation of community as an active and political process." The real setback of the last three decades has been the reduction of the capacites which had once existed for critical political appraisal of the processes of community formation. This loss is largely connected to the decline in working class organisation, which had once connected a sense of local otrganic solidarity with a wider consciousness of the place of class in the grand narrative of national, and sometimes international life. The practices generated around labour party and trade union branches, cultural associations (the WEA, etc), even chapels and church halls, had once provided local 'community' leaders with a mirror in which they were required to judge the reflection of the image they were cutting in the wider national, imagined, community of national and international life. The hollowing out of all of these organisations has led to this opportunity for critical reflection being lost, and for the grievances which initially motivated the formation of common identity to become a permanent howl of visceral protect against the lousy hand life had dealt them, with little or no capacity for moving beyond the sence of victimhood and injustice.

This decline in local politics has created the vacuum into which all the bureaucratic, professionalised forces of the social cohesion industry have rushed. Being bureaucratics, and not organically connected to the social forces that have produced dissonnance and tension, they thresh around looking for ways of acquiring traction in the array of problems they spread out before them, and that has tended to mean reifying categories which once where used in a fairly easy fashion into a hardened set of concepts which refer to hardened social facts. The problems for the poor old term 'community' is that it has suffered precisely this fate, and via the mechanistic thinking of functionalist sociology (of which communitarianism is just one species) has been reinvented as an iron law of social existence.

From our standpoint I think there is little we can do,for the time being, about the wretched state of organisation amngst the working class. I personally will proclaim my commitment to trade union activism and a democratic system based on mass membership political parties, but all of that is an investment for another day.

What can be usefully done in the here and now, I think, is to insist on the relevance of politics to the business of being activity in the domain of community action, regeneration, etc. The presumption that the task of building cohesive communities is essentially a technocratic one, involving the building of social capital and improving networks, has to be challenged and replaced by a stronger sense that activism, if it means anything, requires an assessment of the balances of power and interest which local societies into hierarchies of inclusion/exclusion, frank and open debate about the implications this has for policies and strategies, and the formation of commitment to one side or the other in battling forward with solutions. All of these things make politics the lynchpin of activity, rather than a rather embarasing fact of life that we try to push into the corner as much as possible.

So, the discussion I think we ought to be founding is one entitled 'the politics of community action', which requires the legions of officials and consultants to appraise the positions they occupy against the matrix of power relations, and to give a pulic account of themselves as people who are changing what; by which means; in collaboration with who; and to what ends?

Tha's my tuppennyworth. How are you planning to take this discussion forward? Looks like a Facebook community forum to me (sic).....

All the best,
Don

2008-01-15T06:34:00.000-08:00

From Rob Gregg Dean of Arts and Humanities, Richard Stockton College, New Jersey.
In reply to the community Confusions discussion paper:

Actually, a lot of the issues you raised are ones that have concerned me over the years — particularly in my earlier guise as an African-Americanist (both in my book on African American migration and my on-line book about migration more generally). Two things occur to me, off the top of my head — I believe there are a lot of other things in there (just thought of a third).1) There’s a degree to which I wonder whether the notion of community can ever be simply the positive attributes as opposed to the negative ones — i.e. Radical rather than reactionary. As a force for change for bringing people on the outs into power, or of increasing the power they might have, then it surely takes on a more progressive aspect. But, while it is doing this, it is nonetheless also (simultaenously) manifesting the reactionary part in its very definition. It is creating “fictions” about the community and inventing histories of its nature in order to mobilize people, and in so doing it is silencing (to borrow from Trouillot — Silencing the Past) narratives that hinder such mobilization — aspects of differentiation, class, gender, color, age, etc., that might fragment the “community” from within. As such, community can be turned into (or realize) its more reactionary form by its own success and the establishment of community institutions that entrench elements who then jealously guard their privileges (either from internal threats, or new external ones — i.e., newer immigrants); or it might realize this form through increased pressure from without and its lack of “success” to gain power (one of the things that I argued in my first book was that increased segregation of African American communities led to increased fragmentation and inability to unite in opposition to oppression — contra the Marxist assumption, I suppose). So in terms of a synchronic scheme the division in your definition works, but as soon as movement occurs both elements of community are always present — making it such a hot potato politically.2) Related to this, your passive/active dichotomy is something that I was wondering about. I think this dichotomy serves an important purpose to get us beyond old sociological (Toennies — gemeinschaft and gesselschaft and all that) notions of community that place it in a modernization framework of community (passive and traditional) and society (active and modern). Clearly community is always more active than this old theory suggested, but I wonder if it is ever really passive. In other words, there are things that people did in the past, but are they really expressions of “community” and “culture” until they are no more, or are, in a way, threatened with extinction, at which point they become actively created and invented. Is this what Anderson is talking about in Imagined Communities? Again, this means that community is never simply a reflection of a historical reality (though this will be the claim), but is instead a political intervention made for other purposes. It either becomes the reactionary claim keeping certain people in line (e.g., immigrants to the United States who frequently repressed advances for women in their communities because such things would threaten the ethnic group and would be mark it as potentially dysfunctional), or it becomes an argument for blaming the victim for claiming that the reason that others have failed to adapt/assimilate, etc. is because of the nature of their community (i.e., that it is dysfunctional and attempting now to help it would be “throwing money at the problem”).3) I loved your description of the community organizations of the 1980s and it reminded me of the impact of money that was put into American cities in the 1960s (the Great Society) and the impact it had on inner city African American communities. What such community organizations tended to do — better funded as they were with better resources than other local, community groupings — was move people out of their churches and other such places into the community/recreational centers. This was fine until all the money ran out (Vietnam war/OPEC) and the communities were left with neither the rec centers nor their own organizations, at which point others could then say that the problem with them was that they were weak communities (dysfunctional) and so should be written off — thus the Great Society ironically ended up weakening the position of many. Which reminds me — I hope you have been watching The Wire — definitely the best show ever produced on American tv.

Rob Gregg (Dean of Arts and Humanities) Richard Stockton College, New Jersey

Even the Guardian agrees that community is a "mush" word

2008-01-14T07:54:00.000-08:00

Peter Preston in todays Guardian 14/1/08 page 30:
"So, goodbye "community". You have been the political mush word of the last year, the word that turns political grit into benign vacuity. But too much community saps the spirit, and suddenly as 2008 gets a grip, other challengers finally burgeon".

Interestingly, the next article to the right "Scousers are the culture" on Liverpool's creativity also uses an interesting sense of the term community:
"A well-run capital of Culture could involve and reward the city's creative community in a project that would last way beyond the end of the year".

Though I am not sure what a creative community is I find myself less antagonistic to this use of the term community than many others. Firstly it implies a group of people actively developing ideas - and "instead of importing culture, creating it". Secondly it is not as simple as it usually is with the term community to find alternative ways of saying this without using the term. What do you think?

