Neighbourhoods

Sport for the Haves

Today Nesta launched the Neighbourhood Challenge to try to highlight ways of stimulating local social action.

“Community organisations across England are invited to apply to the 18-month programme. NESTA will select ten organisations and provide them with funding to trial an approach to community organising that reflects their own vision for what will work best in their area.

We will provide the practical tools and high-quality training needed for participating organisations to help people in their communities create local campaigns, innovative community projects and new social enterprises that address their passions and priorities. We will also provide micro-finance to support the development of local projects and establish local challenge prizes to incentivise community-led innovation.”

Deadline for expressions of interest is 22 November.

Some good will come of this. But the first thing that struck me at the launch is how desperately tasteless it was to be in a plush central London location with a free breakfast among a large number of affluent be-suited people talking in very general ways about 'communities' that are characterised by high levels of apathy and low aspirations; and offering residents of those distant neighbourhoods a chance, by competition, to improve their lot.

Statistically their chances of winning through in that competition are likely to be very small. They are expected to put in a bit of effort, symbolically making pleas to the powers that be, and then in all probability just knuckle down to things as they were before; or get picked off by the developers. What sport this must seem to the Haves - get the peasants to do a wee dance in their quaint custom, then show a little favouritism to a handful.

Perhaps I'm being slightly unfair, but it was all so reminiscent of the ghastly mistakes the Labour administration made in its early years with challenges and competitions - dressing the excluded in costumes and getting them to jump through hoops. As if a process of lottery is a legitimate way of reducing deadly disparities in the quality of life.

I hope the Neighbourhood Challenge will result in at least ten decent projects and lots of shared learning: I don't see why it shouldn't. While that's going on I just want to offer a few thoughts here about some of the assumptions that underpinned the speeches I heard this morning.

First, the C word was used throughout, by a succession of speakers, apparently as a synonym for neighbourhoods. What this tells us is that they hold vague assumptions about consensus and cohesion in localities, based on slight experience or poor understanding.

Secondly, much was taken for granted about how straightforward is the role of community organiser. This was revealing: it's beginning to become clear that the notion of community organising under Big Society is going to be pretty much value-free. They won't wait around for people to discuss and refine the values and principles that might guide their work, nor refer back to the previous efforts of the community development field. We want 5,000 community organisers please, using this simple template, male and female, by autumn next year, just get on with it.

Thirdly, the rhetoric of power remains seductive and uncritical. The forthcoming localism bill will bring radical new 'powers', we're told, but as soon as people start to talk about this they refer to devices like petitions, possibly the most blunt and unhygienic item in the toolbox of democracy. Surely by now, we should be able to talk about how power gets transferred and exercised at local level - and how it feels - in a more nuanced way.

Fourthly, there was much carefree talk about the power of local online, and the perceived 'need' to focus this on the problematisation of local issues. But local online is still a very imperfect democratic environment. The approach espoused was to encourage people to use online to articulate their concerns about local issues. A hall for loud voices. I humbly suggest that it would be more sensible to encourage the development of lots of digital conversations at local level about all sorts of things, from which the real concerns of a wider variety of residents would emerge.

My last point is about the nature of the localities in question, the 'communities' from which expressions of interest are sought. Behind the Neighbourhood Challenge there is talk of targeting areas defined as 'low in social capital'. Public sector funding cuts are going to have an atomising effect: how far is social exclusion, and the effects of social justice, going to be identifiable in these terms? Are those who suffer network poverty likely to be clustered into ghettoes? In some ways it might be better if they were, but my suspicion is that the toxic effect of the recession will be more distributed, far harder to track, far less amenable to our fancy mapping technologies.

 

 

A different take on holding a neighbour's keys

Pouring rain as I made my way back from the train station. Five minutes from home I saw a near neighbour approaching, just dashing into the post office. He paused, held out his car keys: 'you can sit in my car if you like, it's just round the corner, I won't be a minute.'

Big - but not society

Does Small State seem any clearer after the Spending Review?

