Can the UK regain its sense of community?
Curiosity killed
Shipmate
There's been a lot of discussion about the way communities have supported each other through the lockdown in contrast to the ethos of individualism driven in the wake of Thatcher's "there's no such thing as society". Is it possible to go back to a society that is prepared to support each other?
This is also partly a reflection on some of the themes coming out of the Prince Philip thread in All Saints, where the way he was absorbed into UK society as a refugee has been contrasted unfavourably with the current "hostile environment" which is another facet of an attitude that protects what we have and is unprepared to share and support the weaker in society, or the world.
We've been here before, when Cameron cynically proposed the Big Society, it's a discussion that keeps on going around.
This is also partly a reflection on some of the themes coming out of the Prince Philip thread in All Saints, where the way he was absorbed into UK society as a refugee has been contrasted unfavourably with the current "hostile environment" which is another facet of an attitude that protects what we have and is unprepared to share and support the weaker in society, or the world.
We've been here before, when Cameron cynically proposed the Big Society, it's a discussion that keeps on going around.
Comments
The biggest barrier to greater social cohesion is the print media, and as long as various parties benefit from their rage to money machine we aren't going to see any changes there.
This is part of what I was trying to get at in the OP on this thread, that we've turned into a rotten society with no concerns for others, and asking if there's any way back to a more caring Britain.
@chrisstiles - I agree the press is deeply unhelpful in driving wedges between sections of British societies to continue their policy of divide and conquer. Having been sent a QAnon video that purports to question the reality of Covid19 via WhatsApp recently, I also think that social media as it currently exists is part of the problem. I heard/read some commentary about how Facebook might be taking down some of the sites, but the misinformation is still rife on Instagram and linktr.ee and that the business model of Facebook prevented them addressing these issues as they would have to completely rethink their basis.
Caring for whom ? Families ? Neighbours ? Fellow citizens of our own country ? Humanity at large ? Seems to me that it's only human to care more for those closest to us.
What evidence do you have that people are less concerned and caring than they used to be ? Do people not give to charity any more ?
The UK may have opened its arms to refugees in the mid-20th century, but taking in one of Queen Victoria's great-great-grandchildren, a prince of both Denmark and Greece, someone whose noble house had four names before it was shortened - someone from a noble house! - isn't a great example.
My other thought reflecting on Prince Philip was that he had subsumed his wishes and desires into the service of the Queen and this country, there's a quote around somewhere where he said something like "you just make the best of it". Comparing him to our current crop of leaders just shows them in an unfavourable light; to them service seems something expected of others towards them
One of the problems is, it seems to me, that we do not have many good examples of self-sacrificing service in our leaders as encouragement towards the building of a fairer society. Currently we have a party in power that is very much into greed and helping their mates.
And as @chrisstiles pointed out, this whole Not helped by the media trashing anyone in the limelight.
I find myself thinking that when the C word is mentioned (as it often is) in the Guardian.
I'm beginning to think - rather as I thought at Christmas, when some of my older Guardianista neighbours organised some carol singing in the street, but seemed simultaneously queasy at the contents of the hymns and ended up pushing the singing in the direction of Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red Nosed f****** Reindeer - that 'community' is a shorthand for 'the good bits of traditional British culture in so far as we understand them, divorced from the Church which always claims they were outworkings of the Spirit, but where we are sure those good bits will blossom and flourish (as leaves on the tree) so much better once we have jemmied them off the rotting superstructure of superstition and prejudice which we are sure is what the church _really_ represents'.
Because I am a Christian, having failed as an atheist, I think my neighbours are wrong. Community is part of the created order - Dooyeweerd (ooh get me) would say it is part of the social 'aspect'. If we attempt to worship it - that is, derive ultimate value from it - we will come very unstuck, as idolaters always do. It's interesting to read the Guardian, to start to learn how that process is playing out.
(This post was going to be about Private Walker and the historicity of the Spiv, but I got carried away).
I think you and I share the same deep-seated aversion to desacralized Christmas music.
And the ironic thing is those people are usually(*) the kinds who would otherwise be complaining about the "Americanization" or "corporatization" of culture.