2008-01-11T09:01:00.000-08:00

Today's Guardian on Lee Jasper. Brixton rapper Marvin the Martian says "He (Lee) is out of touch and he's missing the mark every time. He claims to speak for the 'black community' ... There is no 'black community'. There are poor areas in which black people predominantly live"

Discussion paper

2008-01-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

This is a longer discussion paper. It is very much a work in progress and does not have any great theoretical rigour but I wanted to blog it so as to get your views and start an active discussion about "community"

Community – ambiguous, confusing and dangerous

The word “community” sits at the heart of all that we try to accomplish in the Third Sector (or as some prefer the Voluntary and Community Sector). Such is the power and centrality of this word that we characteristically presume that we know what we are talking about when we use it. In fact the word is used in so many senses, and so much associated baggage comes with the term (which we seldom analyse), that serious inconsistencies and incoherences are often imported into our thinking in a dangerous and reactionary way.

Of course these confused and lazy uses of the term should not lead us to argue that we could or should try to give the term up completely. Discourses around “community” have been used in some contexts to unite social or minority groups around an active, even resistant, challenge to existing power structures and inequalities. Too often, however, the term is used in a passive sense to distance, stereotype and mystify both the people it purports to include and to make challenges to racism, inequality and discrimination more rather then less difficult. In other words if we are not careful about how we use the term, or how we allow others to use it, then it will control us rather than us controlling it.

Definitions

It might be sensible to start with some definitions:
Wiktionary defines the term as:
Group of people sharing a common understanding who reveal themselves by using the same language, manners, tradition and law
Commune or residential/religious collective
The condition of having certain attitudes and interests in common
(Ecology) A group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other

Community Development Exchange defines community as:
The web of personal relationships, groups, networks, traditions and patterns of behaviour that exist amongst those who share physical neighbourhoods, socio-economic conditions or common understandings and interests

There are however two key features or connotations of the way the term is commonly used that are usually left out of these definitions
The first I label its “cosy” or “nostalgic” use. The term community is usually used as a term of commendation – it is assumed that the term denotes something that is inherently good. As Raymond Williams says Community has been “the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships; or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. It seems never to be used unfavourably and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term”[1] This use of the term implies a connection such as kinship, cultural heritage, shared values and goals. Community is thus felt to be more “organic” and “natural” and therefore stronger and deeper than a rational or contractual association of individuals such as the market or the state.
The second I label its “distancing use”. Paradoxically, alongside its “cosy” use it is often used to differentiate or define groups of people who are in a minority, and who are often disadvantaged or discriminated against in some way. Whilst this sense of “community” as describing minorities has been used to challenge some of the oppressions these social groups encounter, more often however it has served to confuse and conceal such oppressions. From the perspective of those with power the term “community” often connotes “the other” – “them” but not “us”[2].

I will provide evidence for and discuss both of these two key features later and will argue that these accretions of meaning actually import unspoken assumptions which are dangerous when applied to complex discourses around such vexed subjects as community cohesion, community care, community policing and multiculturalism. Government policies now encourage or enjoin service providers and local authorities to “involve the community in each stage of the process”. Without a clear notion of the term community this makes little practical sense and often gives rise to the worst forms of local clientism and “community leadership” which often empowers the wrong people in localities as well as further disempowering groups and individuals who are already excluded

ROTA (Race on the Agenda) recently declared that “a cohesive and integrated community is a feeling of connectedness and a celebration of individual differences. By continuing to define community in official geographic and governmental terms, we lose sight of the most important ingredients of community cohesion: respect for the individual, equality and dignity”. I think this is quite right as far as it goes and it does help us clear the ground somewhat by clarifying that any adequate sense of community has to be more than just about the people who happen to live in a particular locality or local authority. It shows that any sensible notion of how we should live together and develop social capital has to incorporate and deal openly with the multicultural nature of most localities in the UK rather than pretend that “Community Cohesion” is the answer to the problems caused by “multiculturalism”. With this quote ROTA clearly sets its approach firmly against most current notions of “Community Cohesion” that are either explicitly or implicitly assimilationist.

I also like it because it brings to the fore the notions of rights, equality and dignity. Increasingly these are things that we have to struggle for in the neighbourhoods and localities, the organisations and the institutions that we find our selves in. “Community” can then be seen for what it is – an active process rather than a passive state. Community is something that we have to make happen rather than something that just happens to us.

Whilst ROTA’s definition rightly challenges the dangers of geographical or governmental definitions of the term, I think there needs to be a further critique of a number of other serious ambiguities and dangers that are encompassed in the term. The term “community” is so ambiguous, so misused and so riddled with implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumptions that I believe that it very often does more harm than good and mystifies more than it clarifies. Worse than this confusion, however, is that the term is frequently used (sometimes deliberately and always covertly) so as to avoid discussions of and challenges to the discrimination, inequality and racism that still riddle our institutions, neighbourhoods and “communities”.

Community Development and Community Cohesion

Valiant attempts have been made by some parts of the community development movement to define their profession as inherently active, progressive and challenging. The Community Development Exchange for example defines community development in the following somewhat circular way:
“Community development is about building active and sustainable communities based on social justice and mutual respect. It is also about changing power structures to remove the barriers that prevent people from participating in the issues that affect their lives”. Whilst this is an active definition that describes the process and practice of many community development workers, it takes us no closer to a clear notion of what these communities are that the “development” is supposed to happen to. It is my contention that one of the barriers that prevents people from participating actively and that mystifies the relationships that they need to challenge to do this, is enshrined in the way in which we so commonly use (or misuse) the term “community”.

Elizabeth Frazer in her powerful feminist critique of both liberal and communitarian models of community, reaches a similar conclusion:
“conceptual and theoretical problems with ‘community’ are very far-reaching. They undermine the validity of models. They resonate in discourses, and have particular (not progressive) rhetorical effects. They impact in policy and practice in perverse ways”[3]

It is not for nothing that the neologism “Community Cohesion” is now a favourite of New Labour local and national politicians who do not seem to want us to look at and challenge the real relations of poverty, racism, class and inequality that infect so many of our institutions, our neighbourhoods and our “communities”. It has been rightly said that the earlier neologisms “social inclusion/exclusion” operated as a convenient way for Labour politicians and other opinion formers to avoid having to talk openly about poverty and inequality. This of course allowed them a smoke screen behind which they were able to start to give up previously totemic Labour notions of economic redistribution. The term “Community Cohesion” is, in my view, an equally cynical and obscurantist way of deflecting us from seeing the world as it really is with the result that we feel that we can do little or nothing about it.

