Daily Archives: Sun, 15 July, 2007

Where everybody knows your name

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Social policies, since Mrs Thatcher’s time, have done their damnedest to treat the old social groupings that used to exercise sociologists (class, race, gender…) as dispensable. Social structure is nothing. “There is no such thing as society.” Yada, yada.

Instead, we have these wierd amorphous groupings, called “communities.” I have very little idea what a community is. In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, an indigenous people’s village, where everybody hunts and gathers together, is probably a “community,” at least until it’s in the path of loggers or ranchers. A village in the English shires may still be something of a “community”, except for second-home-owners and the lack of a postoffice, a shop or a secondary school. When we get to where most of us live, the borders of our “community” are unguessable.

And this is before we start bringing in the many other “communities”, identified by any number of factors. The blogging community, FFS. The closest I can come to identifying a community is a group with shared interests and/or shared locality. There is also a warm fuzzy overtone. Your community accepts you and defends you and cares for you. No, really. That’s why “care in the community” has been so successful…. And “community wardens.” What a fantastic idea. It’s like the old days when the local bobby gave errant kids a clip round the ear. Firm but fair. You never had to lock your front door. (Yes. This is sarcasm. I reckon I have to go down the Homer Simpson route and spell it out more often. It wasn’t clear enough in the previous post)

(And, ironically, I live in one of the few places in the UK where people actually talk about “the Community” and “the Area” with almost audible capitals. And I often leave my front door open.)

I could attempt a reasonable definition of community, but why not just stop using a word when it has no meaning, rather than try to fit social policies round it?

My argument is that, as soon as you start focussing social policies on community groups (been there, got no t-shirts) rather than elected representatives, you give opportunities for unrepresentative self-promoters to control their localities. The increasing social role of extremist mullahs is one example of how an attribution of community leadership becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, it was quite refreshing to accidentally come across some research by Demos, sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation that manages to say this stuff more politely than I usually can.

November 2006 Do policies to promote community participation in governance build social capital? (Governance – another of my favourite words.. WTF is it? Social Capital? Ditto, but bear with me.)
The main points are

  • The key factor influencing levels of participation in governance was the existing pattern of ‘linking’ social capital: those already well-connected tend to get better connected.
  • Community participation tends to be dominated by a small group of insiders who are disproportionately involved in a large number of governance activities.
  • ..social capital … tends to be concentrated in the hands of this small group. There is no guarantee that the wider community feels the benefit of this social capital…
  • A number of forces create ‘barriers to entry’ for those not involved in governance, and increase the likelihood that those already involved will become more so.

etc. Look at the research if you are interested. There’s a lot more on that site that hammers this point home.

A poor diet?

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Research from the Food Standards Agency was reported as showing that the poor do not have worse diets than the rest of the population. I am all for truths that fly in the face of “common sense” but I am finding this quite hard to swallow.

As soon as you look at the specifics, this whole argument starts to fall apart for me.

The Food Standards Agency found that contrary to popular belief, nutrition, access to food and cooking skills are not much different in poorer families.

  • Nutrition. Given that so much of nutritional science is founded on guesswork and can often barely be distinguished from the Gillian McKeith schools of science, I’m not going to do this one to death, except to say that the points that they notice any difference in – such as consumption of fruit and vegetables – are the very things the nutritionists keep saying are important for our health
  • “Cooking skills?” Why would anyone asume that poor people are less able to cook. Well, it seems that the survey does suggest that the British poor are indeed too stupid to know how to eat food, apparently unlike poor people in the rest of the world.

    Men and women with a lower level of educational achievement tended to have a ‘less healthy’ diet than men and women with more education. Men and women with less education ate fewer vegetables and more chips, fried and roast potatoes. Less educated women also consumed less fruit and fruit juice.

    If educational level has any correlation with income (as we are told by other parts of government), doesn’t this suggest that the poor do have a worse diet? So it might be poverty rather than lack of education that leads to the duff feeding?

  • “Access to food? ” What on earth does that mean? It appears from the FSA website that it means where we shop and how we get it home.

    About 80% of this group did their main shopping at a large supermarket. About 50% had access to a private car for shopping

    Hmm – car? Not markedly poor then, you would think.

But then:

Mean weekly spending on food and drink (including eating out, but excluding alcoholic drinks) was just under £30 for one-adult households, just over £50 for households containing two or more adults, £55–£65 for households with one adult and one or more children, and £80–£90 for households with two or more adults and one or more children.

(You have feel particularly sorry for the adults in a 2 or more adult household, scraping by on £25 or less per person.) Continue reading →

Well Done National Trust

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Well, this blog is very quick to complain when we get bad customer service or encounter jobsworth staff. As a result, it is only fair for us to mention the times when people, for what ever reason, are helpful and encourage return service.

Today, as a “family” day out we went to visit a National Trust site. Now there were four adults and two small children – however we only had three National Trust memberships (kids go free). As we arrived at the site (a fairly low-profile one), the man staffing the entrance would have been fully expected to us for one adult (£3.50). As it turned out, he was a nice and kind enough person that he decided not to charge the almost petty sum today. A trivial task, but this is something which had the knock on effect of encouraging enough good will that the dissenter bought annual membership, we spent a small fortune in the gift shop and will be certain to revisit the site.

I am, actually, a big fan of ruthless capitalism but I also think it has its place. By taking the gamble and risking £3.50 this attendant managed to generate many times that for the National Trust. Add to that, the site was beautiful and the weather surprisingly nice, and I’ve had quite a good start to the day

[tags]National Trust, Society, Capitalism, Raves, Good Deeds[/tags]