(*) I don't know if it's true of your older Guardianista friends specifically, but there is generally a somewhat paradoxical overlap between people who complain that "Everything's so Hollywood these days" and people who, on political grounds, dislike singing some of the very few public-domain folk songs still in wide usage.
It's not a bad example. The UK left a raft of royal cousins to fall to the executioners (including Philip's cousin Saint Elizabeth) behind when it suited expediency. Philip's youth and relatively low profile as much as his connexions helped him into England, when its élite rather favoured this energetic Adolf fellow. And, as I mentioned on the other thread, Canada's record at the time was embarrassing and nigh-criminal.
I'm not able to contribute much to community here, as I was in a linguistic (1 in 3) and religious (1 in 50) minority in my youth, and more or less the same through my adult life. As well as on dusty (well, often muddy) trails in France and Sain, I found community in my neighbours of all shades when I was in quarantine. I have been most disconcerted by those who assumed my religion and ethnicity ensured that I shared their values.
I can imagine what that might be like here in theory - in practice the extreme weakness of the church here (in particular my little corner of it) means I haven't had to face that, really.
I don't want to knock our Guardianistas too hard. They're doing their best. It's doomed, and they hate something I love, but OK, there it is.
Seems to me obvious that
- some politicians are adopting postures of being tough on immigration because they think it will be popular, rather than from any conviction that this is a good thing
- significant numbers of people want less immigration, because of the large existing numbers of unassimilated immigrants, rather than from any innate xenophobia.
Interesting that you use the word "community". A group of people is a community to the extent that they have some level of shared culture.
Communities can be more or less open to new members who want to be part of that shared culture. But no viable community welcomes those who don't.
I gather that there are many towns and cities in the UK with large minority communities of people of other cultures. A Chinese community, a Polish community, an Indian community, an Irish community.
If an Irishman living in Britain were to say that he doesn't feel part of the local Chinese community, nobody would be surprised or think something was terribly wrong with that. Being a Chinese community, rather than just a random set of British people identified by being partly of Chinese descent, means living in a strongly-Chinese-influenced subculture. Which nobody who doesn't speak Chinese can really be part of (although culture is more than language).
Anti-immigration sentiment in Britain isn't something opposed to community. It opposes the fragmentation of what was once a British community into multiple minority communities. It's the sense that multi-culturalism has been foisted on a population who never wanted it and were never asked. It's a conservative looking-backward to the community of the past and desire for that community.
I think that's right, although I might prefer a reference to "the imagined and idealised community of the past" in the last sentence, and in that context would want to clarify " the fragmentation of what was once a British community....." because it is a dangerous romanticisation of what never existed. It's the sort of mindset that lays the foundation for fascism. The problem with "community" is that it posits a set of incontestable values that everyone naturally shares, apart, of course, from those who do not share them and are consequently not part of the the community. There are those of us who like neither religious nor civic conformity. We don't want to live in Disneyland.
Second: People did and do identify with different levels of commonality in different circumstances. I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire - but the speaker elects to fight because a war summons a sense of English identity which supersedes for a time that of peasant vs landowner.
You might say we exist in a state of latent community. Events - from a sporting fixture to a festival to a pandemic - will see a manifestation.
Statistically the strongest anti-immigration sentiments come from areas with a very small small percentage of immigrants (less than 5%).
I come to Britain and work in the NHS, or do plumbing or building or joinery, or open a restaurant, or run an open-all-hours shop or a hundred other things - but all my work, all my service, all my productivity, all my taxes, count for nothing because I still eat pierogi or have an accent or more melatonin than you?
Community and Communion are from the same root, and Christians have always been good at excluding the 'wrong sort' of Christian as much as including the needy. In short, there's no answer to the question, because everyone's sense of community is different.
There are few quotes more deserving of hellfire.
Nowadays, people are partial members of many different communities for different aspects of their lives. On the one hand, this gives us a wider range of contacts but on the other hand it means our ties to any specific group of people are weaker.
Good posting. Agree with most of this, especially first paragraph
Suppose you're a Frenchman running a restaurant in England.