This is because the sense in which the word “community” is being used here is utterly idealised. The confusion of senses of the term “community” so as to stress locality, interest, identity, inclusion, commonality then combine in terms like “community cohesion” to draw our attention away from and stop us articulating and engaging in processes of struggle, of opposition to racism and inequality. The “cosy” connotations of the term serve to instil in us a passivity that sees “problems in the community” only as issues for the local Council bureaucrats, politicians or “community leaders”.

For many people in Britain today the “community” in which they live does not include and empower them but rather is actually the site of their own oppression and exclusion. Just as feminists have correctly located kinship and social structures as the site of women’s oppression[4], communities whether of locality, identity or interest are often the sites of oppression where inequalities and discrimination can be most damagingly expressed. Communities are just as likely to be “communalist” (defining by exclusion, objectifying differences) as they are “communal” (defining by inclusion and encouraging association)[5].

Although most communities do not have formal criteria for membership, nevertheless membership of a particular community can be difficult to obtain, dependent as it usually is on acceptance by the existing members. It has been seen as an important characteristic of communities that their members tend to draw very clear distinctions between outsiders and insiders.[6] It is this feature that allows individuals to be actually or symbolically expelled from the community. It is often very difficult to be “the only gay in the village” and this common experience of alienation from their “original communities” that is faced by gay and lesbian people often results in movement to larger cities where there is a substantial and organised gay and lesbian population. Jeffrey Weeks gives an account of how such a “sexual community” arises: “in the face of political and social disadvantage, and crises like the HIV epidemic, gay people have felt that community should exist – a diasporic consciousness results and constructs it”[7] This is clearly an active use of “community” around which a social group is able to organise and which can be used to empower and emancipate. Most uses of the term are not active in this sense. This is easy to see in those uses of the term that are associated with locality or geography (where those people the term purports to describe may have nothing more in common then that they are inhabitants of a particular geographical area – a housing estate or a local authority for example). In this sense, I would argue, the term is actually dangerous because it seeks to pretend that there is some underlying or latent source of shared social capital in localities (in fact this is often identifiable only by its absence).

There is a common notion that many neglected urban localities are actually potential communities if only they can be “regenerated” with the correct policies from the local authority “in partnership with the community” and other local agencies. It is sometimes held that the process needs catalysing elements which are characterised by communitarians as ‘community entrepreneurs’ or ‘community activists’ – individuals who play the role of builders in the process of the construction (or reconstruction) of community. An underlying stock of potential trust and goodwill (“bonding social capital”) lies there ready to be unearthed if only we discover how. Somewhere behind the despair there lurks a potential community which we have somehow lost but which we can rediscover through the intervention of community development workers or regeneration programmes. The problem with these catalytic elements, these ‘activists’ is that they seldom live in the locality and often represent agencies whose interests may run quite counter to the individual or collective interests of those who do actually live there. Equally the regeneration programmes are often run by agents who are not located in the community and frequently, (sometimes for good as well as bad reasons) resist the involvement of local people or local interest groups in the real decision-making stage.

Rather than seeing the creation of community as an active and political process, this beguiling (but often dangerous and mechanistic) notion of community takes us further away from a real analysis of the forces and conditions that need to be challenged if any positive sort of social change is to emerge. The mystification and circularity of this approach frequently diverts our attention away from and avoids any need for a more fundamental challenge to the wider set of social relations which bear down on those people who live in the locality. It substitutes a fascination with subjectivity for any notion of activity or agency[8]. In addition crucial issues of inequality, wealth distribution and discrimination can thus be deftly avoided or ignored. These are usually far too threatening to “the powers that be” who consequently prefer the facile approach enshrined in much of the Government’s Community Cohesion strategy with its “indicators of meaningful interaction” and attempts to “develop a sense of belonging”. But belonging to what? This approach has been rightly characterised as “trying to get us all to eat samosas together”. As Elizabeth Frazer says in critique of the communitarians, the ‘spirit of community’ or ‘fostering a sense of community’ is insufficient fuel to stimulate the action and organisation that is actually needed to accomplish their aspirations to social power: “Organisers’ and theorists’ focus on the absence and longed for presence of a ‘spirit of community’ precisely diverts attention from the material conditions that might generate this agency”[9]

Alienation in community

Alienation from community rather than cohesion inside it is not just a characteristic of many communities of geography but also of many of those defined by ethnicity. If we think only for a moment of the difficulty some Asian women can face challenging “their own community” about issues such as forced marriage, domestic violence or honour killings. If we then remember the relativistic bleatings of some social and “community” workers (who have given multiculturalism a bad name) that these are things that we and they can’t and shouldn’t do anything about because it is “their culture, their community”, we can then see how easily discourses about community can tend to privilege the status quo and lead away from real empowerment and emancipation. Such empowerment will only be actualised as part of a discourse about human rights rather than about “culture” and “community”. As Helena Kennedy says “the holocaust shows us that states and governments are not the only abusers of rights; our neighbours too can abuse us. So can our partners, our spouses, our parents.” In other words the site of much of this abuse is “the community” or even closer to the bone, the family. Despite these crucial challenges to the communitarian approach – that community can “encompass vicious xenophobia and hostility, cultures of criminality, indifference to the suffering of outsiders, the prevention of exit by disadvantaged insiders and so on” [10]– the term still keeps coming back to haunt us with “its warm and positive connotations”[11]

It is no surprise that under New Labour to the same extent that neologisms like social inclusion and community cohesion have crept up on us, at the same time there has been a full frontal assault on “rights” (whether these are welfare or other legal rights or the more encompassing “human rights”)[12]. It is also no surprise that in the vanguard of this attack are the so called “communitarians” with their war cry of “no rights without responsibilities”. Rather than an idealised notion of “community” describing our social relations, in fact as Helena Kennedy says; “human rights is the language for shared living, the grammar of our interconnectedness. We have collective responsibility to ensure that all people can flourish in our society free from discrimination, hostility and harassment”[13]

The Government’s Community Cohesion website defines community cohesion as “the attempt to build communities with four key characteristics:
A common vision and sense of belonging
The valuing of diversity
Similar life opportunities for all
Strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds and circumstances in the workplace, in the school and within neighbourhoods.”

As Jenny Bourne puts it in her excellent comment paper “The Baby and the Bath Water: community cohesion and the funding crisis”, Hazel Blears and the other government proponents of Community Cohesion “start from the premise that lack of cohesion, not racial justice, is the social problem that needs tackling. If they started from the other premise, then the concept of self-segregation becomes self-organisation – a riposte to injustice, not its cause, and community cohesion would emerge as a by product of a joint fight for social justice”. This important notion sees real Community Cohesion as springing from something that we do together (communing or associating together) to challenge the status quo rather than something that “happens” to us by virtue of our being defined as part of a “community” on the basis of a few salient but often arbitrary features that we exhibit in common.

