Who

decides?

I spoke in a Commons debate on the Big Society last week. In underlining its importance I cited a remarkable socialist.

Michael Young was one of the authors of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto. He spent three years after the war interviewing households in Bethnal Green.

He was studying poverty. He found plenty of that of course —Bethnal Green was a poor borough. But, along with the deprivation, Young found something that surprised him — it was exemplified by a conversation he recorded with a young boy who had just joined a local school.

The boy told Young that his teacher had asked him to draw his family. He had drawn his mother, father and brother. 'But isn't it funny,' he told Young, 'the others were putting in their nannas and aunties and uncles and all sorts of people like that'. And that was the point, in Bethnal Green there was a community based on families.

In one street of 58 houses, Young found that 38 of them contained someone who had a family member in another home in the same road.

Despite Young, the centralised planners set about Bethnal Green with bulldozers and high-rise blocks were thrown up and people displaced and put in buildings where the lifts broke down, stairwells stank and the elderly locked themselves in at night.

It was to be, in part, the well meaning housing policies of the state that were to put an end to that living community that was Bethnal Green.

In later years they blew up many post war high-rises. Their destruction, a testament to an age-old truth that power is best gifted to those for whom the consequences of success or failure are most keenly felt. To individuals, families and communities — in what we might call the Big Society.