There is a variant of Gresham's law in mass communication: bad news drives out good. We have been getting bad news about the state of neighbourliness and community.
In most ordinary use, the word "community" refers to place and the people who share some bonds by reason of living there. If you go to live in a new place for a short period, as a transient, you will be unusual if you develop any great attachment to the people who live there. But stay there over a number of years and you will be equally unusual if you do not feel, to some extent, that you do belong there. The place becomes part of your identity. People who stay in Stockton or Swindon end up feeling that they belong to Stockton or Swindon.
Stable residence is the first key to community. A second element is added if residence becomes multi-generational. Children are the seedbed of community. Parents have something in common, simply because they have children. In practice this can mean a great deal. Children are often more sociable than their parents, and if they have the chance to meet with other children, at nursery or at school, they easily form friendships. They can then bring their parents together.
The third element is when kin is added to kith. If a parent has several children and they stay in the same place for long, a local kinship group is in the making. When the children become parents, often forming relationships with contemporaries nearby in their turn, a further and even more important strand is added to the web of neighbourhood ties. The children transform their parents' parents into grandparents, siblings on each side of the family into uncles and aunts, their children into cousins. Each relative is also a link with further relatives and with their relatives' friends, who are links to other kinship groups. The resulting network has a special kind of solidarity which derives from all or many of the members knowing each other.
In the 1950s one of us (with co-author Peter Willmott) described how such a local kinship and community system provided informal care on a huge scale in Family and Kinship in East London. Extended families constantly exchanged mutual aid, especially between women; families, by and large, looked after older people. The community was not just a set of relationships; it was also a moral economy.
Seems a long time ago? Yes, and it would not be worth mentioning except that such bonds are still of the utmost social importance. A repeat survey in East London, not yet published, finds that despite all the changes-including the increase in the numbers of women going out to work-mutual aid is still very marked within and outside of families, for ethnic minorities as well as for the white population. This is shown, for instance, by the extent to which grandparents are relied on by working mothers when they need to nominate someone for their children's school who will act for them in an emergency. In one primary school in East London, 243 families had one or more children at the school. As many as 181 gave grandparents as their emergency contacts; of these, 148 were grandmothers and 33 were grandfathers. Mapping emergency contacts for the country as a whole would provide the first approximation for a national map of kinship density. There are plenty of other hints about the continuing importance of the extended family. The most recent survey of British social attitudes concluded that "the family is still the dominant source of support and care for most people."
Commentators endlessly discuss the weakening of the sense of family, citing the divorces and separations, the single parents. What the commentators do not say so often is that the "vertical" family does not seem to have weakened in the same way, or to the same extent, as the "horizontal" family. Nor are grandparents always cut off from their grandchildren by distance. Even if they are geographically distant, they can still be brought together by means of the telephone and the car. Maureen Lipman in the BT ad-the grandmother congratulating her grandson on his "ology"-was good humour and good sociology. And where are all the thousands of parents with children tied into the back seat speeding to at the weekend? Most of them are rushing to get to Granny's.
But important as kinship is, it is not as important as it used to be. Mobility has increased and will continue to do so. The labour market currently seems to demand that it must. Other means of providing mutual aid have to be found to supplement the many services which the family can still provide. Community is the larger, all-embracing concept. Tony Blair and senior Labour figures have not been sparing in their espousal of the need for it. They have been rather less specific about the means which could be used. So let us help.
British socialism not only owes more to Methodism than to Marxism, it also owes much more to the practice of mutual aid between working class families than to doctrines of public ownership. This tradition of mutual aid goes back a long way, to the friendly societies, sick clubs, co-operative societies and trade unions of the 19th century-a tradition which was overthrown during the Thatcher and Major regimes, which encouraged building societies and mutual insurance offices to become profit-seeking companies. But it is a tradition which can and should be reinstated.
Community can also be affected by housing policy. Buffeted by short-termism and a general distaste for principle, the previous government had no general guidelines for its policy on housing. The keynote was muddle. Nor was New Labour's manifesto as enlightening as it might have been. The goals of the other three great high-spending social services-education, health and social security-are relatively clear, which is one reason why they are high-spending. The goal of the fourth great social service-housing-has not been as self-evidently compelling. The primary purpose of housing policy under the Tories was to encourage the purchase of homes by those who could not afford them-a policy which led to the greatest number of forcible evictions since the Highland clearances of the 18th century.
So how can housing policy contribute to community? First, people should have the opportunity to live near those to whom they already feel some obligation through family or friendship. Those who allocate social housing will have to abandon their obsessive rationing. Currently people are forced, often after a long wait, to move to new neighbourhoods every time their family or housing circumstances change. Thus they are left without the local support they had before-the same local support which provides (and always has) the bulk of social care in this country-far outstripping anything the welfare state has ever provided or will provide. The best form of stewardship of public resources is to maximise the contentment people feel with their homes and neighbourhoods. Such stewardship will never be achieved by housing the maximum number of the most disadvantaged people in the closest proximity, in the name of "meeting needs." Needs may be met; but new and infinitely greater problems are created. We need an in-gathering of extended families among people living in social housing, creating the conditions for stable communities. The islands of social exclusion, the barracks of the underclass which many council and housing associations estates have become, could thereby be transformed.
In the past, informal mutual aid has become formal mutual aid. The state (or voluntary organisations funded by the state) has taken over provision of services which had been given before by family members, neighbours or friends. The care of children, the sick and the old have all been encroached on heavily by the state since the second world war. But constraints on public spending-which many would like to see decline, as national wealth increases-mean that the state can encroach no further. The question is no longer: what can the state do that we used to do for ourselves or for each other? Now the question is: what can be taken back from the state by the individual, the family and the community? So state pensions are being eroded; private health care is on the increase; old people must pay for their own care; some neighbourhoods are hiring their own security guards; parents must play a larger role in their children's education.
The belief has grown that the formal can-indeed must-encourage the informal rather than the other way around, as it always was previously. Nor is it only financial constraints which have created this imperative. The services offered by the state nationally and locally have been found wanting-nowhere more painfully than in the care of children without family support.
It is this reversal from the state to the voluntary, from the large to the small, from the formal to the informal, which we can build on in social housing. An arrangement analogous to home-school contracts in education could contribute to the transformation of some of the worst neighbourhoods in the country. If people were asked to sign a Mutual Aid Compact, committing them to making a contribution to the community in a way they find easy, there could be a huge expansion of volunteering; the growth in the demand for paid care might be stemmed.
People should not be coerced into making a contribution to their local community. If they cannot do it they will not be thrown out of their home-but signing the Compact could create a new expectation with which a significant number of people would comply. A new custom might be created-not a new law; and custom is invariably more powerful than law.
The level of volunteering in our society is rising sharply. People have more free time and a greater sense, perhaps, that something must be done to improve the local park or children's playground. The decline in public services is proving a motivator. We now have the possibility that public services, such as parks and libraries, could be turned into voluntary services. If they cannot-or should not-be funded by charges to customers, they could be paid for by "voluntary taxation" in the form of the National Lottery.
But Britain is a country as well as a little universe of localities. However much mutual aid there is on a local scale, to make it effective there has to be mutual aid on a national scale. Fraternity depends on equality as well as equality on fraternity. Without geographical redistribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer districts, not very much will happen in those places where the need is greatest. The whole must come to the aid of the part.