Communities as subcultures

At the same time as it is used in its cosy sense, the term “community” is often used with a strong undercurrent of “otherness” – as part of a subtle discourse that distances or exoticises certain social groups. At the same time as the term is one of commendation it can also be a term of disguised condescension. One can see this best if one analyses the occasions on which the term is used and the specific social groups that it is used about. The use of the term is often riddled with hidden cultural assumptions – community is something that they have rather than us – something inherently to do with minorities and their “subcultures”. There is a kind of “orientalism” contained in the way in which the word community is often used. The gaze is that of a white anthropologist describing the strange customs and cultures of “their communities”[14]. This use of the term community often amounts to a subtle attempt to define certain social groups so that they can be “kept in their place”[15] Community as a term can thus combine in a fairly toxic way with discourses around identity politics. Although such discourses may have been developed so as to empower certain social groups they can also be coopted to disempower or marginalise them.

Take for instance the expression “host community” and look at the assumptions that underline the use of both the terms that make it up. How does one get to be a member of this “community”? In fact there is no “communing” or associating here at all and it might better be described as a vacuous “commonality” rather than a “community”. An analysis of the term “host community” could lead us to ask about the nature of those who seek to enter such a “host community”. The answer to this neatly displays the two senses of the term that I describe above – the cosy and the distancing. At first sight (cosy[16]) presumably those who enter the host community are “guests” (cf a similar use of the term guest to describe gastarbeiter or “guest workers” in Germany). A secondary (distancing[17]) meaning of host would however lead to the darker sense that tends to accompany use of the term in discourses about race relations where the “others” are seen as “parasites” or “aliens”.

In the US this dual aspect of the term has also been noticed. In the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture[18], the editors note that: “While community has … entered the sacrosanct mythology of mom and apple pie for many Americans, these usages also betray certain negative aspects that demand attention. First, community may be used in an exclusionary fashion. Preserving “community”, for example sounds better that resisting integration or newcomers. Appeal to “community standards” also has a long career in censorship of American art and literature….. Second, community can also be an imposition on others. To speak of the ‘black’ or ‘Asian American’ community (avoiding race) or ‘gay and lesbian’ community implies a unity of action and experience, much less volition that does not reflect the lives or politics of individuals and groups that constitute these segments of American society”

An active notion of community is seldom articulated in contrast to the reactionary and passive notions of community to which people are often assigned without choice and which can then serve to stereotype and stigmatise them[19]. How rare it is that community is used in the sense of “community of resistance.” The use of the term community is at its most dangerous when it is used (explicitly or implicitly) to suggest something that they (not us) are located in and defined by, rather than choosing to locate themselves in.[20]

Of course a sense of community can be lived and experienced in emancipatory ways. For example the struggle of gay people during the last 30 years, the struggles of black and asian people against racism and police brutality have used a positive, inclusive and active sense of the term community to describe and indeed to live their struggle. The notion of “the community” here has been used as a defensive and organising term around which campaigning groups could unite against attack. Even here though it is interesting that many of these campaigning organisations do not describe themselves as primarily “community” organisations. Some like Southall Black Sisters are explicitly critical of reactionary notions of community that seek to override the human rights and freedoms of those who are coopted into them.

Ideal Communities

By contrast to these active (or at least defensive) uses of the term, “community” is usually a hegemonic, essentialising and totalising term that leads us away from a real analysis of the actual conditions in which people live. The word community is usually used as though the natural or default state of communities is to be placid, peaceful and passive (ie “cohesive”). Behind this “cosy” and “nostalgic” notion of “community” lurks an idealised notion of community which can sometimes almost be glimpsed in its original purity. It resembles a pre-Industrial English country village with everyone knowing their place and any potential conflicts of class or privilege kept buttoned up and stiff upper lipped. Around the village green and cricket pitch are a number of thatched cottages and a quiet pub. The vicar and his congregation all attend the ancient Church (communion) and second home buyers from London have not yet moved in and priced the farm workers out of their cottages[21]. Of course I parody, but there are times when the communities that politicians harp on about (or harp back to) bear more resemblance to Ambridge than they do to reality.[22] This “Hovis village” notion of an ideal community emphasises spurious cohesion rather than discontinuities of power, discrimination, racism and inequality. All is well in this best of all possible worlds.[23]

Of course this reactionary and pre-industrial idealisation has at times been mirrored by equivalent idealisations or nostalgias from the old left where the paradigmatic communities are the dwindling number of “occupational communities” – mining, fishing, steel etc. This latter form of “community” has been so disrupted during the 1980s that it can no longer really bear the weight of idealisation that is still occasionally put upon it.

There is one important study of the East End that does bear closer analysis in this context, and which shows the dangers of an idealised and nostalgic notion of community. Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young published “The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict” in 2006. It is based on many years of interviews with East Enders[24] and is a follow up to Willmott and Young’s seminal book “Family and Kinship in East London” (1957). The New East End is highly controversial in arriving at a view (from the Left) that the welfare state has itself given rise to an increase in racism and a breakdown of community in the East End. The authors argue that racial tension has been caused by large numbers of Bangladeshi families being awarded preferential treatment and priority for council housing due to a misguided rights-based welfare state which dispenses its largesse on the basis of need rather than past contributions. By contrast, since the 1950s, white working class extended families (the “original community”) have been broken up as their younger members have been relocated elsewhere for housing. In this scenario, those who have suffered most have been women, who have lost their social status “as the arbiters of family and neighbourhood life”. The book acknowledges the decline of the docklands local economy in the 60s and 70s as a causal factor, but it is notable that the blame for the breakdown of this community is levelled squarely at a “well intentioned welfare state” and, by implication, those who have benefitted from it – the incoming Bangladeshi “community”.

The original white working class community is held to have been broken up by government policy on housing and welfare rights, and supportive networks of kinship and neighbourliness, mutual-help and solidarity to have disappeared.[25] As Madeleine Bunting said in a review of the book,[26] “The minutiae of who you turn to in a crisis has been disregarded in government policy, but it is precisely those relationships of support that prevent an estate being overrun by thugs, or a young mum taking an overdose. So the tricky question for the policy wonks is: how do you devise welfare policies that reinvigorate the relationship networks and stimulate the ethic of mutuality that is so vivid a memory among the elderly white East Enders, whereby no one ever locked their front door and everyone watched out for the kids who played on the street?” But is it really just relationships of support and kinship networks that on their own can stop an estate being overrun by thugs or a young mum taking an overdose? This idealised version of a white working class community is certainly more “Queen Vic” than Ambridge[27] but it doesn’t leave much space for the existence of an extensive gang culture (remember the Kray twins?), the poverty and degradation that have been vividly described by contemporary writers, nor the fact that there was even in the 1950s a growing community of Somalis and Yemenis who were joining the longer established Jewish community (for some of whom Yiddish was still their first language). The welfare system is not only deemed by the authors to fuel white racism, but such racism is also seen to be a rational and understandable reaction to it. The book goes on to argue that these antagonisms are exacerbated by state welfare professionals who are “stoking the flames of communal tension by favouring newcomers against ‘local’ people”[28]

