Songs from the heart of a community

The awkward truth is we prefer to find our own ways of strengthening the social fabric

When the Big Conversation is over, and the great army of advisers, analysts, policy units, sociologists and civil servants have finished mulling over what we, the people, want from them, the Government and its court, it seems likely that a concern for community will be near the top of the list. Getting on together has become trickier recently. Citizenship - in other words, making this land a less scratchy and divided place - is a political priority.

When the Big Conversation is over, and the great army of advisers, analysts, policy units, sociologists and civil servants have finished mulling over what we, the people, want from them, the Government and its court, it seems likely that a concern for community will be near the top of the list. Getting on together has become trickier recently. Citizenship - in other words, making this land a less scratchy and divided place - is a political priority.

"Social capital, which is to do with our relationships with other people, turns out to matter much more than we thought," says David Halpern, a senior adviser on the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, who will shortly be publishing a book on the subject. We need to "strengthen the social fabric".

Raising us all to a reasonable level of contentment and unity is probably a difficult business - academics make careers out of studying happiness and life satisfaction - but, just now and then, it can seem relatively straightforward. It occurred to me the other day, while enjoying a fundraising singalong at a Suffolk village hall, that, in the unlikely event that Halpern, his strategy unit and maybe a couple of ministers could take time out of their busy schedules to attend an event of this kind, then much of the mystery of community-building would fall away.

A summary of that evening's entertainment will not impress sophisticates. There was a line-up of local musicians, the youngest a girl of 11, the oldest an old boy who was well into his 70s. Most played accordions, melodeons, squeezeboxes of different kinds but there was also a pianist, a fiddler and percussion from an Irish pan drum and a bloke on spoons. Their leader was a burly, weather-beaten man in his 40s who rocked backwards and forwards on a stool, a small accordion across his broad chest.

None of the band nor any of the contributors from the audience were virtuoso performers but the atmosphere they - or, rather, we - produced was extraordinary. This was the second such event in the village and word of it had spread. The place was packed so that there was no real division between the official musicians and the audience. As the evening progressed, with no particular shape or presentational slickness, guest performers were invited to stand up to sing or to recite stories and poems - funny, blue, cussed in a typical East Anglian manner, dating from a time when this was truly a farming community and war was something that united rather than divided people.

It was hardly on the cutting edge of contemporary culture, but the audience was a mixed bunch and consisted of neither hardcore folkies, heritage junkies or damp-eyed pensioners. By the time an old boy rose unsteadily to "If You Were the Only Girl in the World", three hours had passed and, without any great debate or conversation, some sort of communication had taken place with the past, with the area in which we live, with each other.

It is a bit of a stretch from the village hall to citizenship as perceived in government circles. In his book Social Capital, which will be published in August, David Halpern argues that neighbourliness needs a helping hand from legislators and planners. Those who volunteered to do litter collection and other good work would be given "community service credits" through the offices of neighbourhood councils, which would have the power to reward good citizens with free bus passes and the like and to penalise those who misbehaved.

Teenagers would be given lessons in parenting while parents would be shown how to interact with small children. Street parties would be encouraged, friendly cul de sacs would be built rather than divisive, traffic-bearing roads. Under the Halpern plan, doctors will be encouraged to put lonely patients in touch with one another and park-keepers would make a comeback, looking after "upgraded local parks and play areas".

Above all, there would be a new spirit of communication, a "contemporary shared discourse", which would be encouraged by issues raised in TV soap operas and then debated within the media. Once a year, there would be a "National Deliberation Day".

Only someone who has visited the suburbs of Australia, where this kind of enforced citizenship already holds sway, will know quite how scary and sinister this vision of the future can be. It leads to a chilling homogenisation of communities, a conformity of attitude, a suspicion of the smallest deviation from socially accepted norms: not only tidy streets, but tidy minds, too.

Consistent with this view of neighbourliness is the idea of convenience, in which neighbourhoods are no longer cluttered by small shops and post offices. Instead, shopping is done in one place - the kind of out-of-town centre encouraged by Gordon Brown in his recent Budget. Supermarkets, those great cathedrals of consumerism where, although people congregate they rarely talk or communicate, are the focus and engine of the new society. Meanwhile, the genuine meeting-place which is the local post office is being closed down.

The awkward truth is that, on the whole, we prefer to find our own ways of strengthening the social fabric, that quite often the best kind of shared discourse is a singalong in a village hall.

terblacker@aol.com