Start the Week

04/04/2011

Andrew Marr talks to the Catholic Archbishop Vincent Nichols about how far his faith's social teachings chime with the Big Society, but also what impact the government's cuts might have on the work of Catholic charities. The writer Michael Collins charts the rise and fall of the council estate, and what role social housing will have in the future. Lisa Appignanesi gets to grips with the most untidy of emotions: love. And the neuroscientist, David Eagleman exposes the workings of the non-conscious brain, and questions whether scientists should wade into the debate over what is fair punishment. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 04 Apr 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping king supers for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week, and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings, king supers, fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply. Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, spring is in the air and love is on our mind today, but not necessarily love in the obvious way, the expression of compassion in society as well as love between individuals. Later on we're going to be hearing from Michael Collins, who celebrates the rise and fall of the councilist state and has some hard questions for politicians thinking now about what the big society means. We'll talk about love in all its human guises, from young and erotic to the love of friends with the writer Lisa Apignonese, and we're going to hear from the neuroscientist David Eagleman about how much of our lives, including our love lives, derive from parts of the brain we have no conscious access to at all. But we're going to start with love and work expressed in social action, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, who's been reflecting on his big church and Britain's big society, the love of God and the love of mankind don't always necessarily sit together, do they? But this is the hope. Well they don't, that's true, especially not in the tumult of our daily experience, but there is a vision and I think one of the tasks of the church is to hang on and keep presenting a vision of what it is to be human, what it is to be a community, what it is to hang together in the midst of all the difficulties that we face. And I think that's what we hope to do at the moment too, that there is an invitation, there is a challenge at this time when a desire to create a culture of greater responsibility comes in the same breath as a deep economic crisis. And as a Catholic community, we really want to try and make a contribution to that. I think we have some thoughts and we certainly have a great deal of practical experience to offer. What is distinctive about Catholic social teaching? Well I think it is the fruit of a lot of reflection, a continuous systematic reflection over the last 120 years, basically since the Industrial Revolution. And at its heart lies an understanding of what it is to be a human being and obviously that's a very fertile question. What is it, what is it that makes us distinctively human? And then that is unfolded into patterns of social structure if you like. There is a kind of architecture for social well-being hidden in Catholic social teaching. Some of its principles are well-known like the principle of solidarity, that we really have to think in terms of we and not just of me. And the principle of subsidiarity, which in a way is a kind of version of localism that says things are best and where they are effectively done. Because you don't actually have a very, I mean you have a very hierarchical structure in some senses in the Catholic Church, but you don't sit at the centre as the top man in the Catholic Church in this country and direct social teaching or social work. It is a much more disaggregated or devolved structure. In November we had quite a large conference in Liverpool to try and bring together people who lead the action of the Church, the social action of the Church, on the streets, in the communities. And the image we came up with was this was like a collection of corner shops. We didn't always know what the neighbour was doing actually. But put together, it begins to emerge as a very powerful picture of terrific commitment to people, terrific inventiveness and quite remarkable ingenuity in keeping things going. Nine out of ten Catholic charities receive less than 40% of their grants from central government. So they're robust and they're quite, I think, important at this moment. If we are going to appear where you've got the sort of slow withdrawing roar of the state pulling back, there seem to be two possible things that could happen when it comes to faith groups. One is that they look after their own. I mean you can see a world in which Muslim and Islamic indeed Islamist charities look after. One group of people, you've got Jewish charities raising money for Jewish, old age care and so on. Roman Catholics doing the same for Roman Catholic people and so on and so on. And you get lots of little cells or groups of different activities. And you might ask whether they add together to make one big society. Or you could see different groups reaching out because you quote Robert Putnam, the American social theorist that people of faith tend to do rather more in their communities than people that don't have faith. Well I think there will be a variety of approaches. I mean the Catholic approach has not been to be exclusively targeted on our own. I think the whole tradition of Catholic schools right across the world shows that. I mean often in a Catholic school in other parts of the world, the Catholic ethos is driven by the promoters of the school and the staff of the school and where there's places people are welcome. And that would certainly be our stance. Now others might say well we need to give a priority to people of our own community. But I think the big society has to be understood beyond the voluntary sector. What actually Catholic social teaching would want to say is that everybody, whether it's state or enterprise