ANOTHER VOICE

I don't know Dunblane, but if it's close-knit, it's no surprise that someone went mad there

MATTHEW PARRIS

Talking to a tram conductor in Black- pool, I asked if the town were a friendly place. 'In winter, yes,' he said, 'when there's less outsiders. Walk into my local any night, and if you're on your own they'll talk to you. Not like London, where nobody wants to know.'

As he spoke, two black men crossed our path. 'And another good thing,' he said to me, 'there's hardly any of them here. A West Indian once bought a pub in Black- pool and tried to run it, but nobody talked to him so he had to close. Good riddance.'

And then, Dunblane. 'Of all places' that has been the cry. Such a close-knit community, they say. Why, of all communi- ties, should a man go berserk in one which was close-knit?

This article is not about Dunblane, a place I do not know. Nor does it ask whether anyone but the madman himself bears any responsibility for his unspeakable madness. Nobody can know. My purpose, rather, is to question the assumption that people in close-knit and friendly communi- ties are less likely to go mad.

The logic is assumed. In a small place people are friends. You can borrow a cup of sugar. People shop together. Neighbours are related. People know each other's past, know what's going on. Knowledge is shared. Problems are shared. Opinions are shared. Gossip is shared.

`Values', too, are shared. 'Community values', one of the buzz-phrases of our era, are known to thrive in close-knit communi- ties: places with shared decencies. Mem- bers of a community know right from wrong. Bad values, no values — these evils are found out. The wicked find fewer hid- ing places in a close-knit community.

This view identifies community with security. It equates proximity with friend- ship and with ease. If similar people live similar lives, in a place where all pull together and little is hidden, then tensions will be fewer, we suppose. Loss of com- munity brings anonymity, loneliness and danger.

Pity, then, those who must live in loose- knit communities. Here, everybody does his own thing. Lives are solitary. Values are disparate, fragmented or missing. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. The bac- teria of evil fester in secret.

We live in an age of strong reaction against the idea of the loose-knit communi- ty. It is an age, too, when racism is abhorred, so we call Dunblane close-knit, even if part of what we mean is that almost everybody there is white, Scottish and Christian. Indeed, it has become common- place to remark that the Scots as a people have an unusually strong sense of commu- nity and of shared civic values. It is also commonplace to remark that, from the winos at Charing Cross to the standard- bearers of British trade, industry and engi- neering the world over, the Scots are famous emigrators. Few link these two commonplaces. They should.

For community strangles. It is simply not true that people are less likely to go berserk in small places. The culture of a close com- munity can produce unbearable tensions. Loss of privacy can give rise to huge stress, and familiarity often does breed contempt. A tightly bound and mutually supportive human group creates casualties of its own.

Wagging tongues, knowing glances, twitching net curtains — these can trap as surely and scar as deeply as can the loneli- ness of the metropolitan jungle. 'Close- knit'? Why draw our metaphor from knit- ting? Wool is kind. Community throttles like piano wire. As an MP for seven years in a beautiful rural part of the Peak Dis- trict, composed of many close-knit commu- nities, I can tell you that mental illness and alienation are as prevalent within the stone walls of English country cottages as within the reinforced concrete of the urban tower block. They can run very deep.

Close families can be unbelievably mean and cruel to their own. Hoarders and graspers abound, but upon ambition rural England looks with suspicion, and all abnormality is feared. Even the wicked are censorious. Envy is everywhere. Local poli- tics is a vipers' pit and the parish pump pumps poison. Corruption is endemic, rules are bent, noses tapped, palms crossed and Farmer Giles squared. Domestic violence is hardly ever reported; nor is incest. Cruelty to children is not considered a matter for the police.

Deviancy is everywhere, whispered of The V-chip keeps turning off the news.' and always hushed up. And once a young man or woman has been well and truly shredded by the neglect, brutality and ostracism of which small places are all too capable, then, shunned as outcasts, they drift away. Into the big towns and cities they drift — loose-knit places, unravelled places. There they fall apart, sometimes spectacularly. And we nod our heads wisely and say, `Ah, another casualty of urban dis- integration.' Close-knit communities export their human wreckage.

Any culture which places a premium upon 'sharing' will have at its heart a persis- tent and disfiguring conformism. 'Land of my fathers,' said Dylan Thomas of rural Wales, 'my fathers can have it.' A culture which sets store by 'including' members in a community heaps upon the heads of the few whom it excludes an opprobrium as bit- ter as that suffered by any London beggar. When you are excluded in a close-knit com- munity, you really are. Nobody is excluded in Earls Court, because nobody is included.

It is very easy to admire community val- ues from the vantage point of an Islington coffee-shop, the Commons Grill Room or a Fleet Street bar. If we may adapt a remark of Lord Melbourne's, such people are not so much pillars of the community as bul- warks: they support it from the outside.

But smart columnists on metropolitan newspapers, we who can choose the place and street and house where we live; who can choose the sort of person we live with, choose the relationship we prefer, choose our career, our workplace, our opinions and our dinner-party conversation; we for whom social mobility is a birthright assumed without acknowledgment; we who live always in the security of the uncon- scious knowledge that if we don't like it we can try something else — we should, before we bleat yet again the fashionable cant about shared values, try to imagine for just a moment the suffocation that those `real' communities we admire so much from a distance can bring.

There is an incipient fascism in commu- nity. Folk means Volk. Community stifles. Community snoops. Community wounds. The. Archbishop of Canterbury has called for a great national debate. Let it start with an acknowledgment of the horrors of community.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Times.