The library, like the pub, the village hall and the church is a vital community institution - even if you don't use it

...the contexts in which civil society operates have become much more hostile. In most parts of the world, communities are increasingly divided. Violence, intolerance and inequality are on the rise. Authoritarians of different stripes have gained a foothold. Restrictions on freedom of speech and association are increasingly common, with just three per cent of the world’s population now living in countries where civic space is defined as “fully open.”And public spheres seem incapable of addressing any of these concerns.

This depressing picture of civic society's polarisation comes from Michael Edwards at Open Democracy as he asks how we escape from the tribalism of modern society - we see more and more groups representing "...a particular position, identity or interest..." and fewer groups "...that attract a diversity of members in terms of class and political affiliation". In part this reflects how politics and political positioning has clustered more and more around these ideas of identity and interest especially on the left. For all the talk of inclusion and equalities, we live in an increasingly fragmented and isolating society.

A while ago I came to the conclusion that the route to community cohesion has to come through the things we share rather than the things where we differ. When I stand with some of my Muslim neighbours watching a firework display, we share the same joy and pleasure at the display - our differences in faith, culture and background are of little consequence. When I go into the local Co-op I share the same mundane experience as all the customers, our identity is not a matter at issue or concern.

We don't have a library in Cullingworth (I don't think we've ever had a library although village old-timers may correct me on this one) but it seems to me that communities taking pleasure in literacy is another of those things that break us away from this polarising emphasis on identity. Yet the way in which we conceive of a library remains caught in the past - perhaps because too few of us make regular use of libraries. My Mum and Dad went to the library once a fortnight and borrowed twelve books and whenever you visited they'd be sat there book to hand. And when you've read six books a week for 70 years, it's fair to say that the breadth of subject for conversation gets pretty broad - literacy is a wonder.

But libraries, created at a time when books were, relative to income, expensive now face a world where books are largely speaking much cheaper. Plus alternatives multiply as the digital world of film, audio, games and words explodes. But these worlds act to reinforce isolation and polarisation too - going to a library is a social act, I'm not so sure scrolling through a Kindle recommends list can be described as one. The problem is that, despite this, fewer of us are using libraries - from 2006 to 2016 users in England declined from over 48% of the population to 33%. That's still a third of the population using libraries but the trend in use is still downwards driven by the digital world and, increasingly, by decisions to close libraries (the matter of local government funding is a whole other subject - you can read some of my thoughts here).

For all the wrong reasons we are pulling funding from libraries, shuffling them into the voluntary sector (and I don't want to belittle community run libraries as they're fantastic places run by super volunteers), and closing them down. And Councils are using the excuse of declining usage and the advancing digital world to justify these decisions even though they all know its really because of the underfunding of social services. To return to where we started, the library like the village hall, the parish church and the pub is a neutral place free from that polarising focus on identity. And libraries do more than just lend you a book.

I asked Twitter whether people still used the library and can confirm that, at least in the unrepresentative world of my Twitter feed, this is the case. But what struck me most was how much, for want of better words, other stuff libraries do. Here are a few:

A quiet place to work
After-school clubs
Somewhere to read the newspapers
Audio and ebooks
Music recitals
A place to write
Children's play
A performance space
Lectures and demonstrations
Job search and advice
Health signposting and advice
Poetry and book readings
Book signings
Meetings
Printing out documents, homework

The problem - and again this might, in part, be a resource issue - is that most people haven't the first idea these things are available. This is from the USA but I'm pretty confident you'd find a similar answer in England:

The survey notes that while 62 percent of libraries offer online career and job-related resources, 38 percent of adults don’t know whether their library offers them. Likewise, 35 percent of libraries offer high school equivalency classes, and nearly half of adults don’t know whether their libraries offer them. The numbers are similar for programs on starting a new business, online programs that certify people who’ve mastered a new skill, and ebook borrowing.

The latter is an especially glaring example of the dissonance between services provided and knowledge of those services. While 90 percent of libraries offer ebook lending, 22 percent of adults say they don’t know whether their library offers ebooks, and 16 percent say their library does not offer ebooks.

If we want strong communities - and I'm a conservative so I definitely want this - we need to treasure the spaces and places that allow for exchange and interaction beyond the boundaries of our identity and interest groups, outside our tribe. But, like so much that's done by local government, the national debate is characterised by MPs thinking they know better and Whitehall trying to get a pounds worth of sweets for ten shillings. We all know these institutions matter but carry on doing things that put them under threat.

Libraries are more than just places filled with books, they're a community institution that helps bridge divides in society, promotes cohesion and provides a neutral space for that community. Government is failing us if it doesn't see its role as making sure that these sort of institutions are cherished. And funding for such vital places is probably more important than free broadband, bidding for the world cup finals or building superfast trains systems.