and even even the finance industry has got to rediscover what the Pope calls the giftedness, the gratuity of human action. So that there's always in everything best that we do there's an element of gift. I saw a furniture van the other day and it's slogan across the front was we are happy when you are happy. Now there's something there that goes beyond just the business of shifting furniture. And here was a company and they wanted to say we're actually want to invest in your happiness in your being settled, not just shifting the wardrobes from one place to another. And there are lots of examples of how there's a kind of gratuitousness in what we do. And if we could focus on that and develop that then we begin to get into levels of motivation which are useful. What happens when the beliefs of the faith group contradict the sort of social mories of societies like for instance I mean there's the well-known issue of gay couples and fostering was one that's been raised an option. Yeah well I think I would hope that in a society as open torrent and as flexible as ours there is space for people to express that commitment to a common good with integrity. I think for example in the case that you give you know there it was a tiny tiny tiny proportion of adoption agencies were Catholic and there was no lack of place for those as gay couples who want to put themselves forward to adopt to go. They could go to hundreds of adoption agencies. So there's a bit of ideology there and I don't think I don't think that helps. Do you think that I mean do you feel that Christians are in some respect under assault or under pressure at the moment? I'm thinking also of the case of the boarding house couple. I don't think we should exaggerate this. I wouldn't want for one minute to kind of make some play for the status of a victim. I don't think so. I think we have to come up with better arguments. We have to contribute to the development of legislation so that you know the balance of rights and duties are perhaps a bit better struck but I think we're active positive participants in this. And do you feel yourself as a Roman Catholic shoulder to shoulder with the other faith groups not against but dealing with an overwhelmingly secular public realm? I think we have a contribution to make which has a lot of common ground. So I think our basic testimony is if you like to the transcendent quality of the human person that human beings are always stretching out for something a little bit beyond themselves and that translates into a belief in God. That's where it origin is. That's what we're built for. And that's the fundamental testimony we want to put forward. That a reductionist view of the person and of life will not create happiness, will not create what we're looking for because it's not true. And how do you deal with the relationships between yourselves and other groups? I mean I'm thinking of all those Anglicans coming over to this ordinary act we call it apparently in the Roman Catholic Church. So you've got tensions with the Anglican Church quite clearly issues with them and yet at the same time lots of other public issues presumably as you suggested you are pretty much shoulder to shoulder. Well I go from this broadcast to a meeting between all the Catholic bishops and all the Anglican bishops of the country today for the rest of the day. So there's not a great deal of tension between us. And I think the Archbishop of Canterbury in particular was very gracious in the way he acknowledged that some people want to follow their conscience and see their way of following Christ in communion with the Catholic Church. So I don't think this is a major problem and certainly our bonds between us are very firm and lasting. Lisa, I do feel I'm sorry to have to say this that as the only woman in the room I really must ask the Archbishop whether in the big society and in this vision of human what is woman's place if the Catholic Church still doesn't allow women some control over their own reproductive faculties and doesn't really allow them to have the same transcendent relationship to God as it does to men. For example the ordinary it, women cannot become priests, bishops and so on. And I just wanted to have that elaborated a little bit. Well I'd have to go back over those one by one. Let's take the second one first. I don't think being a priest or a bishop gets you any closer to God. In fact I can assure you it doesn't. And the search, the quest for God is multifaceted and it appeals to every side of our human nature. So many people would say the great spiritual leaders, some of the great spiritual leaders in the Catholic tradition certainly are women because the feminine side of us is very important in our quest for God. So I don't think we should confuse roles within the church with the quest for God and an openness to God and that search for holiness. The question of the ordination of women of course is a historical dogmatic question about what Jesus did and whether we're free to reinterpret that. So it becomes some distant from what apparently was his wish. Now on the reproductive front the teaching of the Catholic church is that parenthood should be responsible and measured. It's a question of how you do that, not whether you do it or not. So I think you know the idea, parenthood in the Catholic vision is not simply having children. It is bringing children to maturity and clearly there is a limit to how many, how many children parents can cope with. Michael Collins. You mentioned localism. I wonder if this is the church returning to a role it once played in the neighborhood or is it the church rebranding itself within the neighborhood. I would hope Michael that it's a return to some of the things that were excellent. I mean I loved your film and as I said before I spent some time in some of those estates in Liverpool as the priest and I know the kind of combination of values that came from the strength of those local communities which got a boost and got an additional dimension from the presence of the church. And there was a great mutual