The whole approach of both these studies is predicated on the authors “discovery” of a widespread nostalgia by those interviewed during the 1950’s. They mourn their memories of the earlier homogenous white working class communities during and after the experience of the blitz and before the slum clearance schemes that broke up their communities and moved many of them out to Essex. The criticism that this is a highly sentimentalised version of the case was levelled at Family and Kinship fairly soon after its publication[29]. The more recent New East End study not only fails to grapple with this critique but ends up doubling the nostalgia by asserting that the white working class community now feel that they have lost even the sense of community that they were claiming at the time of the first survey. As John Marriott puts it:[30] “Bethnal Green, we discover, is not the place of 50 years ago. In those days its residents displayed a ‘warmth and conviviality’ which helped to compensate for the material privations many suffered. That golden age is now over, and a sense of bitterness and betrayal prevails among the indigenous white population, most of it directed toward the Bangladeshis who in the past 30 years have settled in significant numbers….. In extending the rights of citizenship to migrants, priority is now decided on the basis of need rather than as it was in the past on the basis of claims to membership of the community”. Marriott goes onto argue that (with the exception of the Bangladeshi incomers) the New East End’s authors fail to note any other significant demographic changes in Bethnal Green such as the emergence of the fashionable artistic community and the fact that many Bangladesh families have themselves (in time-honoured fashion!) moved east across the Lea and out of the area and have been replaced by other migrants, most notably Somalis and East Europeans, “none of whom appear in the pages of the book”.[31]
Contrary to this doom and gloom, another study of two estates in East London found a picture of a “vibrant and complex community life”. The study focused on the views and experiences of local people, their perceptions of neighbourhood, social networks and involvement with the community. The research, by Vicky Cattell and Mel Evans[32], illustrates both variation and consensus within and between two neighbourhoods in regeneration areas and explores the underlying influences. Crucially, whilst the study did find evidence of some tensions between longer term residents and newer immigrant arrivals it also found substantial evidence of networking and neighbourliness across different ethnic groups. It did not seek to idealise the community (past or present) and found that:
· The local neighbourhood remains central to the lives of East Londoners. The friendliness and good humour of local people, their patterns of reciprocal aid and supportive networks strengthen residents' sense of attachment.
· Formal organisations involve older age groups more than younger. Past experiences of clubs, trade unions, or campaigns are influential motivators for older residents on both estates. Younger residents are less likely to share these experiences.
· The disaffection of young people and their perceptions of powerlessness are causes for concern.
· Local resources and facilities are key influences on the neighbourhood's store of 'social capital'. They can help in developing supportive networks and relationships of trust, and encouraging participation.
· Social activities and "having a laugh" are important to East Londoners. Residents want community facilities to consolidate this aspect of their identity.
· Residents' perceptions of their neighbourhood and degrees of attachment to it vary. One understanding of the 'good neighbourhood' is based on the interaction of similar people: another embraces co-operation between different groups.
· Past, recent and future regeneration initiatives have influenced perceptions of the neighbourhood and the forms that community life takes. As well as strengthening communities within neighbourhoods, regeneration activities have also caused some divisions.
· The researchers conclude that cohesive and vibrant neighbourhoods require: opportunities and facilities for both localised socialising and wider social cohesion; organisations which encourage effective participation through training and prioritise the involvement of newcomers; the involvement of young people in regeneration; and a holistic and flexible approach to regeneration.
In another study Katharine Mumford and Professor Anne Power[33] report the experiences of 100 families living in Hackney and Newham. They argue that despite the potentially fraught arena of inter-racial communication, the idea of neighbourliness is extremely important to 90 per cent of local families. Almost all the mothers interviewed had friends from other ethnic backgrounds. They concluded that despite all the real problems and tensions, it does not appear to be true that attachment to community disintegrates in a global age, in a global city, with fast changing populations, strong cultural and ethnic differences and many alienating pressures.
By contrast, the pessimistic and nostalgic direction of the New East End’s argument fits in a most uncomfortable way with another major left-wing critique of Multiculturalism. This is the communitarian argument that too many immigrants with markedly different cultures threaten any community’s ability to generate bridging social capital.

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Community and Government

By analysing some of the problems with the use of the term “community” we can see how there is something inherently self-defeating and paradoxical about the way in which Community Cohesion is currently defined and practised. By defining and reifying the notion of communities (defined by their “cultures”) as what makes people different, the Government is actually reinforcing the concept of separate linguistic or cultural minority communities which at the same moment they say they want to integrate (or assimilate) minorities out of. If community cohesion is understood as the attempt to create “bridging social capital”[34] then it hamstrings itself by its own definition of communities. Defining communities in this reactionary way as passive, homogenous groups who tend to ghettoise themselves around purities of language and culture is part of the problem rather than a definition that helps us find a solution. It is “communities” understood in this way that local and national politicians then seek to manipulate through the use of community leaders (who can sometimes represent the most backward, conservative and chauvinistic elements of that group). This notion becomes even more nonsensical when we consider the Government’s recent campaign against single ethnicity funding. As Jenny Bourne has pointed out, the Government is reversing cause and effect by “blaming those whom society has excluded for their own self-segregation.”

Certainly both local and national government from the 1980s on have sometimes made serious mistakes in thinking that they can coopt or placate particular ethnic minority groups by the provision of funding for cultural or community purposes and have thus created a class of “community leaders” who often claim to speak on behalf of their entire communities. This sort of divide and rule has always been a feature of the colonial mindset in British government attitudes to minorities. However, as Bourne says, the danger now is that many of the smaller, more challenging, grassroots groups will lose out on funding. “And we will, if we are not careful, be back to the anodyne ‘racial harmony’-style tea parties of the 1950s which offend noone and achieve nothing.” More Samosas anyone?

Community Care

Whilst associated with many positive developments around independent living, notoriously the term “community care” lulled both politicians and people in the 1980s into the notion that there actually was a “community” outside long stay institutions where “care” would better take place. (In practice of course this often meant little or no care or that caring arrangements would devolve back to family members with little support). Active terms like “independent living” capture the positive aspects of the approach but the use of the term “community care” can be seen as both a cause and at the same time a way of hiding some of the negative consequences of the policy - especially since it is increasingly underfunded to the extent that it is almost bound to fail.

Frazer points out that the term “community” becomes even more mystificatory when it is (so often) coupled with that of “family”: “the meanings of family and community are mutually constitutive[35]…. The terms’ constant reference to each other obscures how social institutions and social processes are actually related. In public policy this really matters ….. for instance the social policy ‘community care’ is actually family care.” There is also, as she points out, a suspicion that the way in which one term seems actually to act as a code for another amounts to a disguised discourse about gender, about the respective roles and resources of men and women which are then covertly differentiated and essentialised.