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Trust the people doesn't mean the people are right, it means that people can be trusted

Lack of trust is a major barrier to making civic life more meaningful and inclusive. Although the majority of Interested Bystanders described civic engagement as being actively involved and present in one’s community, there was a large distrust of and lack of attachment to local community and government, which deters engagement.

This is one of the headline findings from research done by the Knight Foundation in Charlotte, North Carolina and it reinforces the challenges in marginal and deprived communities where levels of trust in community institutions and public sector agencies is much lower. The term 'Interested Bystanders' refers to residents who are interested in what's happening in their community by not engaged - "people who are paying attention to the issues around them, but not acting on those issues".

We're very familiar with this sort of disengagement because we see it in every community. Partly it persists because it's easier to let other people get on with the activism and, anyway, nobody ever asks these folk for help, so why should they bother? Some of it relates to issues with race, policing and the manner in which segregation is problematised. But perhaps the biggest reason - something the Knight Foundation focus on - is a lack of trust especially in local and national government or its agencies as well as also a more widespread distrust in community and neighbours.

There are a lot of things that fuel this mistrust ranging from the media narrative about crime especially fraud, through public heath or police campaigns targeting young people as a social problem, to the widespread convenience for all agencies, public and private, of demanding identification before service is received. In a world where the TV, radio and newspapers report each day on how ordinary people are ripped off, how violence happened to people 'in the wrong place at the wrong time' and how young people are running riot, it's easy to see how people become mistrustful of others (most notably where, as can be the case, the negatives on crime seem to focus strongly on minority groups - black people, refugees, travellers, Roma and so forth).

This media narrative does not reflect the real situation where, for most people most of the time, the streets of an urban community are perfectly safe and entirely welcoming. Nor does that narrative ever show how nearly all - over 99.9% of consumer transactions are done safely and honestly. Or that most of those transactions had no need for any person to formally identify him- or herself before receiving goods or services.

If we want to restore trust - and as a conservative I consider this imperative if we are to restore community and the social capital that makes it work - it must start with public authorities and the government. Yet - as witnessed by Public Space Protection Orders, ASBOs and the ever-extending list of things that require some sort of ID - government really doesn't trust its citizens, all these things assume that in entirely innocent circumstances people (especially poor people, young people or black people) are up to no good.

Trust the people is a popular slogan (I know this because only the other day Matthew Parris was saying what a bad idea it is) but I've a feeling that we're not really thinking through what it might mean - choosing something akin to Rousseau's "general will" rather than appreciating that nearly everybody, nearly all the time can be trusted to get on with things undirected by government, unlimited by bans and restrictions and entirely honestly. Our problem is that government - and the courtiers of media, law and bureaucracy who clatter and bluster round the state's castle - really doesn't believe people can be trusted, especially the poor, the less skilled, the minority and the provincial. The result of this mistrust is what the Knight Foundation uncovered in Charlotte - lots of interested but disengaged people and a bunch of dysfunctional communities.

Trust the people doesn't mean the people are right, it means that people can be trusted. We should maybe try a bit of it.

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Restoring community - an imperative for conservatives

Each day I see more and more that us conservatives, by allowing assorted Marxists to capture sociology, have done the world a disservice. This is because Marx was an economist meaning that he had little or nothing to say about sociology - as a result left-wing sociologists became activists not academics. Much - not all, a long way from not all - of the subject is arrant nonsense.

But it matters. The questions it asks are not answered by economics - for sure there's a bunch of economists splashing about pretending they can inject morality into their subject's dry modelling but this isn't asking the questions a sociologist would ask. Here's Aaron Renn:

There are a number of people in the national media who make the argument that things aren’t so bad, that if you look at the numbers this idea that things are horrible in much of America just isn’t true. It’s easy for me to believe this is actually the case in a quantitative sense. But man does not live by bread alone. When you have an iPhone but your community is disintegrating socially, it’s not hard to see why people think things have taken a turn for the worse.

There are social goods (if you want to use that dreary economics language) that are as necessary as the material benefits brought us by liberal capitalism. And most of these goods are about community rather than anything definable in the typical national politics. As I wrote a little while ago:

If conservatives are to make a difference - and what's the point if that's not the aim - we need to stop trying to make everyone's lives better by centralised fiat. And start with making our and our neighbours lives better. Conservatives should apply that old shopkeeper's adage - 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'. Look after communities - the bit you can see from your front door - and the whole of society, even the bits we can't see, benefits.

