CMYKommunity

Metanarratives of Belonging in a Time of Austerity

Simon Parker, Centre for Urban Research, University of York

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A shameless exercise in self-citation... I propose a dynamic understanding of

community that is constituted through a complex pattern of social identity construction and animated through its resistance to dominant power holders. This thesis...explicitly refutes the communitarian fiction that social and economic inequalities can be evaporated in the fellowship of contiguous space. If this paper has one aim it is to demonstrate that nothing could be further from the truth.

S. Parker,Community, social identity and  the structuration of power in  the contemporary European city.  Part One: Towards a theory of urban structuration, CITY, VOL. 5, NO. 2, 2001, 189-202.

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...a territorially bounded community is not the product of freedom, but of constraint.

The capitalist division of labour...problematizes community insofar as it breaks the bonds between work and place, yet at the same time it reimposes order through the commodification of space.

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Open Society

Big Society

OneNation

New Localism

In it together...

Rebalancing

Communitarian fictions as the dispositifs of self-regulating disaster capitalism

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repetition and difference Temporal-spatial instantiations of the

fictive doxa are always and compulsively, iterative in the discourse of the governors.

Nation elides community as Kommunity and hence the macro-spatial fix of class rule.

The city, the region, the would-be-nation disrupt and threaten narratives of unity through the subversion of difference.

The state of exception hypostatises friend-foe dichotomies as psychic compensation for self-castrating capitalism [self-hating, vengeful state]

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In this together... In my very first act as leader of this party I signalled my personal priority: to mend our broken

society.

That passion is stronger today than ever.

Yes, we have had an economic crisis to deal with, clearing up the terrible mess we inherited, and we are not out of those woods yet - not by a long way.

But I repeat today, as I have on many occasions these last few years, that the reason I am in politics is to build a bigger, stronger society.

Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger society.

This is what I came into politics to do - and the shocking events of last week have renewed in me that drive.

So I can announce today that over the next few weeks, I and ministers from across the coalition government will review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society...

...on schools, welfare, families, parenting, addiction, communities...

...on the cultural, legal, bureaucratic problems in our society too:

...from the twisting and misrepresenting of human rights that has undermined personal responsibility...

...to the obsession with health and safety that has eroded people's willingness to act according to common sense.

We will review our work and consider whether our plans and programmes are big enough and bold enough to deliver the change that I feel this country now wants to see.

Government cannot legislate to change behaviour, but it is wrong to think the State is a bystander.

Because people's behaviour does not happen in a vacuum: it is affected by the rules government sets and how they are enforced...

...by the services government provides and how they are delivered...

...and perhaps above all by the signals government sends about the kinds of behaviour

that are encouraged and rewarded.

So yes, the broken society is back at the top of my agenda.

And as we review our policies in the weeks ahead, today I want to set out the priority areas I will be looking at, and give you a sense of where I think we need to raise our ambitions.

David Cameron: We are all in this together, 15 August 2011.

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Open Society The liberal ideal is of the open society,

where power is vested in people, not in the state or other institutions. This means that individuals need the capabilities and opportunities to chart their own course through life, and to hold institutions to account. So while the good society needs a strong state, and the big society needs strong social institutions, the open society needs strong citizens.

Nick Clegg, "The Open Society and its Enemies", 19 December 2011.

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A pretty regular guy I was born in my local,

national health service hospital, the same hospital my two sons would later be born in [the Royal Free in Hampstead]...I went to my local school, I went to my local comprehensive with people from all backgrounds...

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Another regular guy

Dad was the eternal optimist. To him the glass was always half full. Usually with something alcoholic in it...I asked him what he was most proud of. It was simple – working hard from the moment he left school and providing a good start in life for his family. Not just for all of us but helping his mum too, when his father ran off. Not a hard luck story but a hard work story. Work hard. Family comes first. But put back in to the community too. There is nothing complicated about me. I believe in working hard, caring for my family and serving my country.

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Nation is the Key ...the Liberal Democrats are the only true one nation party. A

one nation party of the radical centre, representing all regions and nations. Seeing not what divides us – but what unites us. Sound on the economy, passionate about fairness: doing the right thing and battling vested interests. Challenging the status quo.

That spirit of One Nation. One Nation: a country where everyone has a stake. One Nation: a country where prosperity is fairly shared. One Nation: where we have a shared destiny, a sense of shared endeavour and a common life that we lead together.

We don’t preach about one nation but practice class war, we just get behind people who want to get on in life.

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we succeeded, because of one reason more than any other, we succeeded because of us. We succeeded because of us, us the British people, us the British people who welcomed the athletes from abroad, who cheered them on. Who found ourselves talking to each other each morning about what had happened at the Olympics the night before, in a way that we hadn’t talked to each other before. We succeeded because we came together as a country we worked together as a country. We joined together as a country.

That’s why we achieved more than we imagined possible. I can’t remember a time like it in the whole history of my lifetime. I can’t remember a time like it, that sense of a country united, that sense of a country that felt it was together. That is the spirit this Labour Party believes in.

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Rebalancing cities

“The time has come to disperse power more widely in Britain today.”

The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, Coalition Agreement, May 2010.

Empowering communities:

“We think that the best means of strengthening society is not for central government to try and seize all the power and responsibility for itself. It is to help people and their locally elected representatives to achieve their own ambitions. This is the essence of the Big Society”.

Greg Clarke, Minister of State, DCLG.

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More than 2,000 charities forced to close services and sack staff as local authorities slash their funding – or in some cases completely withdraw it (Aug 2011, False Economy/Guardian).

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Police & Crime Commissioners

Cost to tax payer= introduction £80m+

Running costs £52m-£78m per year

Extra costs over 5 years at least £101m = 600 police officers

source:fullfact.org

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1% of the extra money spent on PCCswho less than 15% of Eng&Wales voters elected

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Nuts in May Ed Miliband gave a speech recently and told us that it’s not racist to

worry about immigration.Thank you, Ed, we knew that, but it’s not what the Labour Party used to

say. And we won’t take you seriously until you say sorry, admit immigration is too high, and support us in bringing it under control.

I want to tell you about our immigration policies and what they’re achieving. But first, it’s important to explain why we want to control immigration.

It’s not because, as the liberal elites would have you believe, the British public are bigots. It’s because, if we want our communities to be real communities, with a shared pride in our British identity instead of fragmented, separate identities, we have to understand that a nation is more than a market, and human beings are more than economic units.

It takes time to establish the social bonds that make a community, and that’s why immigration can never again be as rapid or on the same scale as we saw under Labour.

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Othering for BigSoc and the crimmigrant spaces of revanchist neoliberalism

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Golden DawnsConvergent narratives around cosmocrat reputation repair merchants for disaster capitalism - Mark Carney, Oxford and Goldman Sachs, Bank of Canada, leftish wife, safe pair of hands...

City of London’s offshore refuge for cosmopolitan wealth oscillates wildly against tripartisan localism agenda =the multiple personalities ofschizoid capitalism

The politics of denial services the denial ofpolitics...

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cK = Kommunity vs comm[on]unity Kicking “K” Kommunity is

the“community” of the revanchist state

Curly “c” community belongs etymologically and ideologically to the commune and the politics of resistance

The task - should we choose to accept it - is to rescue the c from the K

From the One to the Many