This article by Anushka Asthana and Toby Helm, in yesterday's Observer has sharpened the focus on one particular point, which is that a key political sleight has been to get working class people to condemn the workless poor. With the notion of hoi polloi solidarity now exploded (not with a bang but a whimper), the Haves can sit down and tuck in without fear of interruption from the rabble at their gates.

In truth this process has surely been gathering for decades, thanks in no small part to the decimation of trade unionism and the influence of a shameless press; but what the economic crisis has done is to give it a perverse logical justification. The authors note:

'polls suggested substantial support for the assault on benefits. Focus groups had told the chancellor they wanted welfare not cut but shredded.'

And they quote the chief exec of one homeless charity:

'People have looked down on those out of work for a long time. So when you ask them what to cut – police? They say no. Schools? No. NHS? No. The armed services? No – but welfare, who is going to lobby for that?'

And so it comes down to povertyism, the fact that for some reason many people despise those who are poor, seek excuses for their negative attitude towards them, and support policies that punish people for being in poverty. Some of our media and some of our politicians do the rest, with distasteful zeal.

The brand managers are working away at Big Society. Big it may be, but it doesn't look like it will be representative of an inclusive society.

Chair

I could have written a story around this image, but then I think I would not have wanted to publish the image. So why not make up your own?

 

An environment designed for car drivers

From the 'Designing Streets for People' list, a statistical note by Alasdair Massie referring to a crossing that he uses regularly:

If approaching “as traffic” on the road you generally have a green light – 87% of the time in fact. If you are unfortunate enough to hit a red, then you have at worst a 16 second wait before you can proceed. As with pretty much every junction / crossing except for large signalised roundabouts, you clear the crossing in one go.

If on the other hand, you approach the same crossing as a pedestrian, you almost ALWAYS meet a red light. At most, if there are people pressing the call button continuously, only 5% of the phase shows green to pedestrians. You then have to WAIT. Assuming that nobody has pressed the button before you, then that wait will be 40 seconds if there is traffic (which there is for most of the day). You then get 6 seconds of green time. Then, having got to the sheep pen in the middle of the road and struggled your way through the phalanx of people coming the other way, you have to go through the whole process again, admittedly with a shorter wait.

Battle of Ideas

Two weeks to the Battle of Ideas, and if you are or could be around in London that weekend, it's time to checkout the themes.

All being well I'll get along to 'Going nowhere? Staying local in a global village' (with John Adams among others), exploring whether or not there's 'a contradiction between localism and our global aspirations'. If I can't get into that I'll be in the (unfortunately simultaneous) debate about 'Ageing and medicine: quality versus quantity?' (which asks 'Are we in danger of assuming quality of life is purely a corporeal thing?'). After which I'll be speaking, hopefully for no more than a few minutes, at a debate about Big Society.

Other sessions of interest:

• Trust in an age of cynicism
• The empty square: the public engaged or imagined?
• Whose social justice is it anyway?

Rural areas: small state, big needs

The other day the Commission for Rural Communities published a report on 'the economic conditions for organisations contributing to the Big Society in rural England'. It tries to say nice things about Big Society, although the previous day the government had announced that the CRC is being abolished anyway. Can't have been easy finalising the text with that news looming.

The report makes clear that conditions in some marginalised rural localities are not expected to get any better in the foreseeable. Respondents in the study on which it is based said that, among other things, they would like

The government to understand that the Big Society, although cost efficient, is not cost free and that some communities do not have the capacity to get involved. Ongoing and long term funding as well as professional support is still needed to carry on delivering their services and taking on additional responsibilities.

Here's a sample comment from within the report illustrating how economices of scale could impact (from Remploy, another state-funded agency, whose future is apparently still 'under consideration'):

'As contracts are cancelled and niche programmes disappear the economics of high volume delivery do not lend themselves to specific delivery within the rural communities... Rural communities are deemed the areas of acceptable attrition as the funding cuts bite and providers are asked to deliver more volume outcomes for less.'

