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Youngsters who don’t feel part of their community will create chaos |
What has happened to our communities?
Our youngsters have to feel part of their community or they will continue to run riot says Peter Cadogan
WHY are the kids creating chaos? And why are we, the adults, passing the buck to the government? And why is the government accepting it?
Surely we know that teenage manners are the responsibility of parents, teachers, all adult members of every community and the young people themselves. The government is miles away from the action.
The police can help, but they have more than enough on their plate, burdened as they are with paperwork and unnecessary targets imposed upon them by the Home Office.
A community is a body of near-neighbours in which people can take part in shared activities. Or more simply, everyone within walking distance of a High Street or other civic centre. One hundred years ago we all lived in clearly identifiable local communities. Not any more. They have all been wiped out and replaced by socially meaningless Wards.
Victorian England was a mass of communities, they were called urban or rural parishes – vestries for short. They had a long track record going back to the days of Queen Elizabeth I.
Traditionally they had five volunteer officers: Chairman, Clerk, Surveyor of the Highways, Overseer of the Poor and Constable. (They are not to be confused with Church parishes which go back to the seventh century.)
The vestries were solely concerned with civil government. Their trouble was they were quite unprepared for the Industrial Revolution.
They were abolished by Local Government Acts in the 1890s.
St Pancras Vestry became the Borough of St Pancras in 1899. Rural Parishes survived, but with derisory powers. A community is based on togetherness. Party politics is based on confrontation, division, exclusion. Party politics destroys community and our Victorian communities have been 95 per cent destroyed. We retain their names and use them every day. There are some 15 communities in the borough of Camden:
These are Hampstead, Belsize, Camden Town, Highgate, Gospel Oak King’s Cross and St Pancras, West Hampstead, Dartmouth and Tufnell Parks, Euston and Somers Town, Swiss Cottage, Kentish Town, Bloomsbury, Kilburn, Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill and Holborn.
Government ministers and local politicians are currently issuing regular appeals to ‘communities’ and are surprised when they get no response.
Likewise our Town Hall persists in believing that Camden can be regarded as a community – hundreds of thousands of people living over a vast area – and, of course, nothing happens. The notion that Camden is 15 communities seems to be quite beyond them.
It looks as though councillors have been issued with blinkers which prevent them seeing the community wood for the party trees.
I want a Town Hall for Kilburn. I want 15 Town Halls, one for each of Camden’s communities. Then we can really make democracy work and make it possible for our young people to ‘belong’ and be socially responsible.
There is no other way.
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