The UK authorities are talking about 'giving power to local
communities'. They are also talking about 'increasing happiness'.

This isn't election-time bullshit. Hell, it's not even election time!

It means something.

Namely, the opposite of what it says.

'Giving power to local communities' means increasing the amount of time
that working class people are under management, bossery, and
surveillance.

All the traditional authorities are being given more rein in bossing
people about, recording their movements, punishing them... Medics,
social workers, school-teachers, the local council, the police. As I've
said many times, this is one of the defining characteristics of fascism.

Another, related, mindfuck idea is 'social incluson'. Do the rulers have
any right to talk about 'society', 'community', etc.? Of course they
don't!

As for the talk about 'increasing happiness'...

They want a population full of happy morons, delighted with their
submissive and degraded lot, and hateful towards anyone who does things
like tell the truth or think for themselves. (Lynch *them*, right? Damn
'terrorists'!)

A population that's *numb*. Up to its eyeballs in debt, and numb. As
thick as too short planks, and numb. Acceptably psychotic, and numb.

And yes, the policy is deeply bound up with nationalism... You know the
idea: 'British people just get their heads down and keep on going, when
there's a crisis'. Don't put your head up, Tommy Atkins! Remember you're
British! Do what the officials tell you!

The following is an extract from a book by Alessandra Buonfino and Geoff
Mulgan, published in today's 'Guardian'.

Geoff Mulgan is Director of the 'Young Foundation' and former Head of
Policy in the Prime Minister's Office.

Alessandra Buonfino is involved with the 'Midas' project. This aims "to
understand how, in the context of 9-11, [the] relation between security
and liberal democracy has been negotiated". Big concept:
"securitisation". Get it?

Both of these scumbags are mixed up with the 'thinktank' called 'Demos'.

To give you a taster:

***BEGIN SHORT EXTRACTS***

   Yet there are many things that governments can do
   to strengthen social bonds. They can decentralise
   power; they can encourage more personal relationships
   between the state and citizens - for example, through
   jobcentre workers who act more as supportive colleagues
   than as coercive bureaucrats;

             [no, I'm not making this up!! -banana note]

   nurses and doctors who put patients' needs first; or
   community support officers who get to know the people
   they serve. They can reinforce the bridging of common
   institutions - schools, GP surgeries, or libraries -
   that cut across divides of class or race.

   They can promote urban designs that make it easier for
   people to relate to each other - for example, with
   outward-looking homes, 

             [they keep drawing their curtains at number
              37, so the community wardens can't see in -
              I think I'll call the public safety officer
              -banana note]

   Few communities provide enough opportunities for people
   of different ages or classes to do things together, which
   is the practical basis for mutual respect.

             [yeah, mustn't play games in the park unless
              you've got a GP or headteacher making sure
              you're acting 'appropriately' - banana note]

***END SHORT EXTRACTS***

The truth? Even in the current horrendous conditions, there is *still*
too much working class autonomy for the rulers' liking. And they're out
to get it, with a 'vengeance'!

They want you to be under permanent watch. They want you to feel as
though you were at work, or at school, or in prison, practically the
whole fucking time.

Having atomised people to an extreme degree, they want to 'build a
community' based on solidarity with nation and State, i.e. a fascist
community. Or to be more exact, a fascist pseudo-community or
anti-community.

It reminds me of the sort of psychological conditioning that is used in
the army...

From:

<http://society.guardian.co.uk/communities/story/0,,1688280,00.html>:



***BEGIN ARTICLE***

Goodbye to all that 

The solid social bonds of 50 years ago have been replaced by division,
anger, distrust and anxiety. Alessandra Buonfino and Geoff Mulgan on
Britain's 'quiet crisis' of unhappiness 

Wednesday January 18, 2006

The Guardian

Britain, by and large, is a contented society. But for all the huge
social advances of the past 50 years, it is clear that some things have
gone badly awry. We have become a less integrated society: more divided
by class, income and geography. Inequalities persist, our lives are more
fractured. The social fabric has been stretched, bruised and damaged. We
prosper, economically, but we suffer, too, from a quiet crisis of
unhappiness.

Mutual support and neighbourliness have declined; isolation is
increasing; mental illness is more prevalent than it was half a century
ago; the signs of day-to-day anger and tension are everywhere. Yet this
unhappiness is manifest more in depression than riots, in anxiety rather
than insurrection, in public distrust rather than the channelled energy
that makes social progress possible. Remaking these soft, often
invisible social supports, so essential to the quality of our lives, is
one of the great challenges of this century.

Rewind to the 1950s. Britain was changing rapidly from the austere
solidarity of the war years - a time when, perhaps more than ever before
or since, much of the population had felt useful, respected and engaged
in a common project - to the prosperous individualism of a society of
consumers. Then, the great concern of some social reformers was that a
big state and a powerful market would squeeze out the space for mutual
support and compassion. Much that has happened since has justified their
concern.

Perhaps the biggest change has been the huge movement of women into the
workforce, higher education and public life. This has been, in most
respects, a great progress. It has resulted in many unpredicted effects
- ranging from a rediscovery of fathering to the decline of women as
mainstays of the local community. It has also weakened family
structures, which has done more to change the fabric of daily life than
anything else. In the 50s, each older person living in Bethnal Green,
east London, for example, could expect to have an average of 13
relatives living within a mile; 53% of older people had their nearest
married child living in the same dwelling or within five minutes' walk.
Today, many older people are likely to live a lonely existence.

Equally momentous has been the transition from a largely industrial
society to an economy based on services. In 1881, Slough was mostly
rural, with only 13% of its workers in manufacturing. By the 70s, this
had risen to 53%; by the early 2000s it was back down to 16%. Although
these changes have left most people wealthier, they have also left
millions less secure. The biggest growth in jobs has been at the
prestigious top and insecure bottom.