It may seem trite, as Renn does, to hark back to a past age when we didn't have to lock our doors and left the keys in the car on the drive. The local concerns about burglary here in Cullingworth are real yet we have so much more than a past generation who lived lives less plagued by the fear of crime. But we can't blame the good life, the betterment of our lives as consumers - running water for folks in Aaron Renn's home county and the central heating for families here in cold, damp Cullingworth.

The willingness to be a community is still there but it is suppressed by the manner of public service management, by the transformation of voluntary organisations into agents of the state, and by the permissions and regulations laid down by the state between ordinary folk and helping their neighbour:

That's right - permission to care. That professionals in the employ of the Council, the NHS or their satellite agencies needed to allow people to look out for their neighbour. In this I saw a dead culture - one murdered by the good intentions of public agencies. That we might not be allowed to pop in on Mr & Mrs Jones to make sure they're OK, maybe make them a cuppa and have a chat for half and hour. Unless we've undertaken the official "befriending" course, got the required clearances from the state and been attached to an organisation that "delivers" looking out for the neighbours.

We need to look again at the risks of individual social action and start to err in favour of community and its capacity to self-police rather than respond to every bad case with more rules, controls and regulations. It is the suppression of social innovation, suggesting it is only possible through endorsement by the sate or its agents, that damages community. Anyone who has been involved in local communities (and I've been a local councillor for two decades) will know they are buzzing with ideas, filled with people who want to be involved. We have a generation of wealthy and healthy older people who aren't just looking to have extended holidays, yet so much of public rhetoric seems to be about how those folk are uncaring and selfish.

For me the biggest lesson from things like the Brexit vote isn't about divisions but rather about distance. Government - nearly all of it - is distant, complicated, unapproachable, opaque and thoughtless (and this is a large part of why we dislike the EU so much). We look at what happens and wonder why decisions are made the way they are, why no thought is given to neighbourhood, why the word community is used without, it seems, even the vaguest understanding of what it means, and why the narrow interests of a small economically-successful class seems to dominate the thinking of every political party, every academic and every pundit whose number the BBC producer has in her mobile phone.

When we talk about social capital, we tend to do so in a sort of abstract way - as if it it something that can be bottled by middle-class academics and civil servants and poured onto struggling communities. But social capital is all about people standing on their doorstep, seeing something that could be better and saying "we can fix that, we can do that". It's not about local councils having 'community strategies' or lottery agencies funding middle-class experts to administer to places needing help. Nor is it about trying to turn that willingness to help into the new vanguard of the proletarian revolution let alone the need to resist neoliberal hegemony.

The starting point is simply giving places - local communities, neighbourhoods - the capacity to do what they think will make where they live a little better. From fixing some fences, clearing paths and picking up litter to helping mind neighbour children or doing what Mr Sparks did for me, my brothers and dozens of local children in the South London suburb of my youth - took us to play cricket in the summer and swimming in the winter. So long as people think they have to wait for permission to do these things, they won't do them. The imperative in building that social capital we say we've lost is to get government out of the way of people who want to help.

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The pub, the cafe and the diner - the fraying of social capital

One of the features of society has been the shared social institution. Except this all sounds like some sort of terribly pompous concept in social anthropology. What we really mean is the sort of place that The Fureys sang about in the Red Rose Cafe:

Down at the Red Rose Cafe in the Harbour
There by the port just outside Amsterdam.
Everyone shares in the songs and the laughter.
Everyone there is so happy to be there.

Salesman, poet, dosser, docker, farmer and banker all enjoying the fact that they're sharing something - even something as mundane as a beer or a coffee. And, in a lot of places - perhaps even Amsterdam too - these 'shared social institutions' are dying out. Here's Aaron Renn on one of them - the American Diner:

But there are many other forces at work, including changes in the structure of our society. One thing the disappearance of diners illustrates is the loss of shared social infrastructure spanning across social classes.

Something I’ve always liked about diners is that they are the kinds of places that you could find people from all walk of life. There were cops and blue collar workers, college students, professionals grabbing breakfast, etc. It was the kind of institution that was broadly patronized across social groups.

These kinds of institutions are in decline. There has a been fragmentation of the shared American common culture that existed as recently as 1990 into a multiplicity of niche markets.

I touched on this when I wrote recently about the decline of rural Italy - every village with a tatty little bar at its heart serving up coffee, sweets and the occasional stiff drink. And plenty of people having been variously waxing poetic or raging with anger at the decline in the traditional English boozer. The thing here is not just that these places are going but that there are no new 'shared social institutions' replacing them, no new places that transcend barriers of class and age without it looking forced. Worse still we adopt a snobbishness about blue-collar institutions - either dismissing them as bad places, or else creating pretentious pastiches.

