Community - beyond fluffy notions
My contributions to the community debate
A sense of place: how to create community in a fractured world That was the title of a debate I took part in at the Battle of Ideas late last year. Film of the session has recently been published online. So please do watch the introductory remarks that I and fellow speakers gave. I was conscious in the run-up to the debate how fluffy notions of community can be. The last time I chaired a debate on the subject, again at the Battle, we had the loathable rogue Mizzy to vent over. Unlike his amoral antics that was no bad thing as these discussions can often be a bit unreal. All a bit Kumbaya.
This time and thanks to - that’s the wrong word - because of the riots a few months earlier, we could hardly avoid going beyond the usual platitudes. It was no good saying we all should just get on with each other, be kind, not mean etc. We had to deal with the obstacles, the tensions, the conflicts and confusions, that are part of our experience of living together today in our not-really-communities. Anyway, as I say, please do click on the link above and see what you think. Also, while you’re at it, if you too prefer a more substantive, challenging approach to this too often tepid topic, you might be interested in what else I have to say on the subject here on Substack …
Do we live in an anti-social society?
I was shocked, but not necessarily surprised, to learn from the Telegraph that theft has effectively been decriminalised across two thirds of England and Wales’ neighbourhoods. And that in at least half of our countries’ neighbourhoods, not one personal, bike or vehicle theft was solved. Harvey Redgrave, a former No 10 adviser and chief executive of cri…
Abandoned buildings and mishandled youth
Leo Kearse, comedian turned political commentator, recently tweeted: ‘Autistic people sometimes can't help but be blunt and factual’. Qualities that I would argue, in these double-speaking, reality-bending times, are sorely needed. Perhaps it is fitting too that some of the sharpest political commentators around today - Konstantin Kisin, Andrew Doyle, V…
From Mizzy to the Middle East?
First, there is the deep well of civility and tolerance, on which our political life and wider national conversation depend, suffused with our sense of fairness and our devotion to the rule of law.
Let's leave the swipe, scroll, speaker-phone society
‘We are living in the age of the parasocial relationship’ says Louise Perry in a piece for The Spectator. The illusion of intimacy via a screen, first observed by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in the 1950s, has intensified. Today we are glued to our phones, speak to disembodied voices in the corner of the living room, and live lives as see…
The passing of Frank Field and civility too?
RIP Frank Field, who sadly died this week. For those who remember him - and going by the fond tributes, many clearly do - he was a ‘decent’ man. A word you don’t hear that much these days, especially to describe a Member of Parliament and former Minister. There was much I didn’t agree with him on. His pursuit of the Blair government’s politics of behav…
The hipster community with hatred baked in
I’ll be speaking at an event this weekend, discussing community and belonging (see below for details). To be honest, I’m not sure whether I belong to anything called a community. We live complex lives, don’t we, and dip in and out of mostly shallow relationships with people we encounter mostly fleetingly? But one thing that came to mind in preparing for…
There's no such thing as community
Strictly speaking, to misquote Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as community. The holy trinity of undergraduate sociology – Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber – described in their different ways the break with the old world of community and tradition. The way capitalism or rationalism, destroys the old bonds and the old ways of doing thing…
In search of belonging
On the second day of the Battle of Ideas weekend - before I spoke on A sense of place: how to create community in a fractured world - I wandered into a discussion with Christopher Snowdon, author of a new book on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. There was some to and fro about whether he (Orwell, not the Institute for Economic Affairs’ Snowdon) was…
A thuggish assault on the people
The possible suicide of one grandfather after being convicted of violent assault and sent down for two years. The controversial conviction and lengthier sentence handed out to the childminding wife of a Conservative councillor for tweeting horrible things. Both have provoked yet more anger over ‘two-tier’ policing and criminal justice. Indeed, I write a…
Identity and community - Turning ourselves inside out
I’m a David Bowie fan. After he died in 2016 - and as the world fell apart (if you believe those who long for pre-populist days) - I wrote about him. And about what we really had lost with his passing. Actually, Bowie was no fan of the EU and I imagine would have rather relished the so far dashed hopes Brexit represented. Nevertheless, eight years on, a…
Image: Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Brueghel the Elder