Your work gets you wages (or profits if you own the business). Your taxes get you the services that government provides (defence, law & order, a stable currency, roads, the NHS, etc etc). What gets you "one of us" status in the community ?
Do you want to be a culturally English person of French descent ? Or do you want to be a French expat living and working in Britain alongside the English people ?
Do you want to speak English at home ? Work on getting rid of your French accent ? Give your children English names ? Cheer for England in the 6 Nations ?
Or do you want to start the day with Le Figaro instead of the Times, and approach every political question with the preconception that the French way of doing it is best ?
You can't choose to be culturally French and then complain that your English neighbours don't count you as fully part of their community. (Or rather you can, but there would be no justice to your complaint). That's not how community works.
Which is not to say that life isn't more interesting for having a few expats from different countries around the place. Being one expat isn't a bad thing. But being one of thousands of expats from the same place in the same corner of England ?
Seems to me that when one can no longer buy bread, but only baguettes, and the pub closes down because everyone's in the Bar-Tabac, then something has been lost.
I grew up in one of the most Jewish areas of Manchester - with a kosher butchers and the Jerusalem Post in the local newsagents, synagogue and Jewish school. The secondary school I went to was one third Jewish, so I had several Jewish friends. I never felt that anything had been lost from the area because of this.
I was annoyed some important working class history (Chartist meetings) locally hadn't been taught to us in school.
In the past the cultural and doctrinal differences between the CofE in England and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland gave rise to separate viewpoints.The treatment of the Irish, first of all as a colony ,then as often unwelcome settlers on the larger of the British Isles reminds one of those who are excluded from the community as well as those who are insiders.
Language has been the major unifying force (including in the past the 'King James Bible) as well as the (earlier) power of the royal Family and loyalty to the British Empire, it was understood by the people.
Much of this has now changed and the Irish have been replaced by others seen as incomers disturbing the peace and taking the jobs of the locals. And we don't want to talk too much about the Empire !
As in other aspects of life we have to learn to be continually building community, valuing our differences and accepting that they can be enriching for that mythical 'one community of the nation'
But how often in the past did those groups intermingle in any significant way?
I think Britain as a whole has never been a single community. Communities are much smaller than that, existing at the level of maybe a village or small town at most - and even then only when everyone (or virtually everyone) has a shared cultural and social background.
I'm a Brit living in the US. My family's tastes are basically British, our kid's accents sound quite English to American ears, we read British newspapers, watch British comedy, and don't have any interest at all in popular American sporting activities.
We're not culturally American, and don't claim to be.
But we are members of the community. "Community" doesn't have to mean cultural homogeneity. One of my daughter's friends moved here from India a few years ago. Their family sounds Indian. They cook Indian food at home, follow the Indian news, and her dad and I talk about cricket sometimes. They're part of the community too.
We're a community because we have common goals. We shovel the same snow in the winter. We worship in the same churches, play in the same playgrounds, attend the same schools, shop in the same shops, experience the same storms and power cuts.
One of our neighbours died last year - a father with a wife and two young children. Everyone in the neighbourhood stepped up to help his widow with practical needs in the months after his death - bringing them meals, clearing their snow - whatever help they needed. That's what community is: it doesn't mean that we have to support the same sports teams, or enjoy the same things, or speak with the same accents.
Sure - if you live in a village, or an area of a town, that is suddenly overrun by French immigrants, such that perhaps 2/3 of the homes are occupied by French families, the local shops are taken over by French families, and begin to serve French tastes, then the original character of your village has been lost.
But when you live in a village, or an area of a town, and it's 20th century inhabitants find themselves overrun by 21st century people, such that 2/3 of the people have modern tastes, something's been lost, too.
Change is part of life. You don't get to set everyone else's lives in aspic, just because you like things the way they were - all those other people have choices as well, and their choices and preferences aren't less important than your own.
The Jewish eruv is, perhaps, a rather unusual case: you don't need a particularly high density of people with the same cultural background as you to help you navigate a new country / language / whatever - a handful is plenty. But if you're an immigrant from some country or other, and you want to be able to purchase familiar foods etc., then now there's an advantage to big clusters (independent of racism), because you need a large enough group of people with tastes like yours in order to support a grocery store that sells the foodstuffs you want.