When McDonald's opens a new restaurant round the corner from St Peter's Square in Rome there's an outcry. I mean McDonalds - entirely the wrong aesthetic for such an iconic place. Yet the reality - as the video here reminds us - is that McDonalds is comfortable, welcoming and understood. The same goes for other places - the Pub Curmudgeon writes about those old estate pubs that only sell keg beer and what food they have comes in bags saying 'ready salted', 'salt and vinegar', and 'cheese and onion'. Not the sort of place you and I would ever go to, far too rough and common.

I've a feeling that, in places with fewer places to eat and drink, the sort of social mixing Aaron Renn sees dying in Manhattan still persists. But it's also true that richer folk have become more separated from their lower class cousins - not just the grandees who always lived a sort of sheltered life but all of what we'd call the better off:

There’s also been a gulf that has opened between the consumption and cultural practices of the upper middle class (the top 20% by education and income) and everyone else. They shop in different stores, eat in different restaurants, drink different beers...

I was in a restaurant in Shoreditch recently. Nothing too fancy just a bar-restaurant that has some live music. I joked to my wife that I was the only bloke in the place without a beard. I could also have said that I was the only bloke there over 50. Yet I'm pretty sure that, with a little effort, I could travel a short distance from that bar and find a pub where the reverse would be true - instead of well-off middle class thirtysomethings, I'd find poorer working class fifty- and sixtysomethings.

The problem for that traditional pub is that the agenda - social, political and cultural - is not being set by its customers. The agenda is set by that top 20% Renn refers too - a set of folk who are excited by trendy artisanship when it's done by their mates but not at all excited by the possibility of visiting the sort of place where those working-class folk are going (as an aside, the achievement of McDonalds has been to get beyond this class division despite the best efforts of food snobs to stop them). We tut a little at Wetherspoons, dismiss Pizza Express, and wouldn't be seen dead in one of those steakhouse type places run by regional breweries. But these places - chain restaurants and the like - work.

Does all this matter? And even if it does matter, do we care enough to do something about it? After all there's a little bit of romanticism in the idea of lords and peasants sitting down together sharing a foaming pint of ale. Those shared social institutions didn't remove class barriers but rather they permitted a little bit of understanding to trickle in either direction. And the traditional pub, those Italian cafes and many other such places were the haunts of men with the only women serving beer or filling up coffee cups. This probably isn't true of the American diner but even there we see a sort of rosy folk memory derived from old movies and TV shows more than from the reality (a lot of poor quality food served badly in a dirty environment).

What does matter, however, is that we think a little more about spaces and places where we're able to share something with whoever else is there. And that - like the pub, the diner and the cafe - those places contain the part of our culture that we all share. I've a feeling that those campaigns to save pubs are as much driven by that folk memory, the idea of the pub as the beating heart of a community, than by the reality of the pub being saved - a myriad of Vics, Rovers Returns and Woolpacks where the neighbourhood's shared events are mulled over, debated and laughed about.

There's a tendency to consider that bringing communities together requires some sort of publicly-owned place, yet the reality of cafes, diners and pubs is that they served this role (at least in part) while being straightforward for-profit businesses - and none the worse for all that. And a further tendency - I suspect Aaron Renn falls into this trap in his focus on Manhattan - for us to see the lack of social capital in densely populated cities as somehow the norm when, once we get out into suburbia, this starts to change to the point when we reach the exurbs of small towns and villages as see those very institutions we thought were dying actually thriving.

Yet again the thing that is driving the collapse of these social institutions, that is fracturing brittle social capital, isn't people no longer wanting these things but rather the brutal necessity of urban densification and the rejection of the suburb. Planners, designers, developers and cultural pundits see everything as a stark divide between urban and rural - it's either a city filled with breathless, high velocity living or else a bucolic rural idyll, gentle and somnolent. The death of the shared social institution is its death in the city where people quite literally don't have the time for such things and the nearest we get to such interaction is in the queue at Starbucks - assuming we're not the sort who goes to that really special coffee bar round the corner run by a bloke with a splendid beard.

If we're to have the strong society we always say we want, we need to pay heed to what these changes tell us - the decline of the pub, the cafes that close, the deserted Italian village, all send a message that the bindings of community, the relationships that make society real, are fraying. And on-line messaging, international travel and facetime don't begin to repair the tears in those bindings. We talk a great deal - or those of us in and around local government do - about how everything is local and how we need to build community. Yet the truth of our polity, culture and social approach is quite the reverse, geared to serving the economic needs of the great city rather than the lives of people in those communities.

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The Inner City - urbanism's dirty secret

From Chicago through Dublin, Glasgow and Manchester to Lyons, Barcelona and Vienna, the Inner City is urbanists' dirty secret. We've spent decades bashing away at solutions and nowhere are we any closer to what the right policies might be.

