‘Broken Britain’: can we fix it?

In their famous post-war study ‘Family and Kinship in East London’, Young and Wilmott romanticised a period when a sense of community seemed to thrive. Today, in contrast, there is a widespread conviction that we live in a ‘broken society’, with endless stories of feckless parents or feral children, and a collapse of ‘respect’ and ‘trust’. Will government initiatives such as Community Service Volunteers, Citizens Panels and Commissions on Integration and Cohesion help to create new social solidarities? Or do such official interventions threaten to undermine the very relations they seek to create?