A historical moment for community development?

So today it has been announced that Community Development Foundation 'will cease to operate as a public body as of 31st March 2011.' It will continue as a charity. There have doubtless been numerous discussions of the news in a context that acknowledges, first, that CDF had become primarily an agency for disbursing government funds, and their market collapsed; and secondly that in focusing on that role the organisation quickly lost its claim in many people's eyes to be an expert CD agency.

I received the news electronically while sat in a Big Lottery meeting about community organising - ironically, in groupwork discussing communication issues in relation to community organising. I was only able to attend a couple of hours of the meeting but some thoughts struck me then about the nature of this historical moment for CD.

The moment is partly defined by being a few days away from a hugely influential government spending review; partly by the rhetoric of Big Society and its call for millions of people to plunge joyfully into enticing, tranquil pools of community action - hopefully not discovering that there are vicious political eddies and currents, and corrosive contamination beneath the surface, god forbid; and partly by the unfinished business of the empowerment of local groups in determining what happens on their patch.

Today Big Lottery brought together some expertise and experience with a view to informing their future funding programmes. I found three related things to bother me.

First, one speaker, explaining her part as an externally-funded, imported 'community champion', said that her role included challenging 'the negative attitudes of doubters and spoilers'. Meaning, I fear, this: if someone externally appointed comes into your neighbourhood and drives a programme of action with high expectations that you will go along with it, and you choose to raise concerns about the process, then your response is unwelcome and you are likely to be labelled as a doubter or spoiler at best and ungovernable at worst. The process will ride over you AND it will still be called community development. (I may have wrongly interpreted this specific case but it's hardly unheard-of). The easy dismissal of counter views can be very disempowering.

Secondly, I'm bothered about the coercion of people in the community development process. The morality of coercion is not trivial and must be acknlowledged. One of the best community workers I ever met admitted yes, we do coerce people. Because life is short, and you make a judgement about what would be in their best interests, and there isn't always time to wait for them and work with them to appreciate the options...

There is a flurry of urgent interest in community organising to compensate for an economy that has failed its public sector; and we risk losing our appreciation of the nuances of how and on what terms people decide to get involved. We risk finding ourselves in a value-free zone of community action which discourages contestation of issues.

And finally - very briefly cos I feel like a broken record on this - persistent repetition of the C word does not mean that a bunch of people who happen to live in the same area necessarily constitute a 'community', nor should the unreflective use of that word be allowed to imply consensus without challenge. Enough on that.

Government is encouraging community development but has stopped funding what was previously its expert CD agency. The meaning of this moment may turn out to be that community development must come of age, by insisting on its values, being honest about the difficult nuances required when encouraging local people to participate, and not denying the realities of conflict and disagreement.

 

Diversity and representation on local websites

I've had a few conversations and thoughts lately (beginning with the London Neighbourhoods Online [LDN10] event last month) about diversity and representation on local websites. I just wanted to capture them for the time being.

The founders I've spoken to about this have set their sites up with a vague sense of social purpose but no explicit intention to promote community cohesion. The sites don’t set out to be or claim to be democratically representative or culturally representative or accountable.

Those we've looked at in our London study are clearly dominated by people who are relatively affluent, educated and empowered. These are the people who put energy into helping the site grow, contributing and generating social capital (vaguely defined) and civic involvement to sometimes enviable levels.

Around them and among them live clusters of less affluent people, renters rather than owners perhaps, people from minority groups and with English as a second language, perhaps people who may not have home internet access but who use telecoms shops in the high street to call family in other countries and access websites in their own language.

Meanwhile, let's acknowledge that participation on some of these neighbourhood sites can call for a high level of confidence and assertiveness, which may be closely related to levels of literacy. These are text-based environments and the currents are fast-flowing.

Some of our respondents expressed bald criticism of the lack of representativeness, while others suggested that perhaps the sites could make more effort to be inclusive. For example, one wrote:

‘Seems to be for white middle aged people, basically.’

