I was obsessed with archaeology as a child. My idea of a perfect day was spending a few hours digging in search of historic artefacts. But digging alone was hard. When I was seven or eight, I hatched a plan to convince the kids who lived on my street to help with my most audacious dig yet. A massive trench in the local park. A metre wide. Four metres long. “Who knows what we’ll find”, I said, as I knocked on doors, recruiting kids I hardly knew to help.
A few hours later, the trench was dug. It might not have been as wide or long as I’d planned, but it was a respectable effort. And we did find things—not quite a Staffordshire hoard—but masses of ceramic fragments and an old metal yo-yo. Everyone was pretty happy by the end of the day, with the exception of the local council who now had a big hole they’d have to fill in.
This is my earliest memory of attempting to organise strangers around a common goal. And it worked because when I knocked on each door, I made the kids I met feel like they could be part of a group—part of a community. “We’ve never played together before, but do you want to join in with this thing we’re all doing together? We’ll have fun and we’ll split any treasure we find.”
It’s exciting to think about community in this way. As the act of building a group, and collaborating with others to have fun or achieve some shared endeavour. For most of our history as a species, different cultures have considered community as an asset. We’ve understood that working with others unlocks progress that can’t be achieved alone. And we’ve taken it for granted that we have reciprocal bonds with those around us.
But if you ask policymakers about community, you tend to get a much less hopeful answer. Division and disconnection. Tensions and flashpoints. Community is increasingly seen as a problem to manage.
There’s some truth to this. The proportion of people who trust their neighbours has fallen by a fifth since 2013. The stats are even starker for young people. Only a quarter of people aged 16 to 24 say they trust their neighbours and fewer than half chat to them at least once a month. Meanwhile, it’s hard to escape a succession of bleak headlines. The biggest far-right demonstration in decades marching through central London led by Tommy Robinson. Gangs of masked men blocking roads around the Port of Dover. Record levels of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred. All of this produces a policy response grounded in prevention and policing, rather than the kind of community building we desperately need.
The benefits of community feel less tangible for most of us. Why talk to your neighbours when you don’t need to? Maybe you can vaguely remember popping next door to ask for a cup of sugar when your parents had run out. Maybe you have a hazy memory of people working together to jump-start a broken-down car. But why bother with those things now? For a small delivery fee, you can get groceries delivered in a few minutes, or summon on-demand roadside recovery. And this isn’t only true for the well-off—cheap delivery and on-demand services are now within most people’s reach. Put another way, there are now fewer instances where we need to rely on the goodwill of those in our community, because we can buy our way out of most problems. We can replace our social transactions with economic transactions more readily. And when nothing binds us to the people next door, it’s much easier for grievances to fill the gap.
We don’t have to live our lives this way. We can choose to prioritise our social relationships, and invest in them. When the country locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic, thousands of mutual aid groups were set up by ordinary people who wanted to help their communities. People collected groceries or prescriptions for their neighbours and checked in on those living alone. Our collective response far surpassed what the state alone could achieve.
Crises like the pandemic often pull us into community, because we don’t want to face adversity alone. But we can learn to apply the same energy without the crisis. We need to make the political case for community again. Not only as a response to a challenge, but as an ever-present asset.
None of the main parties has made that case with confidence in recent years. Yet the raw material is there. Labour has a long communitarian tradition, from the co-operative movement to ethical socialism, that puts belonging and mutual obligation at the heart of its politics. The Conservatives under David Cameron argued for a Big Society, fusing a vision of collectivity with the conservative virtue of contribution. Both offer a framework ready for politicians to pick up.
I sometimes think back to that trench I dug as a child. I imagine the council turning up with a shovel, confronted with a hole-shaped problem—oblivious to the fun I’d had and the connections I’d made that day. The state can keep seeing community as a problem to manage, a hole to fill in. Or it can use its power to do what I did that day—knock on doors, connect people, and help them achieve together what none of them could manage alone.