There can be few people who have made their country a better place in so many different ways than Michael Young, who died in London in January 2002 at the age of eighty-six. From helping to write the Labour Partys historic 1945 Election Manifesto, to starting the Consumers Association, to founding the Institute for Community Studies in Londons Bethnal Green, in which he worked up to the last weeks of his life, his career was a necklace of effective change.
But he was much more than an outstanding practical reformer. He was an intellectual of great talent who grounded his arguments in lived experience. His determination in this respect may have prevented him from becoming a jet-setting international theorist. But three cheers for this it made him far more interesting than many a university academic.
I was privileged to work with him on one of the great faultlines of our time, where different ethnic communities impinge, clash and replace one another in this case, between the white London working class and the incoming Bangladeshi migrants. The reason we got there was thanks to the pioneering research Michael had undertaken with Peter Willmott when they wrote Family and Kinship in East London in 1957. Apart from its originality and influence, the study distinguished Michael from other upper middle class supporters of the Labour Party in the UK. His was not an affiliation to the power of the Labour movement, it was a commitment to the values of a way of life.
He studied the patterns of community and livelihood in the East End and their erosion under the impact of commercial change and post-war state planning. The same concern was to lead him to write a famous polemic against the rise of the meritocracy (a term he invented, and explains here). In the 1990s, Labour became New Labour in response to the demographic and cultural changes that had hollowed out its traditional base of support.
Michael Young had witnessed and documented the start of that profound transformation decades previously. His sense of the realities of change led him to join the Social Democratic Party in their break-away from Labour in 1981. But he rejoined his Party when it showed signs of hearing the wake-up call of modern times.
From Bangladesh to Bethnal Green
The most important change in Bethnal Green since the mid-1950s has been the arrival of a large Bangladeshi community. Michael persuaded me (without difficulty) that I should combine research I was undertaking in the Institute for my own PhD on the Bangladeshis of Tower Hamlets with work he wanted to do for a new edition of his and Peter Willmotts book.
At a very early stage in our research we went to a part of Spitalfields, at the western end of Bethnal Green, to visit some Bangladeshi families. This was, I believe, the first time Michael had visited a Bangladeshi household and he demonstrated his wonderful ability to engage with anybody he met. For him, any stranger was a source of interest and new knowledge. He was enchanted by the hospitality we received and by the small shy children who hovered in the background in the houses we visited. He was struck by the decorations, especially by the pictures of Mecca and the Taj Mahal illuminated by many tiny light bulbs acting as stars.
That evening we went to a small supplementary school for Bangladeshi children, who were learning Bengali, studying the Quran and having extra lessons in some school subjects. It was a cheap, temporary building buzzing with the sound of small children at work, its walls covered with colourful paintings and elegant Arabic script. The teachers were giving their time for free. For Michael this was an inspiring visit. Here, around the corner from him in Bethnal Green, was an organisation very like many that he had created himself, surviving in straightened circumstances, staffed by volunteers and filling a special need in a special place.
Michael Young developed an affection for the local British Bangladeshi community. He liked the way in which they had enlivened the district: their food and clothing shops, their restaurants, and the vivid expanding commerce of the Whitechapel Road market. He recognised in the large Bangladeshi households of extended families an echo of the extended families sharing turnings (as small side-streets were known) and popping in and out of each others houses in the pre-redevelopment golden past of the Bethnal Green of Family and Kinship in East London.
The family values which he felt were increasingly neglected in wider British society were alive and well in their full glory (and, I would add, with some of their attendant disadvantages) in the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets.
Living the politics of community
In September 1993, there was a local council by-election in the Millwall ward of the Isle of Dogs, which was won by a member of the British National Party, running on generally racist and specifically anti-Bangladeshi policies. The by-election was followed by an increase in both low-level racism and overt racial attacks. Just as worrying was the prospect of further BNP gains at the full council elections taking place only a few months later, in May 1994.
Following the by-election there was a lot of media attention, especially on local radio and television, discussing the situation in Tower Hamlets. Many of the details in these reports were inaccurate, in particular those concerning local housing availability and council housing allocation subjects of great concern to the whole local population, whether white or Bangladeshi. In several places the misleading impression was given that Bangladeshi families had been given priority in the allocation of all good new housing at the expense of what were described as local people i.e. white people.
The crisis struck at Michaels loyalties. He had an abiding affection for the old Bethnal Greeners, the 1990s grandparents who had been parents with young children when he was researching Families and Kinship in East London. These were the people now being vilified by the national media as throwbacks to pre-war fascist mobs. The newspapers in particular appeared to be glorying in the old antagonisms which seemed to be emerging once again in one of the grimier parts of the capital.
Michael always talked to people he met in local cafés, queuing in sandwich shops, waiting for trains. He had also recently been visiting elderly ex-Bethnal Greeners living in the Greenleigh of his and Willmotts book, and to some of the elderly long-time residents who remembered the Bethnal Green of the 1950s.
He loathed the intolerance and racism of those who had been tempted to vote BNP. But he also understood a feeling of dispossession and alienation felt by older people who compared today with the myth-misted security of their remembered youth. He was not one for blindly taking sides, for easy condemnation or complacent apologetics. Because he always understood different ways of seeing things, his solution was to encourage people to see things in another way.
Part of Michaels proposed solution was therefore a programme of education. For this, he needed to create a new short-lived organisation. With his usual energy and persistence, and with the help of Robin Richardson of the Runnymede Trust, Michael gathered together a group of people either living or working in Tower Hamlets, who were prepared to help campaign in whatever way was feasible for the defeat of the BNP in the May 1994 elections.
With a characteristic combination of passion and care, Michael raised the money to conduct a survey in the Isle of Dogs to discover voting intentions. He oversaw the publication of a series of fact sheets covering various aspects of local affairs, such as housing funding and allocation, to counteract the on-the-street gossip that was feeding the newspaper columns. He insisted that we could replace some of this misinformation with more accurate, disinterested facts about local government policy and practice. He invited journalists from the local newspapers to attend some of the famously frugal Institute lunches in order to persuade them of the correct and judicious line to take in their editorials.
On election day the voting turn-out was high and the BNP lost their one seat. Perhaps none of Michaels efforts and ideas made any difference; many others also fought hard to keep the BNP out of the Tower Hamlets council. But Michaels wholehearted commitment to a good cause, and his determination to put wrongs right, mobilised action that would not have taken place without him. More to the point, he carried on when others stopped or gave up.
The conjoining of heart, mind and purpose
After the election he remained vigilant in a continuing situation of potential conflict. Street clashes tend to be worse in summer, when street life is more active and young teenagers are released from the formal structure of school life and its disciplines. Michael worked with other local organisations to establish the Tower Hamlets Summer University, specifically designed to encourage young Asian and white people to engage with each other on shared activities, both educational and recreational. This initiative may be something which could be repeated in other urban centres where trouble blows up in summer months.
Michaels response to the approach of the elections of May 1994 did not take place when he was searching idly in his seventy-ninth year for something to do. On the contrary: he had a book to finish (as usual) and a multitude of other organisations demanding his time and work.
But Michael never turned away from something that he believed needed doing. One of his qualities was his ability to argue others into enthusiastic participation with him along his various yellow brick roads. The journey was always inspiring, and always worthwhile. In this case it was exemplary.
He recorded with accuracy and sympathy an old way of living. He welcomed the dedication of a new one. In both cases he saw the integrity and humanity of those struggling to make a home and community for themselves and he worked selflessly to defeat those who want to sow hatred and enmity between them.