And others:

’I would imagine the website doesnt attract a contribution from a full range of social demographic backgrounds to reflect the actual community as a whole’

‘doesn't seem to represent the diversity of the local community, particularly ethnically and in terms of social class.’

This is more about cultural capital than social capital. Most of the cultures in question have strong family-based networks re-inforced locally. The easy and insensitive English way of detaching ourselves from our elders, leaving them to live out their years in isolation or in homes, is going to seem strange at best to people from Bengali, Turkish or Kurdish cultures for instance. They also network around their foodstores, their cafes and hairdressers, cultural centres and places of worship. So it could be argued that these groups have less need for a structured form of neighbourhood network. This assumption may be misguided. And if it is accurate, there is still a danger in it, which I'll come to.

The logic of the technology allows local ethnic minority groups to set up their own space within or alongside the dominant site. At least one of the sites has tried to encourage this, and it's hardly surprising that so far it has not happened.

We should also recognise that pseudonymity on local forums permits a hidden diversity. We were given a striking example of this at LDN10. On the internet, no-one knows you're a black single-mother who drives a bus. However, that gives no visibility to diverse perspectives.

The point that bothers me is this. Neighbourhood websites are set to increase and to have greater influence. Our survey of council officers and elected members shows recognition within councils that they see online forums as ideal for identifying issues of concern to residents. Local politics gets discussed by those elderly Cypriot men in their local cafe, and it gets discussed on local online forums; but in terms of potential influence over what happens, there's no comparison.

There will come a time when there is a pronounced tension between the legitimate but unsystematic influence of local sites on the one hand, and their lack of representation of diversity on the other. It's worth trying to get in front of that I think.

 

Neighborly Conversations Against Mosquitoes

It makes sense - mosquitoes breed in standing water and don't travel far, so for those affected, a little neighbourly collaboration can make all the difference. Not a problem round our way, but it seems to be working in Arizona. Suggestions include 'holding block parties to talk about mosquitoes' (who could resist?) and

'When your neighbors go on vacation, offer to police their yards. You might offer to clean your elderly neighbor's rain gutters as well.'

'When I was a kid'

I get very lucky in my work sometimes. Today I was in a community shop in Haringey for a drop-in tea and cake session for older people, and had a hilarious time.

Quite a few stories came out - like the one about the neighbour who kept a pig (this is inner city London we're talking about, in this case maybe ten years ago although memories aren't always reliable on dates). He took it for walks like you would a dog, on a lead. But not always on a lead. I missed the next bit of the story as I was sorting cups of tea but when I came back they were talking about butchers' shops.

Then there was a conversation about how 'when I was a kid' you didn't misbehave because everybody knew who you were. ("And mum said that if grandad found out, we'd all be in trouble"). So someone asked, surely you got up to some things you shouldn't have, didn't you? Oh well yes. David recalled how they got hold of a canoe and paddled it down the sewer, "about 14 of us, I don't think anyone found out about that".

Inside or out? Older people and homes

Here's a thoughtful article on the quality of life for older people in a good nursing home, by documentary film-maker Alan Gilsenan in the Irish Times:

'Real care does not reside in the building or its facilities... but rather in the spirit of the people within. Laughter seems to be a huge part of this: a shared sense of humour that engages with the elderly rather than excludes them. Time too is hugely important: the time to sit and talk, to listen. The ability to engage with each person as an individual rather than as a unit. Above all, tenderness. Time and time again, one glanced down a corridor or through an open door to see a gentle hand on a shoulder, a supporting arm, an easy hug. These little gestures spoke of some enduring goodness, some small triumph of humanity, in a health service so maligned and under threat.

'Strangely, while there is a sense of warmth and light inside the home, one would be less certain about the life for older people on the outside. Spending time with the many day-care users, who live independently in the community but visit St Monica’s for one day a week, one was struck by the loneliness and fear of many of them.