New Localism

The ambitious attempts by some Labour local authorities in the 1980s to “decentralise” largely fell down because of their inability to analyse and critique the idealised notion of community or neighbourhood that they were actually employing. There was a prevailing notion just that by “bringing people together” through the good offices of community development workers and “community centres”, shared commitment and social capital could be (re)generated. Whilst such vitally needed resources may be a necessary condition for improving people’s lives in a locality, they are very seldom a sufficient condition.

In Camden where I was working as a community worker (1983-1987) there was substantial funding in the early 1980s to establish community centres within easy walking distance of every resident of the borough. Whilst this development did coincide with the first thoroughgoing and laudable attempts to introduce equal opportunities and anti-racist policies in funding and service provision (both from local boroughs and the GLC), nevertheless there were only infrequent attempts to mount sustained challenges to the relations of power and discrimination in these localities. Some Community Centres actively resisted the establishment of local campaigns to challenge racial harassment on local estates, others were suspicious and obstructive to projects operating locally for disaffected young people, gays and lesbians, travellers and users of mental health services. Whilst there were a number of positive gains as well as serious concerns about this approach, such provision was largely demolished due to constraints on local authority funding and attacks on these local authorities by the authoritarian Thatcher government. The attempt to use what we would now call “community anchors” to develop a new sense of community spirit (let alone one that would stand up to and confront Thatcherism) had largely failed. Indeed since the 1980s a significant number of these community and youth centres have been closed down or sold off.

The experience in Islington (where I subsequently worked in the Council for Voluntary Service 1989-96) was marked by the establishment from 1985 of 24 decentralised Neighbourhood Offices each with their own Neighbourhood Forums. The experience of these forums were mixed, whilst some did develop in vibrant and inclusive ways, many of them became little more than fiefdoms for unrepresentative and sometimes xenophobic local community (residents or tenants association) leaders. The attempt to empower members of the “local community” resulted in some cases with a further entrenchment of prejudice and exclusion at the local level. In some cases such fora systematically excluded minority ethnic and other disadvantaged social groups. Having established neighbourhood forums that purported to encourage neighbourhood participation, councillors and local authority staff then tended to recoil when “troublesome groups” gained representation within the local political system. Of course the key decisions about resources had always been taken elsewhere, but there was in some cases a noticeable movement to circumscribe and limit the responsibilities of neighbourhood forums and to relocate powers and decision-making away from them if they started raising issues that were uncomfortable for those in the Town Hall.

At the same time funding patterns also encouraged the establishment of a number of community centres and organisations for minority groups. Many of these (including the emerging refugee community organisation sector) did provide excellent services and reach groups who felt they had little purchase on mainstream provision. Nevertheless this pattern of funding also had a tendency to encourage competition between and even within different ethnic groups. Whilst the emergence of community leaders and a growing number of Black and asian councillors changed the face of some localities, in some cases there was a tendency by the local authority to “buy off” different groups rather than encourage their involvement at all levels. The prevailing ethos at the time was a kind of lazy multiculturalism. Significant sums were spent on community festivals and local cultural events and while much of this was extremely positive it became clear that there was little appetite to challenge entrenched racial harassment (especially of local Bengali families), gangs and vandalism let alone the endemic poverty and other inequalities that scarred the area.

Multiculturalism and community

Currently there is a full frontal attack on ‘multiculturalism’. Ironically the government seems increasingly determined to adopt the more integrationist or even assimilationist approach that has failed so disastrously in France and elsewhere across Europe. Community cohesion is now being seen as a panacea for the ‘problems’ caused by multiculturalism. In the words of the Chief Rabbi these are deemed to be that “it encourages people not to integrate and creates social exclusion” As the Institute for Race Relations has pointed out, attacks on multiculturalism usually reflect a disguised assimilationism: “what they actually mean is that they are not happy with the weight being given to other cultures and customs. They essentially want British culture to be more traditional and/or Christianity to prevail over other faiths”[36]. This critique of multiculturalism and the development of ideas around social cohesion grew up as response to 9/11 and the London bombings of 2005 because of the perceived militancy and “self-segregation” of sections of the Muslim community and the reaction to increasing numbers of asylum seekers. Not only does this approach serve to blame the victim, but it also as IRR points out, moves the debate away from racism and inequality and situates it back in culture – in the notion that we somehow need to create a kind of cultural glue (bridging capital) that can hold society together and that ensures positive integration.[37] Samosas again!

In fact both the government approaches of multiculturalism and now community cohesion are actually so infected by the same problematical definition of “community” that they create more problems than they explain. As Sivanandan argues, multiculturalism originally grew out of community-based fights for equality and justice – struggles emanating from below. Local and national government policies sought to introduce a very different notion of multiculturalism or communalism from above by reifying communities and rewarding (or in some cases punishing) community leaders through funding and other political mechanisms. This level of “culture” as expressed in and by “communities” heads off and diffuses challenges to power and inequality at the local and national level in the same way as does the community cohesion approach. Only when we develop a more challenging understanding of community as an active process rather than as a passive state can we start to overcome this contradiction.

Of course we should immediately dispense with any form of multiculturalism that claims that the cultural traditions of minority ethnic groups should be immune to criticism on grounds of human rights. Human rights should always trump culture – this is an easy thing to say when it comes to issues like Female Genital Mutilation, forced marriage or honour killings. In practice however there are still many progressive community activists who are equivocal about some of these issues. For example City Parochial Foundation has recently been criticised for its imaginative and welcome decision to allocate substantial funding for work around faith-based child abuse, especially within parts of the African diaspora in London.

The Grammar of community

The “grammar” of the term community – the way it is used - reveals much about how humans are and how we see ourselves in our part of the developed world in the early 21st century. The danger with terms like “community” is that they often help us pretend that we can do more than this. We are often lured by such terms to think that we can describe an ahistorical, unchanging and somehow essential human condition rather than ways of living that are conditioned and mutable. Like Wittgenstein I would suggest that there can never be a final and complete empirical definition of a concept like “community” and that all we can therefore do is to explore how the concept is used in a number of different contexts. Its meaning is in the way it is used. We can also attempt to carry out some basic “housekeeping” when it comes to our use of the term. Where we are using it in a way that is systematically unclear or so that it carries unwanted or damaging connotations and ideological implications, then we should limit our use of the category or try to find other ways of expressing ourselves without using the term in an unanalysed and idealised way.

