Community
David Feldman
“We have a right to keep out everybody who does not add
to the strength of the community – the industrial, social
and intellectual strength of the community,” asserted
Arthur Balfour, speaking in the House of Commons in
support of the 1905 Aliens Bill, the first modern legislation
designed to restrict immigration to the United Kingdom.
This imagined the nation as a whole as a community, and
immigrants, in this case east European Jews for the most
part, as outside its boundaries. Today, too, immigrants
are set outside of the parameters of the community. In
July 2013, the immigration minister called for stronger
controls on immigration, as without them, ‘communities
could be damaged.’ He was especially concerned that
immigrants were generating overcrowding, anti-social
behaviour, and longer waiting times at GP’s surgeries.
In his 1976 compendium Keywords, Raymond Williams
writes, ‘unlike all other terms of social organisation’,
community ‘seems never to be used unfavourably.’ It is,
‘a warmly persuasive word.’ As he noted, ‘community
politics’ suggest a form of organisation not only distinct
from national politics but also from formal local politics.
In contrast to bureaucratic and hierarchical types of
governance and mobilisation, community activists
claim to represent the unmediated voice of the people
in a particular place. This idea of community, as the
expression of authentic bonds which develop from
everyday experience, continues to thrive. We have
community councils, community care, community
centres, community workers, community groups,
community spokesmen and women.
It is one indication of the benign, yet vague, meaning
of community that governments too have adopted the
term, not least when they seek to invest an unpopular
measure with legitimacy. In 1990 when the Conservative
government introduced a fiscally regressive form of local
taxation – when the property based tax, known as ‘rates’,
was replaced by a levy placed on the head of almost
every adult – it labelled the new and much reviled tax ‘the
community charge’. Since 2006, the British government
has included a Department of Communities and Local
Government. The department’s website attempts to
infuse the arid system of local administration with the
nurturing juices of community. Its mission, it states, is
to support local government and in doing so to ‘put
communities in charge of planning’.
These connotations of community run deep. The
Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of
‘community’ to the Anglo-Norman and Middle French
term communité meaning joint ownership or association.
By the late fourteenth century it indicated ‘a body of
people who live in the same place, usually sharing a
common cultural or ethnic identity’. These meanings,
concerned with ownership, association, culture and
ethnicity, do not exhaust the semantics of community –
it can describe a body of people practising communal
living on religious or ideological grounds, or be applied
to a group that follows a sport or hobby, such as the
‘football community’. Nevertheless, in the second decade
of the 21st century they remain central and powerful.
These historical roots reveal why the term is so often
used in relation to migration and indicate its subtly
manipulative qualities. In 1603, Chester City Council
objected that “strangers… not only take away… the
maintenance and relief which belongs to the poor born
in the said but… impoverish the state of the commoners
of the said City.” Yet, in early 17th-century England only
a minority of people lived and died in the same town
or village. The population was a collection of migrants.
Moreover, access to common land was far from common.
It was distributed unequally and, at times, a point of
bitter conflict. The welfare system – parochial poor relief
– was discretionary, grudging and sometimes penal, as
rate payers strived to minimise their obligations. The
language of community was a fiction disguising economic
inequality and institutional power. It was also a vital social
force when mobilised to exclude poor migrants.
An emphasis on shared ownership and origins can
be used to promote a sense of solidarity that is also
exclusionary. At this point, community assumes a less
benign aspect. In this register, the language of community
is liable to place people who have a different culture or
ethnicity, or who do not have a pre-existing share in the
common fund of goods, or who have not qualified for
membership, outside the community of solidarity. The
17th-century complaint – that migrants were draining
the welfare system and other collective resources – has a
familiar ring. Only now, the complaints are not directed
at people who have walked ten or twenty miles, but at
the growing number of international migrants who are
placed beyond the boundaries of collective solidarity,
both as they strive to enter contemporary Britain and
also, for those who manage to settle, once they arrive.
There is one other usage of community in relation
to immigration that we must mention: namely, the use
of the term ‘community’ to denote an immigrant, ethnic
or religious group. In the 1960s, many towns established
Community Relations Councils as they tried to manage
the arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean and South
From Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, edited by B. Anderson and M. Keith, COMPAS, Oxford, 2014
Asia. They expressed an assumption that the immigrant
and the established population comprised separate
‘communities’. Their founders were well intentioned
people who wanted to promote and manage integration.
The same language can also be found, however, in Enoch
Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech delivered
in Birmingham in 1968. Here, Powell condemned ‘the
Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs
inappropriate in Britain’. The idea that immigrants and
ethnic or religious minorities comprise ‘communities’
remains commonplace in the present. It pays no regard
to the fractures, hierarchies and conflicts within these
populations, nor to the bonds of interest and association,
through trade unions, tenants’ associations or chambers
of commerce, for example, that might unite immigrants
with others born in the country. In this respect, the use of
the term community to classify immigrant groups is the
regrettable yet predictable counterpart to its use to try to
exclude them. In both cases ‘community’ erases divisions
of wealth and status, and transforms a potentially unruly
and contentious population into an imagined united
whole.
From Migration: A COMPAS Anthology, edited by B. Anderson and M. Keith, COMPAS, Oxford, 2014