'The demise of neighbourliness and the onset of violent crime against the elderly was a constant theme. The quiet emptiness of weekends and bank holidays seemed to carry a particular poignancy. For many, that day inside St Monica’s each week was a lifeline of care and fun and support.'

This theme has been part of the thinking behind the Haringey Neighbourhoods Connect project underway with Networked Neighbourhoods, working with networks of informal neighbourhood carers. We can't insist that older people are necessarily better off ageing in place rather than in an institution, but we can take steps to make it more desirable as an option.

A load of bollards

 

Oh yes. All credit to the Whitchurch Bollards Project.

 

The first aid approach to community safety: views of a tourist in wonkdom

Ben Rogers in yesterday's Guardian:

'Strengthening civility and neighbourhoods is important, but the police have only a minor role to play. Other things – the way places are designed, traffic is managed and the public realm is maintained; the character of shops and local public services, the provision of activities for young people – are just as important as anything the police can do.'

(Most of these and more were covered in Respect in the neighbourhood)

'Some figures have a particularly important role to play in maintaining local social order – park keepers, estate managers, shop keepers. But the capacity of a community or neighbourhood as a whole to help police itself is also crucial.'

The role played here by citzen-run neighbourhood websites should not be missed: our research suggests that where they exist they are greatly valued residents and agencies for the way they facilitate the maintenance of local order. He then goes on to talk about a first aid approach to community safety -

'training people beyond the police to deal with antisocial behaviour... People can be taught how to read a situation so they know when it is appropriate and safe to intervene, and when to call the police. They can be shown how to protect themselves and others from attack. And they can be given mediation and conflict resolution skills. As with first aid, this training should be available to anyone who wants it.'

It's the next step in the logic of co-production. I can see benefits and attractions. But it would be the next step in the formalisation of informal neighbourhood life: like Neighbourhood Watch, it's formalising relations on a basis of distrust, rather than trust.

Starting from trust of course is far harder. As some of the comments insist, there needs to be a better appreciation shown for the realities of living with the threat of the kind of anti-social behaviour that does require policing. Rogers leaves himself wide open to exactly this kind of reponse:

'Can someone arrange for the author to leave cloud-cuckoo land or whichever magical land of dreams he inhabits and demonstrate his idea on one of our estates? The last time I saw some yobs dismantling a bus shelter they had an overexcited pit bull with them. As I didn't know dogspeak for 'Calm down bro. Let's talk through the issues', I left them too it.'

Or this:

'We need proper policing to deal with louts, and not some Big Society codswallop.'

I know what Ben is trying to say, but that comment resonates with me because I have a strong sense of what people experience and their desperation at ever getting a response from policy. It's not good enough to say that ASB is not out of control, because the same people go on experiencing it and have done for a very long time.

'Not out of control' reads 'hasn't yet spread to middle class areas'.

The intention behind the first aid approach to community safety is to address lower level incivility; but there's a real problem in distinguishing unstable behaviour that might be just boisterousness, but could tip unpredictably in an instant into drug-fed random violence.

After 20 odd years (some of them very odd) on the fringes of Westminster and working with people from various think-tanks, still feeling like a tourist in wonkdom, I'm convinced of this: sometimes it doesn't matter how good the idea is, what you don't do is publish it in the Guardian saying 'here's a policy suggestion: we could try doing this to people'.

 

 

It's the povertyism, stupid

I seem to recall Charles Dickens wrote in a letter, 'Oh for a world without an ism!' The extension does make for ugly language, but that's no excuse for not having a public debate about povertyism.

To pick up from my last post, I think it's time to make a lot more noise about disrimination against poor people.

I was far from being the only person incensed by Nick Clegg's recent remark that the welfare system should not be "a giant cheque written by the State to compensate the poor for their predicament". If I fix on that remark, it is because it is a blatant example of embedded prejudice at a high level, expressed by the wealthy and powerful towards those who are not.

