I've done it. After much hesitation I've sent off my ballot paper. With Simon Hughes third, I was torn between Chris Huhne and Ming Campbell for first choice . There is so little between them in policy and ability. In the end I must admit it came down to a class thing. We have enough Public School toffs in leadership positions, but Ming is a Grammar School kid made good - and the man for me.
Everyone is talking about it: happiness. There was the "Making Slough Happy" series on TV recently. All Slough was up in arms about it: most of the miserable people interviewed werent locals, community groups were ignored, some of the presenters were batty, and so on. But there was some useful economics and psychology hidden away there. This is revealed in Richard Layard's book, entitled wait for it "Happiness", with the subtitle "Lessons from a New Science". I've long known of him as an innovative thinker on employment and unemployment and poverty policy so he is an expert on major causes of happiness and unhappiness.
He now argues that the promotion of happiness should be a major element of government policy. Happiness (which he demonstrates can now be measured) in Britain has not risen over the past fifty years or so, despite the growth of prosperity and reduction in poverty. He uses economics, sociology and new developments in psychology and psychotherapy to show why this is so and what can be done about it. These include governmental, public and social factors, and individual, personal practices.
Research shows that, in descending order of importance, family relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends and health, together with personal freedom and personal values are the chief determinants of happiness. Most of these are self-explanatory, but it is worth noting that the community and friends one is about whether "in general people can be trusted" and the question to be answered about personal values is whether "God is important in my life".
For my personal impressions of his analysis and proposals for individual and government action watch this space!
This was the title of a conference I attended this week. It was run by the Government Office for the South East (GOSE). How many have ever heard of this body, I wondered. It is an arm of government, with 600 civil servants in Guildford, not directly responsible to any electorate. But do we want any more levels of elected government? Anyway, reps from the GOSE mingled with local authority officers and community workers, both voluntary and salaried. In fact this networking was more useful than the formal sessions; at least I thought so, talking with a Chaplain to the Police, a member of the Bahia community, a Crown Prosecutor, a local government policy analyst, several reps of Councils of Churches and Islamic Trusts as well as others I already knew.
In an introductory review, a GOSE rep noted that more people identified themselves by their faith than by their ethnic origin. The morning sessions compared and contrasted a Borough Council initiative to form a Faith Partnership to work with the council in community policy and action with, in another city, the formation of a Council of Faiths completely independent of local authority support. The former had enabled swift responses a multi-faith statement on the 7/7 bombings and a Tsunami appeal. The latter had over a longer period survived over-expectation to provide an arena where differences and similarities could be expressed frankly, with shared hope of steadily forming fruitful mutual acceptance in a multi-faith society.
The afternoon was devoted to workshops on faith and new communities, faith representation on Local Strategic Partnerships, faith and young people, engaging under represented faith groups. I went to one on service provision. This debated the old theme of the difference between faith communities and ethnic communities and the degree of overlap. It was unresolved but it was agreed that there was still work to be done in understanding and respecting cultural/faith sensitivities in provision of services by both statutory and voluntary bodies.
All in all, a thought-provoking day. We can be assured that Government, both national and local is listening to and recognises it needs cooperation from people of faith. Community cohesion is a nebulous concept, but it is easy to see that we all need to work at it if we are to be secure and happy.