The Comment Factory

At the risk of turning this into Great Graphs of Our Time, here are a few charts from the latest citizenship survey, released by the government this week with no fanfare at all.

The first shows us why the Department of Communities and Local Government was so coy. The proportion of people who think they can influence decisions at local and national level has shown a small but significant decline. Despite local government reform, despite all the talk of empowerment over the last decade, despite the new ‘duty to involve’, people feel less empowered than they did ten years ago.

You might put a lot of this down to the MPs’ expenses scandal and the general end-of-term malaise that has shrouded Gordon Brown’s administration. But look back to previous years and you’ll find the figures haven’t been much better since the high-water mark of 2001, when a whopping 44% felt able to influence local decisions.

The second chart is more worrying. It breaks that sense of being able to influence decisions down by ethnic group. Of the people who describe themselves as white, only 16% say they feel they can influence national decisions, and only 34% say they can influence local decisions. I don’t buy the idea that white people (and white working class people in particular) are disadvantaged by virtue of their race. But what the survey suggests is that disaffection is stronger among this group than among others – which, as I’ve suggested here and here, is why we should take the British National Party and their like seriously, and start trying to understand and engage with the people who are turning into their supporters.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the survey doesn’t support some of the shriller hyperbole about ‘broken Britain‘.

The third graph shows a consistent finding over recent years: more than four out of five people agree their area is one where people of different backgrounds get on well together.

What’s more, as the fourth chart shows us, around three quarters of people feel they ‘belong strongly’ to their local neighbourhood, and this has generally improved in recent years. In a world where family ties are weaker than a few decades ago, people are more likely to move with their work, and migration is always cited as a touchstone issue, this general sense of rootedness is not only welcome: it gives the lie to people who like to peddle the notion that society is falling apart.

Obviously this doesn’t hold good for every neighbourhood. What it does suggest, though, is that our problems are to a large extent localised and personal: there are neighbourhoods under extreme stress, and groups of people within those neighbourhoods who face extreme struggles (or cause them for others). Perhaps it’s time to rediscover the thinking behind neighbourhood renewal.