As Frazer points out, “certain sorts of groups – shopping crowds, theatre audiences (members of which have something in common which distinguishes them from other groups) – are not included in the category whereas villagers, tribespeople, religious and linguistic groups are”[38] As she remarks, it is not immediately clear why this should be the case. The leading communitarian Amitai Etzioni tries to answer this sort of conundrum with an appeal to “commitment” – in community “we care about each other’s well being” in such a way that “the community can lay moral claims on its members”.[39] He does not explain why this does not apply as much (if not more) to gangs as it does to communities. Yet again we see the term automatically (but covertly) assumed to be describing good rather than bad forms of association. Commitment is not enough of a defining characteristic to allow us to make a distinction between community (good) and criminal/gang subcultures (bad). Indeed the confusion of senses of the term that involve spatial location, real or imagined “commitment”, ethnicity, interest, identity (whether externally or self defined) make the term systematically confusing and complex rather than explanatory and simple.

It is interesting for example that there are some social groups that the term cannot be applied to in the same way: we do not usually say “the women community”, “the male community”, “the young community”, “the middle-aged community” or the “community of older people”[40]. This is because these are all terms that describe states that the majority of people will inhabit and which we all therefore have an interest in (as opposed to those other uses of the term which almost always explicitly or implicitly imply that they are minority interests or conditions, often outside the mainstream). In most senses of the term, age and gender are presumed to inhabit, even constitute all communities whereas other distinctions such as race, sexual orientation, profession, location etc. stand in a different relation to the term.

Another feature of the way in which the word is used, is that for almost every social group that community is applied to there is usually a perfectly feasible way of using a name or phrase to denote the group that does not use the term “community”. Why call business people “the business community”? Why call a neighbourhood or locality “the local community”? Frazer again points out that “for many theorists….., community is the site of the realisation of communion, and communion – connectedness, the meeting with another soul to soul – is the ideal for social relations that can be more nearly realised in community than anywhere else.” This idealisation, this empty aspiration to community is an aspiration to a kind of connectedness that “transcends the mundane and concrete tangle of social relations”.[41] But, rather than seeking this transcendence to an idealised realm of community, it is at the level of reality (where the muddle of relations and differences of power and status, discrimination and inequality operate) that we need to become active if we are to develop processes and politics that really construct active and progressive ways of living together.

The nostalgia for past communities does tell us much about our own attitudes to the past and the future. “The past is more comfortable, or there is a strong tendency to create it as more cosy than it was. At the risk of being equally one-sided, it was a harsh and parochial world that we are well rid of, except of course, we are not sure that anything better has replaced it.”[42]

Whereas the experience in imagined or pre-industrialised “communities” may appear (to our nostalgic eyes) as cohesive and stable, certainly in many C21st inner urban areas this is far from the case. In terms of spatial location, community in the context of the contemporary urban environment is at the idealised end of the spectrum set out below:

GOOD ↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔↔ BAD

Community ↔ Neighbourhood ↔ Locality ↔ Territory

Here community can be seen as an ideal form of neighbourhood which itself carries strong connotations that the space or area is at least capable of “neighbourliness”. Locality is a neutral term and territory has a distinctly negative connotation of defensiveness. Territory is what armies and gangs (or indeed animals) inhabit and defend. As Frazer puts it “we are better off theoretically speaking, with locality than with community – for there is in this concept no suggestion that a single or any particular set of values, norms, preferred social identities, patterns of relations or tastes is privileged. Within the framework of social justice , the needs of existing users (residents, workers, visitors) in a place would all have to be considered.”

As we have seen, the problem for communitarians is that their central notion of commitment, shared values etc. as definitive of community fails to identify only forms of association that are good or “communal”. Commitment can lead to destructive, exclusionary or communalist forms of association as well as those they approve of (to which they want to append the term “community”). For gang members of course, their territory or “manor” fulfils all of the roles of community that the communitarians see as defining what is good about community – commitment, mutuality, solidarity, self-empowerment, strengthening of feelings of self-identity and status etc.

Recent knife and gun murders in London have drawn our attention to so called “post-code” gangs where “it doesn’t matter what race you are, what religion you are; to join you just have to live in the right area. It’s all about territory”[43] The prevailing response to this defensive form of association is usually a despairing cry of “why has this started happening?”[44]. If we are so far away from a clear understanding our own “communities” it is surely no surprise that we don’t understand why our young people sometimes live out the desperate parody of community that is gang culture.

Community is a word which we commonly resort to when we can’t bear the real relations of alienation, inequality, fractiousness and complexity that confront us everyday in the urban environment. It is a largely ideal and imagined space that can be magically transformed by the “grammar” of the term into a realm of cosy and harmonious communion. The problem with imagined communities, however, is that we do not always watch who does the imagining.

Conclusion

I have argued that there are two forms of social analysis that are particularly prioritised or presumed by talk of community. The first is the traditional conservative picture of an organic and cohesive but authoritarian social order. The second is an old Labour and traditional socialist view of organic, unalienated and homogenous working class life. I have tried to show that both these approaches are not based on real relations of power and inequality and the real emancipation and empowerment that can arising from challenging these structures. Instead they both rely on an imagined or idealised nostalgia for some essential state of “community spirit” that somehow needs to be rediscovered or regenerated. This form of analysis tends to hide the real relations and conditions that are at work in the world rather helping us undertsnad them

There are two other possible forms of analysis on the left and the right. The first is that of the Thatcherite new right which believes that “there is no such thing as society” and whose elements of analysis are individuals, families and the state mediated only through market relationships. This social market approach gives little value to the ways in which people form associations and challenge the local and national state as a way of empowering and defining themselves through their activity other than those that are assumed to be derived from their existence as economic units. Here there is not only no society but very little community either.

There is another possibility – a more radical view which focuses on social movements and local and global challenges to existing structures of inequality, racism and other forms of discrimination. This notion of community needs to be understood more as a process of empowerment than as a passive state. It mirrors the activity of people and the social movements and associations that they generate to make sense of, improve and sustain their localities, and their economic, social and environmental circumstances. It tries to understand people as agents rather than merely as subjects.
To the extent that the term community can be used in furtherance of this last model then we may want to continue to use it. However we should remain vigilant of its power to express reactionary, nostalgic, quiescent and exclusionary forms of life and ways of living together. We must guard against its constant power to divert us from dealing with the real relations of power and inequality that so disfigure our world.
[1] From Raymond Williams’ “Keywords: a vocabulary of Culture and Society 1976”. I think a possible candidate for an opposing term to “community” could be Durkheim’s use of the ancient Greek phrase “anomie” - a state of alienation or social instability caused by an erosion of standards or values.
[2] Interestingly, Raymond Williams notes that the word can also mean “the commons or common people, as distinguished from those of rank”(Keywords)
[3] The Problems of Communitarian Politics, Oxford 1999
[4] Elizabeth Frazer
[5] There is an important parallel here with Puttnam’s distinction between bonding and bridging social capital which I will argue later is itself so imbued with a nostalgic and idealised sense of community that it is frequently useless and/or dangerous. Nevertheless in terms of this perspective “communalist” social groups are clearly inward looking with high degrees of “bonding” capital and “communal” groups have a high degree of “bridging” and “linking” social capital.
[6] Crow and Allan, Community Life, A.P.Cohen , The Symbolic Construction of Community
[7] Jeffrey Weeks ‘The idea of a sexual community’ 1995 (quoted in Elizabeth Frazer, ibid)