A more subtle, collateral effect of deindustrialisation is the partial
disappearance of poor and working-class Britain from public view and
power. In the 50s, even the poorest areas contained people with
experience of leadership - foremen, shop stewards; today, there are
communities where there is no one with experience of comparable roles.
Respect for the hard-working values of the poor has declined: the old
white working class is dismissed as racist and unreconstructed, while
the newer working classes from Asia and the Caribbean are seen as
dangerous sources of crime or terrorism.

Increased mobility and longer working hours have perhaps inevitably
weakened the traditional "web" of social relations and have made Britons
increasingly suspicious of each other. In the late 50s, 60% of the
population believed that other people could generally "be trusted". In
the early 1980s, the figure stood at 44%. It has now dropped to just 29%
and is thought to be falling even lower.

Distrust starts young. The perception that children are at risk from
cars or paedophiles encourages them to be kept at home, ever more
isolated, so that spare time is now more likely to be spent in the home
watching television or playing video games. A report published just
before the May bank holiday last year showed that 59% of children were
likely to spend their holiday kicking around their homes complaining of
being bored and staring at the TV set. Among adults, the warmth of
companionship and neighbourliness is often missing. One in five say that
they hate people living nearby and have, to use the current cliche,
"neighbours from hell". Anger and conflict

People are adapting less well to change than 50 years ago. A more
individualistic society, without the buffers of mutual support and
respect, is also more prone to anger and conflict. Nearly two-thirds of
office workers claim to have experienced "office rage", and 53% have
been the victims of bullying at work. Britain is now reportedly the
worst country for road rage in the European Union. Reports indicate a
400% increase in incidents of "air rage" between 1997 and 2000.

If anger is one side of the story, fear is the other. By most objective
standards, modern Britain is remarkably safe, with historically low
murder rates and deaths from traffic accidents. Yet there is no shortage
of fear in modern Britain - not just of terrorist attacks, or of
paedophiles in local communities. Fear governs many routine activities,
from interactions with neighbours to perceptions of crime. The media
amplify more than they reflect; most of the public think crime is
rising, even when it's falling, and crime gets woven into a wider story
of insecurity and threats, in which migration, terrorism, and crime are
of a piece with Friday night disorders.

So is community inevitably thinner in modern societies? The small worlds
in which most of us live our lives - the primary school and the library,
the park and the post office - remain important, particularly in the
lives of families with young children. Our identities remain very local
and there has been a rise in the proportion of people who think that
others in their neighbourhood are helping rather than going their own
way. A majority of us still live within five miles of where we were
born, and still depend on local friends. Communities are not dead. But
there is no mistaking the widespread unease that these very local worlds
of friendship, love and family support are under stress.

So what, if any, role is there for government? When it comes to the
subtle dynamics of community, governments have good reason to be
cautious. Their policies can damage human relationships: over-
centralised local government that reduces the number of people who serve
as representatives; schooling policies that encourage self-segregation;
planning policies that push dual carriageways through the heart of
communities. Such policies all have an effect, as did previous policies
that forced parents back to work too quickly after the birth of their
children.

Yet there are many things that governments can do to strengthen social
bonds. They can decentralise power; they can encourage more personal
relationships between the state and citizens - for example, through
jobcentre workers who act more as supportive colleagues than as coercive
bureaucrats; nurses and doctors who put patients' needs first; or
community support officers who get to know the people they serve. They
can reinforce the bridging of common institutions - schools, GP
surgeries, or libraries - that cut across divides of class or race.

They can promote urban designs that make it easier for people to relate
to each other - for example, with outward-looking homes, with porches
and front gardens, sloping roofs and variety, with lines of sight on to
public spaces, rather than into each other's windows. They can encourage
good connections to the outside world, but also introduce measures to
slow down road traffic within the community, which seems to affect how
much neighbours talk to each other. And they can encourage very local
media on the web, which have turned out to be one of the most powerful
tools for strengthening very local mutual bonds.

The recent debate on "respect" exemplifies the possibilities and the
limits of government action. Respect and recognition matter to any
community, but they are influenced by what people do together, by the
resources they control, and the networks they inhabit. The structures of
respect that defined a traditional society have partially waned. But
modern respect has not evolved sufficiently to take its place. Few
communities provide enough opportunities for people of different ages or
classes to do things together, which is the practical basis for mutual
respect. Casual denunciations

Putting this right will not be easy. Although coercive laws can bring
down the worst examples of antisocial behaviour, casual denunciations of
"yobs" will do little to reinforce respect and may, at worst, be
counterproductive, since they form part of a pattern that has led to
less respect of the poor by the rich (who are dismissed as "chavs") and
less respect of the young ("yobs") by the middle aged.

The best way to strengthen respect is through activity: projects and
tasks that give people reason to recognise each other as human beings,
rather than as categories.

The politics of recent years has been almost obsessively focused on
economics. Over the next few years, we need to turn our attention once
again to the social - to what it is that makes us able to live together
well.

· Alessandra Buonfino and Geoff Mulgan are, respectively, research
fellow and director of the Young Foundation. This piece is adapted from
a book published this week to mark 50 years of social research
undertaken at the Institute for Community Studies (now the Young
Foundation). Porcupines in Winter: The Pleasures and Pains of Living
Together in Modern Britain is published by the Young Foundation, price
£12.99. 

***END ARTICLE***

-- 
banana     "The thing I hate about you, Rowntree, is the way you
            give Coca-Cola to your scum, and your best teddy-bear to
            Oxfam, and expect us to lick your frigid fingers for the
            rest of your frigid life." (Mick Travis, 'If...', 1968)