Our vulnerable communities need a social infrastructure

This rhetorical flourish ignored many important social groupings - communities of neighbourhood, shared faith, work or occupation, leisure interests, learning or politics, just to take a few examples. We are all members of some of these interlocking communities and, together, we make up the fabric of our society in all its diverse richness. It was never sensible to ignore all of this except families, parents and children - families are important, but they are not exclusively important.

I was pondering this in the context of Louise Casey's review and the Sutton Trust's report on class differences, ethnicity and disadvantage. Like many, I'm also seeing things through the lens of the Brexit vote and the July spike in hate crimes, symptoms of a deeply divided society - a 52 per cent majority was hardly an indication of a coherent world view across the UK. The increase in hate crimes was evidence of underlying tensions that the vote had somehow given people licence to express. Fortunately, the incidence of hate crime has now reduced to the pre-referendum level, although even that is too high, and we must never be complacent.