Just a reminder what it looks like - this is Baltimore:

Take, for example, McElderry Park, a 103-acre area just east of Johns Hopkins University's centrally-located medical center. The neighborhood, which was once middle-class, is now a severe version of the city's downward spiral. About one-third of families there live in poverty, and workforce participation levels are 54%. Nearly three-quarters of residents don't have any college education, meaning they are generally supported either by the government, or low-wage service jobs—which make up an increasingly high percentage of jobs in the city. The neighborhood's physical emptiness symbolizes another discouraging trend, population loss, which is at the heart of Baltimore’s problems.

As Scott Meyer who painted this picture observes, this isn't an anomaly in Baltimore or indeed any large city in the USA. And we know - we see the riots, despair and dislocation in our own cities - that it's not an anomaly in Europe. In the USA, Donald Trump made much of the inner cities in his campaign - in that blunt and divisive style of his, he said stuff like:

“Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever...You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.”

Set the rhetoric aside for a second, hold back your distaste for Trump - doesn't he have a point? If that sad, declining picture of Baltimore is any guide then these seemingly intractable problems of the inner city are genuine. And Trump is right - if you're a decent parent how are you going to raise your children, keep them out of trouble, keep them alive and off drugs when the only thriving industries are crime and welfare?

And is isn't new. Here's P J O'Rourke from 1991 in New York:

Mott Haven was once a district of substantial apartment houses, comfortable if not luxurious, the tract homes of their day. These sheltered the Jewish middle classes on their way from the Lower East Side to White Plains. Now the buildings are in various stages of decomposition, ranging from neglected paint to flattened rubble. Abandoned buildings are office space for the local criminals, who deal almost entirely in drugs. (There's not much felonious creativity in a modern slum.) Scattered among the remaining turn-of-the-century structures and the empty lots piled with trash are various housing projects with large, ill-lighted areas of "public" space, dead to all traffic and commercial activity. Squalor and overcrowding are often spoken of as almost a single phenomenon, but in New York's poor neighborhoods the lower the population density, the greater the filth and crime.

Or, to make clear this isn't a problem merely of US inner cities, here's The Economist in Paris:

For all the schemes and money, the banlieues are a world apart. From 2008 to 2011 the gap widened between unemployment rates in “sensitive urban zones” and in surrounding areas. Schools have a high turnover of often-inexperienced teachers, gaining merit by doing time in the banlieues. Job centres are understaffed. The unemployed say their postcode stigmatises them. Drug dealers compete with careers advisers to recruit teenagers. “Here, drug trafficking has always helped circulate money,” says Stéphane Gatignon, Sevran’s Green mayor. “It’s how people scrape by, despite the crisis.”

Every city has its dark side, the place where the crime, drugs, squalor, poverty and despair lives. We've spent millions - we're still spending millions - on these places. We do up the houses, Smarten up the schools. Put in neat pocket parks. We even try to do up the people - schemes of training, child care, job support. And yet if we take a map of England's poorest places from 1968 and a map from today, there's a frightening correlation. For sure some bits of inner London and a few streets of Salford and Manchester are now swish and gentrified. And in the seaside towns and mining villages the collapse of their industry created new places of poverty - Blackpool, half the size of Bradford, has twice as many children in care. But not much else has changed.

We sort of know what needs to be done. That old line about escaping the ghetto - finish school, get a job and keep it, get married and stay married - is still true. But the problem is that not only does this not happen enough, there are young people on the edges of these places - people who start out OK - whose lives collapse them into the slums. Immigration helps, especially immigration from even poorer places, but only when you've an economy that generates the jobs those people need. That's France's crisis - in a country where one-in-ten of working age is out of work, the banlieues have double that rate and even higher rates of youth unemployment. It's no damn use having employment protection, mandated working hours, minimum wages and child care if the result is there aren't any jobs - especially if you're black or an Arab.

Britain's most dysfunctional places are different - mostly filled with native white communities (often mixed with long resident afro-caribbean communities) rather than immigrants. In an economy, even in the North's big cities, that creates jobs, not great jobs but a step on that ladder, too many decide to step aside from that world. A community settling for a half-life on benefits topped up with bits of crime and casual, cash-in-hand work. What's gone is the thing - whatever it was, church, club, union, workplace - that showed those growing up how it worked. There's no-one saying "learn something at school, get a skill if you can, get a job - any job - and keep it, try to make your relationships work".

Instead we get the well-meaning and the bothersome. The former do a lot of good by stopping the whole place falling into utter chaos and letting some few young folk escape the life of the slum. These social workers, policemen, housing officers and folk delivering job programmes are, however, mostly a sticking plaster, more about giving a broken community a hug than fixing the break.

