Can the UK regain its sense of community?

Curiosity killedCuriosity killed Shipmate
edited April 12 in Purgatory
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.
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Comments

  • chrisstileschrisstiles Shipmate
    edited April 12
    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?

    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.
  • @Enoch, to respond to your comment here, rather on the Prince Philip memorial thread, and quoting the original exchange in full to add context:
    Enoch wrote: »
    @Eutychus - that's unfair. The UK took a lot of refugees in and around WW2 and absorbed numbers of Kindertransport children to name but one group of many. I attended university with many children of those refugees. That's the period when Prince Philip was granted British citizenship - around 1946-7, after he'd already served in the Royal Navy. Comparing the crap treatment of refugees now to what happened then is not comparing apples with apples
    @Curiosity killed I disagree. It is comparing apples with apples.

    Those apples weren't perfect but they were more than edible. These days' apples are not. They are bad, mouldy, festering and rotten.

    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.
  • yohan300yohan300 Shipmate
    edited April 12
    I think it's a myth that before Thatcher everyone supported each other or that there was less "individualism", whatever that means. I doubt the total quantity or value of support within communities has changed much at all, only the qualitative nature of it which makes it harder to observe (for example people might be less inclined to speak to their neighbors but will readily help in an online support group for some rare problem that they have experienced).
  • What sense of community? Define "community" please
  • RussRuss Shipmate
    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.

    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 ?

  • RuthRuth Shipmate
    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.

    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.
  • I wasn't thinking so much of Prince Philip as a good example of taking in a refugee, although @Augustine the Aleut suggested on that thread that the UK took in some 80,000 refugees around the time of WW2, and we were encouraged to support those refugees. We are now a generally xenophobic society, unwilling to support others, discouraged from doing so by the "hostile environment" established by Teresa May and continued by Priti Patel (two recent Home Office Ministers). I know what a challenging time asylum seekers placed locally are having.

    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.
  • What sense of community? Define "community" please

    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).





  • stetsonstetson Shipmate
    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

    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.

  • Ruth wrote: »
    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.

    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.

    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 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.
  • RussRuss Shipmate
    We are now a generally xenophobic society, unwilling to support others, discouraged from doing so by the "hostile environment" established by Teresa May and continued by Priti Patel (two recent Home Office Ministers). I know what a challenging time asylum seekers placed locally are having.

    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.

  • KwesiKwesi Shipmate
    Russ 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.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    First: I don't believe there ever was a unified, homogeneous British community. There have always been a mosaic of loyalties and identities, with rivalry or even conflict as likely as cooperation and unity.

    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.
  • Russ wrote: »
    We are now a generally xenophobic society, unwilling to support others, discouraged from doing so by the "hostile environment" established by Teresa May and continued by Priti Patel (two recent Home Office Ministers). I know what a challenging time asylum seekers placed locally are having.

    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.

    Statistically the strongest anti-immigration sentiments come from areas with a very small small percentage of immigrants (less than 5%).
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    And what exactly is this 'assimilation' that's so great?

    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?
  • Does no-one here remember the signs in boarding houses in the 50s and later saying, 'No blacks, dogs or Irish'? There were anti-Catholic riots in the 1780s, anti-Irish riots through the 19th century, anti-Black riots in my home town in 1919/1920. 'Community' has always been self-defined and has been about who is excluded as much as who is included. Like the chirpy Cockneys sticking together when Adolf left them with nothing during WW2, this sort of community spirit is at least half fiction. The mining communities stuck together during the strike but you didn't want to be a manager or go back to work, even if you had grown up side by side with everyone else.

    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.
  • Signs outside rural pubs in the 90's saying "No gypsies"
  • mousethiefmousethief 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?

    There are few quotes more deserving of hellfire.
  • RicardusRicardus Shipmate
    I have the impression that in the Olden Days communities were a bit more 'vertically integrated' (for want of a better term). That is, your neighbours were very likely also to be your workmates, your fellow worshippers at church/chapel, and the people you socialised with.

    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.
  • TelfordTelford Shipmate
    Ricardus wrote: »
    I have the impression that in the Olden Days communities were a bit more 'vertically integrated' (for want of a better term). That is, your neighbours were very likely also to be your workmates, your fellow worshippers at church/chapel, and the people you socialised with.

    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
  • Penny SPenny S Shipmate
    Pub in Dorset field study area "No students".
  • RussRuss Shipmate
    Firenze wrote: »
    And what exactly is this 'assimilation' that's so great?

    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?

    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.
  • EigonEigon Shipmate
    My culturally French neighbours are absolutely part of the local community. They've done a lot of good work with the local junior school, raised money for environmental charities, and are delightful people. Why should they be excluded by people who were born here just because they speak English with an accent and buy Le Monde newspaper?

    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.
  • ForthviewForthview Shipmate
    Even without the admixture of 'foreigners' the UK has never been entirely one community.
    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'
  • Marvin the MartianMarvin the Martian Admin Emeritus
    Forthview wrote: »
    In the past the cultural and doctrinal differences between the CofE in England and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland gave rise to separate viewpoints.

    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.
  • Russ wrote: »
    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 ?

    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.
    Russ wrote: »
    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.