And there's a widespread selective deafness at work here. More than 40% of adults claim that there is ‘very little poverty’ in Britain today, an Oxfam blog post tells us. And a recent Oxfam briefing paper points out:

'People living in poverty in the UK make a vital contribution to the economy and society through unpaid caring and community work. But public attitudes prevail that people on low incomes – and particularly those on benefits – are ‘scroungers’ who are to blame for their own poverty.'

The authoritative Damian Killeen describes it like this:

'Public attitude surveys... reveal a widespread resentment of people living in poverty. Better-off people may often disapprove of the fact that many poor people share the same tastes and consumerist aspirations as they do. This can extend to a denial that poverty exists and hostility towards the costs of providing people with opportunities to escape their poverty.'

This plays out painfully in people's experience of judgemental attitudes in public space and in the ways they get treated by agencies. One example Killeen gives illustrates how embedded povertyism has become in our systems:

'One mother of five was offered £36 per week to meet her family’s needs after leaving her job to protect her children from an abusive father. She said she thought she was being punished by the system when she believed she was putting the interest of her children first. She kept her family together by selling the children’s toys in order to buy food.'

Should we be talking about class discrimination? We've learned to identify racial discrimination at last and are supported legally in doing that. Even age discrimination has finally been recognised, if not yet brought to order. But I think we'll continue to struggle to identify class discrimination, partly because class is now so fractured and far fewer people self-classify in the established categories any more.

That's why I think it's right to talk about poverty discrimination and to make more noise about it in the run-up to the coalition government's spending review (20 October). JRF's report on Understanding attitudes to tackling economic inequality, Killeen's paper mentioned above, and Oxfam's more recent Something for nothing report seem to be the starting-points.

Does it matter that we don't have a term in widespread use for discrimination against poor people? We have a disability discrimination act and I'm not aware that the awkwardness of the term 'disablism' was a brake on that. Povertyism is an awkward word for a distasteful concept - straightforward nasty prejudice against a large class of people who, by inconsiderately not having much stuff, manage to make others uncomfortable about their own greed. I don't understand why more people are not bloody angry about this.

But there wasn't much of an outcry against Clegg's words, which shows how poverty discrimination is routine and acceptable in British society. Being unrecognised as an 'ism' in the political armoury (what were Labour doing all those years?) makes it all the more devastating.

It's the poverty, stupid

Now, a word about the received wisdom that ethnic diversity at neighbourhood level gives rise to lack of cohesion and weakens social relations. There seems to be an assumption that directly relates diversity to perceptions of antisocial behaviour and disorder. It matters because I suspect the assumption influences many actions and decisions in a hidden way, in policy, practice and everyday behaviour.

I recently mentioned a paper by John Hipp (Social networks, 32(2), 2010, subscription required) which hints at a little more complexity: perceptions of disorder are explained by general social distance between individuals, not simply social distance based on ethnicity.

And last week the ESRC published some research on neighbourhood social heterogeneity. The researchers found 'little evidence' of a significant effect of ethnic diversity on people’s perceptions of a neighbourhood.

Among the findings:

• Population turnover does not influence perceptions of antisocial behaviour but is associated with lower levels of social cohesion and trust.
• Living in a low density area is strongly associated with more trusting, supportive and cohesive communities.
• Deprivation has a negative impact on levels of cohesion, trust and informal social control. It also increases the chances of perceiving high levels of antisocial behaviour.
• While there was some evidence to suggest that ethnic diversity is associated with reduced levels of community cohesion, trust and informal social control, the impact is much smaller than that of neighbourhood deprivation.
• The ethnic make-up of an area, either in terms of mixing or dominance, was not significant in explaining perceptions of antisocial behaviour.
• Those living in the most ethnically diverse areas were the least pessimistic about the national crime trend.
• Ethnic diversity does not influence the significant associations between deprivation and negative perceptions of a local area. However the effect of ethnic diversity on levels of social cohesion and trust is dependent on the level of deprivation in the area.

So, it's the poverty, stupid. And attitudes towards people who are poor. There have been people working their backsides off in the field of poverty alleviation and wealth equalities, ready to voice this message to those who would hear it.