dependence there and I would love to see that recognised because I think it's genuinely enriching to our society. The Archbishop describes mankind as the truth seeking or the meaning seeking animal which leads us to David Eagleman, the neuroscientists, a new book on the brain incognito David because the essence of this book is that very, very little of what our brain is actually doing and directing us to do are we conscious of at any time. That's right. It turns out that almost everything that transpires in the brain is happening under the hood or under the bonnet as I suppose you'd say here. And you know we have these vast seas of neurons, the cells of the brain and electrical surges and chemical surges and it turns out that we don't have access to almost any of this. So when you move your arm let's say it seems effortless but of course it's only in the same way that a credit card transaction would seem effortless if you didn't know about the server farms behind them exactly. And the more I started really reaching down into this about all the things we do whether it's lifting a cup of coffee or your lips or driving or falling in love or seeing a friend. It turns out that all of this is happening beyond the probing of the conscious mind. It turns out the conscious you the one that's asking the questions about all this stuff is the smallest bit of what's happening in the brain. And that's the situation we're faced with in modern neuroscience and in the way we live our lives. So when we come on to Lisa's book and different forms of love you'd say that the evidence about the people we're likely to fall in love with, the times when we will fall in love with people, these are all below our conscious mind. We may think we're making a conscious decision but actually we're not. That's right. I mean all of this stuff is sort of pre-programmed where we find attractive certain sorts of things. I mean just imagine if somebody asked you to consciously try to change your sexual orientation. It would be essentially impossible because you're wired up for certain things. You know of course this is species specific, right? You could stand naked in front of a frog all day and the frog won't find you attractive nor you he and it's because we're wired up for particular sorts of things and it goes very deep. Here's an example of a recent study. Men were shown photographs of women and asked to rank their attractiveness and what the men didn't know is that it was the same women in both sets but in one half of the photos their eyes were dilated and the men uniformly found that set of photos more attractive. None of the men could say, "Well I noticed that her eyes were, her pupils were a millimeter wider here than here." And wouldn't consciously have been able to tell presumably. Precisely none of them had any conscious access to that but something in their brain knew that dilated eyes as a sign of sexual readiness and so they were driven towards that. They didn't merely felt the urge, the sense that, "Oh I like that woman." And there's lots of other good examples but for instance the brain's perception of time tells you something of the same that the brain is taking decisions well before the self-conscious part of the brain is taking decisions. That seems to be the case. So whenever you have an idea and you say, "Hey I just thought of something," it turns out it wasn't you that thought of it. Your brain's been working on that behind the scenes for days or weeks consolidating information, putting things together and then it serves up an idea to you and you say, "Hey I just had an idea," and you take credit for it but it wasn't really you that had it. And one final example, for instance when sportsmen are hitting fast-moving balls, baseball or cricket or whatever, actually they're hitting, they're going to a place where a ball can be way ahead of where they're self-consciously they could get there. Well that's right, it turns out the conscious mind can't keep up with a fast ball. In baseball it travels from the pitcher's mound to home plate in four tenths of a second and your conscious brain can't keep up with that. Nonetheless, batters hit fast balls all the time. So what that means is that your body can do things well before the conscious mind ever gets any word about it. And of course we've all had this experience where your foot gets halfway to the break of your car by the time you realize that somebody's pulling out of a driveway ahead of you or you jump up because your phone is ringing before you're consciously aware that you've just done that. So the conscious mind is the last guy to get any information, sometimes it doesn't get any of the information at all. And so the moral ethical legal consequences of this get everybody hot under the collar. Does this mean that we can't be held responsible most of the time for what we do? What does it mean for criminal activity for instance? Well this is a very deep question, it turns out that who you are, what your brain is at this moment is a very complicated interaction of your genetics and every environmental interaction you've had. So the brain standing in front of the judge's bench, there is an argument that this question of culpability is made difficult by the fact that you didn't choose your genes and didn't choose your experiences, your developmental experiences or childhood experiences. Now what it does is it makes this question of culpability perhaps the wrong question to ask in legal case. And the way for the legal system to solve this question is to be purely forward looking to say okay what do we do with this brain from here rather than spend all of the time asking the question of well is it this person's fault and asking questions of bloodlust. In other words you can say. So where does that get you to it? It sounds like the opposite of one of our prime ministers once said that we all need to understand a little less and blame a little more, you would say we need to understand a little more and blame a little less. Well precisely what that buys us is more tailored legal system where