    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.
  • I think it's worth noting that "concerns about immigration" are only taken seriously when the immigrants are poor and/or brown. When they're rich white folk buying up all the houses and leaving them empty most of the year we just get handwringing about not interfering with private property.
  • HugalHugal Shipmate
    So what about ethnic quarters. When I lived in London we were near Southhall which is very predominantly South Asian. Then of course there are predominantly Jewish areas on North London as well as Le Marais in Paris. Are these areas helpful or are they cutting yourself off from the society you live so you can live in the society your left.
  • And how often are those segregated communities the choice of the minority rather than the majority? Whether it's white flight in areas now predominantly British Asian in NW England or Bristol estate agents (likely including my grandfather) operating a colour bar to keep black folk in certain areas, or the response of white congregations to black Christians we've got to acknowledge the contribution of racism to the formation of distinct communities.
  • HugalHugal Shipmate
    I did a magic show at a wedding in Southall at the conservative club. It felt very white. They has an air pistol shooting range out the back when it was closed but I hay could have just been the bar manager.
  • There are advantages in clustering together - consider, for example, the magic bit of wire that Orthodox Jewish communities have erected around certain areas to allow Orthodox Jews to do things on the Sabbath. Or consider, if you're a recent immigrant, the advantage of having some neighbours who speak your native language / understand the cultural context you've come from and can help you navigate the differences in the place you've moved to. And those advantages exist independent of racism.

    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.
  • Those require a certain critical mass of people with a particular need, but they don't require that the group are largely segregated. That usually happens if other people choose to move away from the area and/or people from that group are treated poorly elsewhere.
  • SighthoundSighthound Shipmate
    I happen to live on the edge of a big Jewish area. We have one of those eruv things; it does no harm as I explained to someone who objected to something similar proposed in their area. We have a growing (prosperous) Muslim minority and Afro-Caribbean faces are much more common in the locality than they used to be. That's without going into the diversity in the white 'Christian' just-about-majority.

    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.
  • Sighthound wrote: »
    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 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.
  • It's ok to be sad about the loss of things you like, it's when that turns into disliking people and treating them badly for where they or their ancestors were born that it becomes a problem.
  • RussRuss Shipmate
    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.

    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.

  • It's exactly the same in the parts of France where large numbers of British families have settled. English becomes a lingua franca and their communal life is not penetrable to monogolot Francophones.

    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?
  • AravisAravis Shipmate
    But a positive for the French families, or they wouldn’t do it. It’s a lot of effort to integrate into a new group if this also involves speaking a less familiar language. Also, there’s a natural instinct to form a sub-community when you find a few people with whom you have a lot in common amongst the larger group.
  • EigonEigon Shipmate
    Why is it a negative for me if half my neighbours speak in a different language amongst themselves? I spent a lot of childhood holidays in a North Welsh village where Welsh was widely spoken. My gran went to Welsh language chapel there (she recognised the hymn tunes, if not the words, and went "la-la-la" loudly). I played with Welsh children, and learned some rather haphazard Welsh, but everyone could also communicate with us in English, and made us welcome.
  • DiomedesDiomedes Shipmate
    In my experience there is also a 'hierarchy of respect' afforded to foreign languages used in a community. I remember teachers at one school I taught in waxing lyrical about how wonderful it was that little child X was living a bi-lingual home and speaking both French and English or German and English. They weren't nearly as impressed that little child Y from India or Pakistan was fluent in Urdu or Punjabi. Often child Y would also be learning Arabic at Mosque classes, watching films in Hindi and speaking some dialect language with their grandparents.
  • FirenzeFirenze Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Russ wrote: »
    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.

    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?
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    I've just read a review of a book by the sociologist Robert Putnam. Apparently his study has it that a sense of community in the US declined to a low in the 1900s, rose again up to about the 1960s, and then declined again. He thinks the initial harbingers of the decline or possibly the initial causes were a view of economics based around the free action of the individual actor and a view of morality that restricts morality to just respecting the individual rights and freedoms of other people.
  • Dafyd wrote: »
    I've just read a review of a book by the sociologist Robert Putnam. Apparently his study has it that a sense of community in the US declined to a low in the 1900s, rose again up to about the 1960s, and then declined again.

    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.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    The Upswing - recent enough to just be reviewed now.
  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    It's probably been said anadromously, but our hive instinct only kicks in when the hive is threatened. Otherwise we're a pack uh monkeys.
  • Ethne AlbaEthne Alba Shipmate
    So from that point of view, kicking the proposed super league into touch Should unite us all ?

  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    It certainly looks like it! 's'not fair is it?
  • BoogieBoogie Shipmate
    My son has lived in Germany for twelve years and is a German citizen.

    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. :smiley: 🥒
  • Martin54Martin54 Shipmate
    Our previous street had a street party every year and when we finished there we'd go a mile or so to the one where we live now as three households opened up their gardens to all until 11 with live music. On Xmas day the paterfamilias of the central house of the three goes out at noon and rings a hand bell and people come out increasingly for a toast. We have a monthly litter picking exercise, 15 people last month. This in one of the most culturally and economically diverse streets in Leicester therefore Britain and the world. Perpendicular to the most culturally diverse street in Britain.
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