The bothersome on the other hand are different - these are the folk who know better - they want people to change their lifestyle, to conform and are more worried about delivering stop smoking clinics and fat clubs than seeing behind the eyes of their 'clients'. There they'll see someone who wants to know why they should bother being 'healthy' when booze, fags, easy sex and crap telly are the only things that take the edge of pain away from a shit life.

It's no surprise that, in this world, the people most likely to escape are those who've found god. Church, mosque and temple provide a place of calm and the faith a direction - all those beliefs will point to the very things that allow people a road to a better life. Educate yourself. Work hard. Respect others. Do the right thing. In times past we also had secular institutions embedded in these working class places that did the same - trade unions, clubs and pubs (often with sports attached), friendly societies, allotment clubs. A host of activity done by the community not to the community.

These places weren't perfect but, in dealing with the imperfections - sexism, cliqueiness, casual racism - we've lost sight of the good things like community, shared experience and decent role-models. What we have left, with the death of these institutions, are the institutions that are least wanted and most exploiting - crime, landlordism and the external state.

I've often suspected that, in part, we don't want the responsibility of trying to fix these broken places. We've been happy to manage their problems rather than invest in the intensity needed to provide a new hope. For sure, it's easy to say to people "your life, your responsibility" and then make sure they don't starve (while locking up their sons and taking the children off their daughters). But is that really what we should be doing? Or should we be looking for the skeletons of past institutions are trying to breathe new life into them?

It's easy to point at the city as the problem with its lack of personal scale, its busy-ness and its tolerance of wealth and poverty in the same place. But rebuilding the bones of an old community, helping shape strong people - that to me seems worth doing. To do this we need to set aside fifty years of sociological presumption, to lift the stone and see glorious life not nasty bugs. Instead of make people's habits the problem, we should be asking how we build back the social infrastructure that once held places together and pointed people to a better life - even when sometimes those things involve booze, fags, burgers and cake.

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Social capital and the problem with immigration - some thoughts

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Immigration is a problem. OK, you can call it a challenge, a significant policy issue or some other 'slightly-dodging-the-issue' form of words but the truth is that people – voters – are bothered about immigration. We know this because they tell us so in polling and because, if any of us have any ears, we hear it every day. Whether it’s a casual racist remark in a queue to go through security at Leeds Bradford Airport or the comments that trail behind crime reports, stories about ‘multiculturalism’ and descriptions of events at mosques.

The problem is that, whatever people say, immigration really isn’t an economic problem. There really isn’t much – or indeed any – substantial research evidence showing that immigration has a negative impact on levels of employment, economic growth or other measures of economic performance. So when Jonathan Portes reports this he is right:

“The research found evidence of a positive and significant association between increases in employment of migrant workers and labour productivity. It found that recruiting from outside the UK had allowed employers to fill skilled and specialist roles and enabled some organisations to expand. Employers reported that migrants' skills are often complementary to, rather than substituting for, those of UK born employees.”

However, this really isn’t the problem (or challenge or significant policy issue) at all nor is this simply a case of people being fed misleading information by politicians and the media. A positive economic impact simply isn’t sufficient for people to accept the social changes that immigration implies. Yet much of what we might call ‘immigration-positive’ research and comment is dominated by economic considerations, arguments over statistics and accusations that opposition to immigration is essentially racist.

If we are to understand immigration and, more importantly, develop policies that respond to the genuine concerns of very many people, then we need to get a much better grip on the sociology of immigration. We need to get a better idea of how immigration affects existing communities, how those communities react to immigration and how we manage migration so as to give a greater chance of that community reaction being positive rather than negative. By focusing on the economics of migration we have missed completely the real driver behind those community concerns that some politicians exploit.

Indeed it is the need to reduce negative social impact that should drive immigration policies and controls rather than the prevailing preference for points-based systems based on a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether the ‘skills’ of the immigrant are ‘needed’. The evidence, both from polling and from qualitative studies, shows consistently that worries about immigration relate inversely to people’s exposure to immigrants. I would add that my personal view is that Britain’s current anti-immigrant feeling is substantially driven by the migration from EU accession countries being to parts of the UK that have had limited prior experience of immigration.

None of this gets us any closer to a basis for setting policy - assuming we’re going to plonk for somewhere on the continuum from totally closed borders to totally open borders. Regardless of the economic case for immigration, the potential social negatives (the cost of which may not be wholly contained in an economic model of migration) require some degree of control. And that will mean that some people will not be allowed to migrate into the UK.