[9] Elizabeth Frazer, ibid, p. 84
[10] Elizabeth Frazer, ibid p.82
[11] Raymond Williams, ibid.
[12] Indeed significant parts of New Labour are now leading the attack on the Human Rights Act that it itself introduced in one of its few radical moments
[13] Guardian.co.uk/commentisfree December 15th 2007
[14] Alan Hudson makes this point eloquently in his discussion of the New East Enders study which I refer to in detail later in this paper: His word for this exoticisation of the working class community in East London is “culturalisation”: “When I read the descriptions of white working class life….. I hear the awed whispers of a naturalist describing the patterns of life and the habitat of a favourite animal species: ‘See how the mum entrusts the care of her young to the next female in line as she prepares for the trip to the laundrette’….…. – the inimitable voice of David Attenborough….. The circumstances, outlook and habits of a historically specific and ephemeral working class become not only cultural norms but also cultural and ahistorical absolutes”
[15] An interesting sense of “place” which can imply both geographic space (ghetto) or position in a hierarchy of status or power.
[16] Wiktionary defines this sense of the term as: A person who allows a guest, particularly into the host's home
[17] Wiktionary defines this sense of host as: A cell or organism in which a virus replicates.
[18] Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture, Ed. McDonogh, Gregg & Wong, Routledge 2001
[19] Alan Hudson in his critique of the New East End says that the objects of its study (the white working class community) “are passive beneath the concerned, investigative gaze of the observer. But the observed are soon to vanish from history and we are asked to be sorrowful for them as victims and then become nostalgic for that which is lost”
[20] Even that old stalwart of Empiricist philosophy John Locke saw the world clearer than this in 1690: “The only way by which anyone divests himself of his natural liberty and puts on the bonds of civil society is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community” (2nd Treatise of civil government). Community is thus seen as relying on an associative process rather than a preordained state.
[21] This vision of the perfect community (England) could not have been expressed better than in John Major’s nostalgia for a world of “long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said 'old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist'.” (John Major’s speech on St George’s Day 1993)
[22] Elizabeth Frazer is surely right when she concludes that “the aspiration to community is an aspiration to a kind of connectedness that transcends the mundane and concrete tangle of social relations” indeed she draws comparison to use of the religious term “communion”
[23] “The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate”
(from the hymn “All things Bright and Beautiful” by Cecil Alexander, 1848)
[24] Indeed some of the interviews were completed well over 10-15 years before the publication of the book – a point which Alan Hudson makes as explicit criticism.
[25] In contrast to this view there are a number of studies showing how much positive social capital there still is in areas of high diversity in London
[26] Guardian, February 13th 2006
[27] Actually rather than resembling the BBC series “East Enders” or the Radio 4 series “The Archers” what this perspective really does remind me of is Alf Garnett’s character in “Till Death Us Do Part” for those of us old enough to remember it – somethings never change!
[28] Quoted in New Myths of the East End, by Chris Jones Socialist Review April 2006
[29] Jennifer Platt’s devastating critique (1971) is the most cogent of these. She concluded that Willmott and Young sentimentalised poor working class life. For the two middle class researchers “the quaintness and exotic unfamiliarity of the subjects of their research throws a glamour over behaviour patterns which might otherwise be regarded as constituting a social problem”
[30] Rising East Online May 2006
[31] This is hardly surprising if – as Alan Hudson notes – so many of the interviews were conducted 10-15 years ago
[32] A summary of the research published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation 1999
[33] East Enders: family and community in east London, 2003
[34] This notion stems from Robert Putnam’s theory of social capital. He makes a spurious and essentialist distinction between “bonding capital” (when people interact within their own ethnic group or “community”) and “bridging capital” (when people interact with groups outside their own community)
[35] Frazer p 173-4. She points out that for communitarians, “families are, ideally at least communities, and conversely the idea of community is analysed as ‘family writ large’”
[36] Not even that well disguised if the recent disgraceful remarks of the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali in the Sunday Telegraph (6/1/08) are anything to go by. The Bishop asserts that Muslims have created no go areas for non-muslims. A previous article by the Bishop (also in the Telegraph 15/8/06) claimed that “multiculturalism is to blame for perverting young Muslims”
[37] Jenny Bourne in her defence of multiculturalism (IRR Feb 2007) sees community cohesion as: “the idea that the nation somehow had a deficit of glue, which would have to be artificially manufactured and injected into British institutions.”
[38] Elizabeth Frazer, ibid
[39] Amitai Etzioni, “The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda” 1993
[40] Though I have heard the term “pensioner community” occasionally – whatever this means
[41] Elizabeth Frazer “The problems of Communitarian Politics” p.71
[42] Alan Hudson, Whitechapel Road Revisited, Rising East May 2006
[43] Observer newspaper 30/12/07 “Stabbed to death at 16 – a victim of the teen gangs’ postcode lottery” by Caroline Davies and Jamie Doward.
[44] Even a brief reading of Oliver Twist or a glance at Hogarth’s cartoons of Beer Street and Gin Lane should convince us that there is little that is inherently new about forms of social behaviour that the tabloids often see as proof positive of the breakdown of community since the 1960’s. Gang culture and binge drinking have been a part of our culture for much longer than this.

Community confusions

2008-01-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

Community – ambiguous, confusing and dangerous

The word “community” sits at the heart of all that we try to accomplish in the Third Sector (or as some prefer the Voluntary and Community Sector). Such is the power and centrality of this word that we characteristically presume that we know what we are talking about when we use it. In fact the word is used in so many senses, and so much associated baggage comes with the term (which we seldom analyse), that serious inconsistencies and incoherences are often imported into our thinking in a dangerous and reactionary way.

Of course these confused and lazy uses of the term should not lead us to argue that we could or should try to give the term up completely. Discourses around “community” have been used in some contexts to unite social or minority groups around an active, even resistant, challenge to existing power structures and inequalities. Too often, however, the term is used in a passive sense to distance, stereotype and mystify both the people it purports to include and to make challenges to racism, inequality and discrimination more rather then less difficult. In other words if we are not careful about how we use the term, or how we allow others to use it, then it will control us rather than us controlling it.

This blog is set up to encourage voluntary and community sector workers, anti-racists, political and community activists and social commentators to discuss what we mean by the term community and to challenge its use in a number of contexts (community cohesion, communitarianism, community care, etc.). It seeks to promote a critical approach to lazy and ambiguous uses of the term community and to encourage a politics of community action.