So one of my next posts I hope, Clegg inspired, will be about the nastiness of povertyism: I want to ask why there isn't any debate about disrimination against poor people?

How bad will it get before people get really angry?

A man known as the deputy prime minister, which you'd have thought was a responsible job calling for intelligence, a sense of perspective and the ability to reflect in a balanced way on important issues, has been quoted as saying that it is not the role of the state "to compensate the poor for their predicament".

I feel chilled. The further these people go with their superior, complacent and condescending attitudes, the nearer we get to something very confrontational and potentially violent.

Community development and Small State

'Big Society' is an imposed brand and for me gives rise to the same sort of resistance that a commercial advertising campaign would generate. But those who claim that it is nothing more than branding are not quite right. In spite of the coalition's coyness about policy, there have been policy assertions and it's appropriate to examine them. CDF's Mel Bowles has rolled up her sleeves and done just that from a community development perspective, in a measured, questioning recent paper available (if barely discoverable) on the CDX site.

She quite rightly highlights the distinction between politicised and non-politicised community work. Community organisers under Small State will not be expected to support local people in fighting to protect or gain access to existing services:

‘Neighbourhood groups will be expected to develop (additional or alternative) public services and bid to provide them... Community organisers – and others – will be expected to support them to do so. The policy context requires intermediaries... to refocus their attention on developing new community groups that are willing and able to develop and deliver public services…’

She goes on to note that:

‘none of the policy material to emerge thus far addresses the extent to which community organiser support should focus on bringing people from different backgrounds together or on supporting vulnerable citizens and groups to get involved.’

Discussing opportunities for CD, the paper concludes that social action in the context of Small State looks likely to involve 'hybrids of community groups, social entrepreneurs, public services and private contractors overseen by citizens, as well as local governments’.

And among the challenges, the big one:

‘ensuring active citizens are not solely providing services, but are also able to make demands upon authority and power.’

Which reminds me, back in April before the election, I wrote:

'start from the recognition that community action is fundamentally, insecapably political, and get used to it. Attempts to depoliticise it will be self-defeating and may lead to a revival of confrontational radicalism';

and Julian Dobson wrote:

'If we want community activity that won't frighten the horses and will leave most of society pretty much as it is, and will give you social action without having to worry about social justice, this kind of set-up may be a good bet. Those who want more substantial change may well find themselves suffocated in such a network.'

Which in turn invites the familiar point that much of the debate about Small State has taken place in the blogosphere, none of it included in Mel's cited sources. We continue to see two literatures on public policy, the traditional one ignoring the upstart.

 

 

Silly bagger

Robbie told this story how he saw a fancy carpet on a clothesline, rolled it up and made off with it on his bike. This was over Eastleigh way, you know where the new houses are, well not so new, and how he was so neat going across the big field there, it was all wasteland then, said he carried his bike for a bit then put the rug down and rode over it so his tyretracks wouldn't show. And the same on the fields coming back past your end, where it's muddy in the dip. The sort of thing he did, he wanted to be a proper criminal. Robbie took it to the feller in that used-stuff store down on Paisley Lane, he said that's not a carpet lad it's a curtain, could you not tell the difference? There should be two. And they both should be clean.

Minister helps to create safe, tolerant and inclusive communities

We have a Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who leads a team of ministers with the following responsibilities:

• creating safe, tolerant and inclusive communities
• building better homes and neighbourhoods
• promoting strong and accountable local government
• improving local services and environment
• regenerating and investing in our towns, cities and regions.

The Planning blog has an entertaining slant on Mr Pickles's splendid achievements since coming to office, including of course the crucial identification of the need for a portrait of the queen at CLG headquarters and the crowd-pleasing requirement to have English county flags displayed outside the building.

Among the comments, this one will hardly seem eccentric:

'I’m trying to give this government a chance but I’m running out of patience. Why is this pickled egg arsing about with flags and pictures of the queen!!??'

Well all politicians get a little flak from time to time. What worries me is that he's probably doing his best.