And there is a good argument for striking a balance in terms of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity. I know we like to talk about how many different languages are spoken in our communities (this isn’t new – I remember the Principle of Bedford FE College saying just this in 1983) but the breakdown in social capital implicit in that heterogeneity damages both the immigrant andreceiving communities:

“People in ethnically fragmented communities have lower levels of interpersonal trust; lower levels of civic, social, and charitable engagement; less efficient provision of public goods; more sluggish economic growth; and lower levels of happiness and general satisfaction. It seems that the more diversity we experience, the lower our quality of life is.”

The risk we run with open borders is that they meet a short-term economic need but in doing so provide the seeds for more sluggish development in the communities where those ‘needed’ immigrants settle. Indeed, we should recognise that some degree of homogeneity is essential if a community is to develop the institutions, connections and structures essential to building social capital. Put more bluntly, the people within a neighbourhood have to share more than the fact of living in that neighbourhood if it is to become community rather than merely a place.

The unanswered question here is how we determine the point at which we set our migration policy. This has to be where the economic benefits of immigration exceed any negative impact on educational attainment, health or crime. Not just because those negatives carry a cost that isn’t necessarily picked up by the employers of immigrant labour (the prime beneficiaries of the economic benefit) but because poorer schools, health and community safety are reflections of a dysfunctional neighbourhood, of the breakdown in the social capital needed for the long-term.

Finally, there has to be some connection between the expectations of the current demos and the actions of government. In a democracy this should be a statement of the obvious but I fear it is not so – too often the response from public officialdom to concerns about immigration is to say ‘there, there - don’t worry’ or else to suggest that the person expressing concerns is simply a bigot. A further type of response is to flood the individual with (essentially meaningless) statistics accompanied with the implication that they are some kind of idiot.

We need to have immigration controls for the very simple reason that the public – the demos – demands that we control the arrival of culturally-distinct people into the neighbourhoods where they live. This can’t be dismissed as racism, bigotry or prejudice (although all those things may be present on occasion) but rather should be seen as articulating the collapse of social capital in many neighbours that large scale immigration brings about. People are not idiots but are reflecting concerns about the loss of community in their words and choices. And government too often fails to pick up those concerns in defining policies (locally and nationally).

I believe that immigration enhances our nations bringing new ideas, attitudes, food, drink, music and dance to pour into the English cultural melting-pot. We are a vastly better society for having welcomed generations of migrants to our shores. And I don’t want to live in a place where we push people away, where we don’t offer sanctuary and where there’s a preference for a sort of sclerotic monocultural numbness. But if we want migration to work for everyone, we’ve got to manage it, to try and mitigate how it can damage social capital and to direct our attentions to integrating all the wonderful, hard-working people who have come to make their lives in our great country.

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Eurovision and social capital - some thoughts....

Last Saturday over 8 million Brits spent a fun evening watching the Eurovision Song Contest despite the inevitability of the British entry languishing at the bottom of the pile as always. Now this doesn’t make Eurovision quite the most important event of the year – I guess the finals of the X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent will get a bigger audience and one of the Great Debates in our recent election got more viewers.

However, Eurovision has become a mark in the calendar, something we share as a nation – part of the social capital of Britain. Now before you all rush off let me explain. Much of our TV viewing is only marginally social – if it’s not a solitary activity, it’s shared only with our immediate family and friends. Indeed, some critics of our modern culture single out the goggle-box as a prime culprit for the loss of social capital.

However, events like Eurovision belie that gloomy prognosis. What we see is a much broader engagement – not only the large numbers of viewers but all the other aspects of social interaction. There’s pubs and clubs organising Eurovision nights, some people get together with a bottle or two of cheap fizz and some chocolates and others make it a big family occasion. Workplaces have sweepstakes, the newspapers are full of stories and twitter, facebook and other bits of the interwebs abound with chitter-chatter. It’s more than just a TV event.

And today – whether or not we like it – these televisual events, Eurovision, X-Factor, World Cup and BGT, represent a new calendar. These are as much part of the social fabric as Christmas, Easter and Bank Holidays. But more importantly still they provide a bridge – these events allow us to interact, to get together and to share something – even something a trivial as a singing contest. We are provided with the means to engage in conversation – and this works even when the other person thinks Eurovision is a dreadful festival of plastic pop! We have an opinion, there’s no indifference and this results is positive engagement – building what has been called ‘social capital’.

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The Smoking Ban Problem - polls, libraries and predicting future behaviour

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Many experts on polling question the effectiveness of the “what if” question:

“If politician X was leader of Party Y why would you be more or less likely to vote for them”

There are too many chances to be wrong for this to make much sense as a question – Politician X isn’t leader, you many already have a 100% likelihood of voting for Party Y, the election is in the future. In essence this type of question expects people to make a prediction of their own behaviour following a given change – a we are not especially good predictors of our own future behaviour under such circumstances. Indeed, these questions are really just a variation on “who would you prefer to be leader” or “which policy would you prefer”.

