A convert to communities

[Darren Hill]

A couple of months old.... missed it at the time - appears to have been 
mentioned in the Independent and The Guardian

Monday 29 March 2010

Charles Leadbeater made his name as one of Tony Blair's favourite 
thinkers. He epitomised the kind of optimistic early phase of late-90s 
New Labour. He bundled together some key themes which provided Blair 
with rich pickings for speeches. He combined an almost utopian faith in 
the emerging web and its opportunities for collaboration and innovation, 
a championing of a new individualism and a robust defence of 
globalisation's record in reducing poverty.

Today he seems to have hit a crisis of self doubt. While phrases from 
his books, Living on Thin Air and Up the Down Escalator, continue to pop 
up in speeches by arch Blairites (our desire to "author" our own lives 
is still current), Leadbeater's new pamphlet for the Young Foundation, 
Digging for the Future <http://www.youngfoundation.org/>, published 
today, is almost painful in its reckoning with the emptying out of his 
earlier idealism.

One doesn't normally expect a thinktank pamphlet to be quite so 
self-revelatory. But Leadbeater begins by confessing: "Much of work and 
life seems dreadfully pre-programmed and mechanical. Our managerialised 
politics marked by spin, self interest and timidity has eaten away at 
itself … Modern society is a melange of political pragmatism, cultural 
relativism and constant consumerism that seems at once wonderful, 
distracting and hollow … [there is] the chasm between our need to have a 
sense of purpose and our incapacity to muster the collective commitment 
to do so."

Hit by this crisis of meaning, Leadbeater takes an admirably quixotic 
leap back into history for inspiration: it's 1649 and a radical Gerrard 
Winstanley <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrard_Winstanley>takes a 
group of followers up St George's Hill in Surrey to start digging unused 
land to grow food. Winstanley was a mystic – of the Quaker variety – a 
passionate advocate of manure and a political radical. From this 
wonderfully eclectic mix of ideas, Leadbeater argues we can find plenty 
to shed light on our current predicaments.

continues.... 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/29/convert-to-communities

Leadbeater's pamphlet for the Young Foundation, Digging for the Future 
is at - <http://www.youngfoundation.org/>
http://www.youngfoundation.org/publications/books/digging-future-march-2010