I heard something on the radio over the weekend that got me thinking. A woman from Northern Ireland was speaking about the network of people who, connected by WhatsApp, had rescued and supported numerous immigrant families during the recent riots. It was difficult listening. It was also inspiring, seeing what is possible when social media is used positively for the benefit of others. However, when the woman said that the community was only doing what the government should have been doing, then I began to ask myself a series of questions, primarily about the place of community and its relation to government:-
Where is Community?
The inspiring element of the report from Northern Ireland came from the fact that this was ordinary people, linked together by WhatsApp, who had acted to help those in trouble. It was community action. However, community is something that appears to be entirely lacking in so many parts of our country. Ironically, it may be stronger in Northern Ireland than in many other places, but I would not guarantee that.
Since COVID most of the houses down our little street have been sold and new families have moved in. As I walk the dogs past the various houses then I have noticed that every one of them has either heavy wooden shutters pulled to across the windows or closed curtains. We used to have a thriving little community down this street, with Christmas gatherings and summer parties. Now I nod and say hello if I happen to see a neighbour moving rapidly from their car to their house, and most of the kids appear to know the dogs, but there is no conversation, no community, and I am sure that we are not alone.
Perhaps, you might ask, why have I not got out there and created a community, organised the gatherings, invited neighbours to parties? A good question, but I am not really a community person and never have been. I have always associated community with exclusion and would see community more easily among the rioters in Northern Ireland, or those who share their ideology, than among those who support the excluded. It sits rather oddly with me, therefore, to be advocating for community.
Can Government Create Community?
I remember all too well the Blair government’s attempts to coopt the idea of community. When I was working on church-community relations in Manchester then everything the government did was labelled ‘community’. There was community policing, community health care, care in the community and so on. This was never real community and, as I argued at the time, this was an attempt by government to save money by claiming a narrative that still, in the 1990s, had positive associations in the public mind, and using it to push people away from government services.
The Cameron government, some ten or twenty years later, talked about the Big Society and advocated communities working alongside government to tackle some of the unmanageable problems within society. I am sure David Cameron, like Tony Blair, was working with the best of intentions and believed, explicitly, in community and government working in partnership. The fact that both ended up looking like government pushing responsibility onto the community has, I would suggest, done lasting damage.
Who is Responsible?
We now have a situation where community has declined yet further, both through deliberate government action, but also through the rise of social media, the fall out of COVID, and through many other factors. We now turn to government and expect them to answer all our problems, look after the weak, guarantee our safety, or whatever it is. Many of these roles have never been those of government at the local level, and government cannot do these things without the implicit, if not explicit, support of the community. If nothing else, we do not give the government enough money by way of taxes to do this, and, I would say, we never will. It is, I would strongly argue, not their job!
In days gone by, every individual had responsibility for the members of their wider family, particularly the children, the elderly and the vulnerable: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. Every household also had a responsibility for those who came to live in their neighbourhood, supporting those who were down on their luck because at some point in the future we might need their support in return: ‘love thy neighbour’, or whatever might be the equivalent in other religious discourses. Is this simply romanticism? I am not sure. Of course, many people failed both their relatives and their neighbours, but overall, on average, statistically, the support was their and was visible. Now it is not.
Who, then, is responsible? Do we condemn the government whenever others suffer, while refusing to let them raise our taxes? Do we deny any personal responsibility, sticking to our own, social media based, communities of interest (bubbles/echo chambers)? Can we see a way of nudging the pendulum back towards community? Or must we now wait for society to finally collapse before we can all begin again, building new communities because of absolute necessity? I am not sure I am very optimistic on this one…
Martin Stringer Quartet 