Which brings us to the way in which these questions are used to justify policy decisions. By way of benign example, let’s talk about libraries. Most of the population are not members of a public library and have at best a very occasional engagement with the library service. This isn’t to say we don’t want libraries – we’ll fight hard to protect these vital local services even though they are not services we (or anyone we know) makes use of.

Faced with this problem – declining library membership – the local council undertakes a review part of which involves surveying the public. But first the council thinks of lots of exciting things to do with or put it its libraries – computers, coffee machines, self-service issuing of books, book clubs, kids parties - you name it. And in the survey the council asks whether these things will make non-users more or less likely to use the library.

Now let’s assume that library non-users (or a majority of them) say that some or all of the changes will make them more likely to use the library. Seizing on this, the council rushes through the changes – despite that fact that current library users have said they don’t want these changes. Ah, says the Council, the policy will attract loads of new users to the library and we’ll be in clover!

So what happens? Well the current users of the library don’t like the changes (noisy kids, impersonal service, coffee stains all over the table and so on) and some decide to get their reading material from Oxfam or Waterstones. And those non-users who said they would be “more likely” to use the library? Not a sign of them. Result of the policy changes? Probably further library closures, reductions in the book fund and another review.

This is precisely what happened with banning smoking in pubs – non-users said they didn’t like pubs because of the smoke. And that they would be “more likely” to use the pub is smoking was banned. Existing regular pub users – overwhelmingly – opposed the ban preferring good extraction, separate smoking rooms and other measures. But no – banning smoking would make pubs more popular. Those non-users said so, didn’t they?

In truth those non-users said nothing of the sort – they didn’t go to pubs because they didn’t like pubs. And the smoking was just one factor – mostly they didn’t see the pleasure in sitting a drinking away from their comfortable homes. Nothing to do with smoking, nothing at all. And, following the ban, these non-pubgoers have not started going to the pub while at the same time loads of previous pubgoers now stop at home where they can smoke. With fewer regulars, the remaining hardy folk began to drift away and the local was left with three customers at 10pm on a Friday night.

The result? The pub closes. The community loses a local facility. Ordinary, harmless folk have nowhere to go for a pint and a fag – other than at home of course. Some of that much vaunted social capital is lost. The football team folds – it was a PUB team after all. The gardening club slowly declines. Other groups become ever more cliquey. Why? Because a ban brought in to satisfy folk who never used pubs resulted in those pubs closing.

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We really are idiots. And we like it that way.

What the Big Society could look like?

Alasdair Palmer, writing in the Sunday Telegraph wonders about David Cameron’s “Big Society” idea (and I’ll forgive him his rather huge statistical faux pas). Not for once about whether it’s a good idea or not – I guess like me that Alistair sees it as essentially a good idea harking back to the Burkean roots of Tory thinking. Instead he heads with this observation:

“I wonder if Mr Cameron actually knows what ‘being a member of an active neighbourhood group’ involves for someone whose day job has nothing to do with politics, and whose life does not revolve around it. The first thing it involves is giving up large chunks of your leisure time. Instead of spending it with your family or your friends, you have to devote it to arguing about administrative procedures with people you don’t know and may not like.”

Yet again we have the prospect of the “politically engaged” berating those with better things to do. ‘You are all idiots’ is the inference we draw – but that’s how we are. It’s very English of us, as Alistair points out with reference to Rousseau:

“The 18th Century political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau despaired of the British precisely because we were content with the pursuit of our own private happiness and weren’t interested in devoting our lives to serving the community. He noted that the city-states in the ancient world were true democracies in the sense that every…adult participated directly in every major political decision. But then, as he pointed out, the slaves did all the work.”

So yes we are idiots – good idiots. We will ‘participate’ when it is in the interests of ourselves, our families and our friends. The social capital of modern English society isn't constructed from political engagement but from private activity – from the village scarecrow festival, from the am-dram society, from taking the kids to play football, from drinking in the local (if the smoking ban hasn’t closed yours down yet), from a host of activities where the only role for government appears to be to get in the way, to ban, to regulate and to prevent.

I want a big society, I want people to be active and engaged – but that doesn’t have to mean sitting on committees, worthy ‘social action projects’ or attended mind-numbingly dull community forums. It also means enjoyment shared with friends and neighbours, it means the sponsored walk round the park or the garden trail. It includes the dinner party and the kids’ party. And it includes sitting with a pint and a cigar chewing the fat with your mates (or even - if you insist - playing dominos).

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