Tuesday 26 January, 2010

UK
Politics

Litchfield Way, Hampstead Garden Suburb: Hampstead Garden Suburb was set up in 1907 by Dame Henrietta Barnett to be a joint co-operative endeavour by a group of like-minded citizens, similar to Letchworth Garden City.

By Charles Gardner

Few things better illustrate how far the Labour movement has moved away from its roots than the story of Henrietta Barnett, who originated the concept of the Hampstead Garden Suburb – today one of the most exclusive addresses in the world.

But that wasn’t the idea when the Anglican clergyman’s wife first devised the scheme just over 100 years ago. It was meant as a place of refuge for hard-pressed artisans and other poor residents of London’s deprived East End, where the couple had worked – away from the grime of the city centre, a place to breathe easily on the edge of the expansive Hampstead Heath with plenty of space to grow produce for the family and for the children to run about.

The plan was that artisans would live as neighbours to more middle class families – a radical attempt at social reform straight out of the pages of the New Testament.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way over the years, but Henrietta’s legacy lives on in the way she meant it at Toynbee Hall, a so-called ‘university settlement’ whose social reformist policies were influential in the creation of Britain’s Welfare State with the likes of William Beveridge and Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee having been very much part of the pioneering institution.

How sad that Gordon Brown’s Labour Party have abandoned their roots in the Christian gospel which alone can foster genuine social reform built on the solid foundation of faith in Christ, who calls us to love our neighbours as ourselves, to contribute to the needs of the poor, to heal the sick, show kindness to all and to spread the good news of salvation throughout the world.

Labour now wishes to retain those elements of Christian teaching they like, and dispose of the others – including God himself. That is a kind of socialism that comes dangerously close to Communism.

And indeed the present godless government are consistently encouraging the aggressive campaigning of atheists, homosexuals and others who insist on recognition for their perverse ways while doing everything to gag those who have a message to change the world for the better.

A Christian basis to much 19th century thought and philanthropy was assumed in the Victorian era which is a pity in some ways because, if the reasons for their many and varied efforts to promote peace, goodwill and happiness among the poor had been explained in writing, as it were, our current atheistic socialists might have been given something to think about.

Henrietta and her husband Samuel began married life in the troubled and greatly deprived parish of St Jude’s, Whitechapel. But by 1889 they had moved to exclusive Hampstead (Heath End House on Spaniards Road) where Henrietta wanted to create a mixed community with housing and social amenities that allowed for a healthy lifestyle for all.

The idea behind the Toynbee Hall settlement, established in 1884, was that if men and women from the universities lived for a time among the poor, they could ‘do a little to remove the inequalities of life’.

It was named after Arnold Toynbee, who was committed to the development of adult education opportunities for the working class.

Clement Attlee, British Prime Minister from 1945-51, was secretary to the Hall and an active social worker while William Beveridge, the economist who wrote the crucial 1942 government report on social insurance, was appointed sub-warden in 1903.

With the proposed extension of the Northern Line tube to Golders Green and beyond, Henrietta realised that the character of the Heath could be seriously damaged. So she raised money to buy an extension to be preserved as parkland and worked to establish a new ‘Garden Suburb’.

Her vision was of an estate built with architectural integrity and with people in mind in which ‘all classes could live in neighbourliness together with friendships coming about naturally and without artificial efforts to build bridges between one class and another’.

Sadly, as the new suburb grew in popularity through a nearness to the new tube station along with increased house prices and a relative lack of rented housing, it became a middle class enclave …But not before the creation of a magnificent central square with the cathedral-like St Jude-on-the-Hill as its focal point. And it is there that the message proclaimed by Samuel and Henrietta continues to reverberate with great clarity!

The original Labour movement was a legacy of the gospel through men like Keir Hardie who campaigned for working conditions that accorded with Christian principles. But when they dispensed with the God of the gospel (literally good news), they invited trouble and the ultimate unravelling of their idealistic philosophy.

The case of the young Doncaster boys who tortured a nine and ten-year-old demonstrates the depths to which humanity can sink when God is thrown out of the window. If the best we can do stems from so-called humanism – that we are the architects of our own destiny who do not need to rely on any higher or divine authority – we can expect more of this sort of degradation.

The truth is we are all made in God’s image and, if we acknowledge that, we cannot accept the sinful traits of selfishness and brutality with which the devil would want to mar our personalities.

A return to Labour’s roots in the gospel would do much to restore confidence in their ability to provide answers to our social problems, which they did to some extent when they first rose to power. The party is in a self-inflicted coma, having suffered a knockout blow when they decided not to ‘do God’ anymore. Either we switch off the life-support machine altogether at the polls this spring, or (perhaps with the help of a lightning bolt, electric shock treatment) Labour finally wakes up to realise that the survival of our civilisation is at stake, and that their only salvation lies in a return to their roots.

Photo: geograph.org.uk under Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0