The area I live in has quite a lot of immigrants from India and Pakistan. Because there's enough people with that background, you can also find a couple of mosques, a Hindu temple, and several Indian grocery stores. So if you're a new immigrant from India, say, then if you move somewhere in this area, you have easy access to familiar foods, and if you're Hindu or Muslim, there's a place of worship for you. Other things being equal, those are advantages.
You can look at this diversity in two ways. 1. It makes life more colourful and interesting and adds to the spice of life. Or 2. It's a threat to 'our' traditions and is thus scary.
I think more people than we like to admit go with option '2'. And that very fear damages what might be called 'community cohesion.'
I happen to go often (in normal times) to a local cafe run by a family of Italian-origin Catholics. You see all the above groups in that cafe, and we all seem to rub along together pretty well. I hope this becomes a microcosm of society as a whole, but I am not wildly optimistic. The haters seem to be in the ascendant.
I don't think you have to have to go as far as "scary". Lots of people stop at "I don't want it". Many people don't like change. The post office that was a 5 minute walk from where I grew up has recently closed. Nobody living in the area likes that - it means they now have to trek out to the main post office. The independent corner shop/newsagent owner retired and sold up - he was replaced by one or other of the corner shop franchises (Spar, maybe), which offers a worse service, and his absence is a matter of regret for many long-term residents.
New housing means that the roads now have more traffic, and the hedgerows and fields that one used to be able to walk to have been replaced by semi-detatched brick boxes. The nice butcher I used to shop at has closed down (driven out of business by the supermarkets). Any number of businesses I used to patronize, and activities I used to engage with are no longer there.
It's OK to be sad about all of that. Times change, towns change - it's not reasonable to expect the places I grew up to remain unchanged for my convenience, although it would be nice if they did.
But is there any fundamental difference between me regretting that the shops I remember have mostly gone out of business (and often been replaced by the big supermarkets) and someone regretting that the things they used to enjoy are now a Polish cafe or a Halal butcher?
It's OK to be sad that the sounds you remember from your youth have been replaced by other sounds. But the truth is that those sounds were going anyway. If they weren't replaced by people chatting in Polish or Urdu, they'd have been replaced by something else.
Maybe if the planning system is working properly then the developer doesn't get to build a big new housing project unless they also give something to the existing residents of the area to compensate them for the loss ? (Such as building a community centre, or donating some of the land as a public park).
Not wanting big changes to the character of your area is a desire that cannot always be satisfied. But it's a legitimate desire. And it's not an expression of lack of community - rather the reverse.
What makes this difficult is the disconnect between small change and large.
One French family at your church or school or in your village is a positive - added colour. Multiple French families who chatter to each other in French instead of engaging with the rest of the people starts to be a negative.
We can build new communities, as various comments have already said of their own experience of being part of one, but we can't rebuild the commnunities we had. Globalisation has happened, at the behest of corporate interests (mostly on the right politically) wanting to move whoever they want wherever they can be employed most cheaply. This is what we got for being the sweatshop of western Europe. Now we are no longer that, we can safely atrophy in sameness. Why would anyone want to come here now?
How dare people talk only to people they know! If the interaction were based on kinship, or belonging to The Lodge, or the bowls club, rather than language, would that be more acceptable?
I can think of groups where I've shared language, common activity, age range, ethnicity, you name it - and still been an outsider.
There's a well-kent deli in Edinburgh where the otherwise Scottish-accented assistants will switch to Italian for some customers. Are they being exclusionary or just, as we all do, flexing between different social relationships?
I presume the book is 'Bowling Alone' ? I was meaning to quote from it to one of the earlier posts, but couldn't find my copy to quote the references/studies he uses to show a decline in community engagement over time.
He’s very culturally German and, in conversation says ‘us Germans’. He’s also very involved in German politics.
Our street has a good sense of community, coffee mornings, calling on each other etc. If we pass someone gardening in their front garden a long chat ensues. Today’s chat, with a lady down the road (yes, I do know her name) was about whether cucumbers should be kept in the fridge.