we can have customized sentencing and customized rehabilitation. We will continue to take people off the streets who are behaving badly but we don't have to treat incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead we can really understand what's going on with people's brains and understand who needs a longer sentence, who needs a shorter one and who can have other kinds of help available. So what do the rest of us think of this? Lisa first of all everyone in wants to jump in. Well I loved the fact that you were working from a neuroscientific base and actually saying that people were largely unconscious of quite a bit of their everyday activity. I think it's absolutely brilliant. What I worried about was this rehabilitation process with the help of neuroscience because in fact as you describe it it seems to me that this is really not so very different from some kind of cognitive behavior therapy or indeed even old Soviet style behaviorist reconditioning of the mind and that worried me slightly because that too is rather more narrow than your original understanding of this huge complexity of the brain and mind. Well I'm so glad you asked that question because it turns out that it's because of our current understanding that we have new opportunities. So one of the things that I discuss in the new book is this framework that the only way to really understand the brain is that it's a competition between a lot of sub-populations in the brain. In other words you're not one person you're a whole society in there and this is why you can argue with yourself and cuss it yourself and get mad at yourself. It's because there's not just one you. Well it turns out that a hallmark characteristic of people in prison is poor impulse control because one of the competitions in your brain is between what you want in the short term, what you want immediately and what you want on a sort of longer term more considered timescale. And one of the things that we're looking at with rehabilitation is how we can strengthen people's long-term decision-making over their short-term impulses. That doesn't change the person at all. From a libertarian perspective it's still the same person we haven't done something like psychosurgery. All that's happening is we're allowing them to take more sober reasoned consideration before they make an act. And I think that's a really valuable contribution. I wonder what the Archbishop has to make of all of this because it seems to me that David's description of what it is to be a human being is light years away from the church's view of what a human being is. Well I'm not entirely sure of that. I mean I think obviously the research that he does is very valuable and I'm very important that we understand more and more about how we work. What came to my mind is my own experience for example of working with a brain damaged child where you try and repattern their movements so that they subconsciously learn again how to walk. But I think the fundamental issue is well rehearsed in the history of philosophy. So for example in Catholic teaching we would make a very clear distinction between the act of a human being which might be subconscious might be instinctive might be unthought out and what is called a human act which is the fruit of reflection and mature decision. And indeed we would go as far as to say the culpability only lies with a human act not with every act of a human being. So I think we need to make some distinctions because we are reflective beings that's what we're doing around this table we're reflecting and so we're not simply the product of our neurological activity which no doubt is very tumultuous. But you would give pretty short shrift to somebody who came into the confession and said bad news father I have sinned good news it was my subconscious brain that was responsible and not my conscious one so it seems okay. No but you would act a good confessor would want to probe the area of freedom that a person had because then that's what brings moral culpability and responsibility is a consciousness of freedom. And I don't think from what I read of David's book that he's excluding that arena of human freedom. Well that's right so there are a few things there one is that this idea between the animal instinctual act and the human act we would cast that now in terms of the neuroanatomy we might say drives from your limbic system versus considerations from your frontal lobe for example. So the idea is the same except that it's all under the same umbrella now of what's happening in your brain. It does happen that I am a little closer to your point of view maybe than one would think just because you had mentioned earlier about this reductionist view you know there there is a problem in neuroscience with the with the absolute reductionist view there's so much that we don't know about what's going on and what's clear is that when you see two people outside who are holding hands and who are in love it's more than just atoms in motion right there's that it's the wrong level of description to bring everything down to the atoms or the neurons there are emergent properties with humans and it's there's still plenty of of mystery that we're trying to unfold. The amazing part to me is where we are right now is we've opened up this inner cosmos inside our heads and we know about as much about it as we do of the outer cosmos we're still exploring the alien life forms. And the exploration is terrific. So and the point is to have a certain amount of humility and not to be too reductive as you have all the little bits you know unpacked on the table in front of you. Quite right the very last thing I'll say about that is the you know there's this question that's been around for a long time about whether we have free will or we don't have free will. Religious people tend to take that we have free will many neuroscientists take that we don't have free will. It's it's a tough argument to come down one way or the other and know for certain what seems clear is that if we have free will it may be a bit player in the big system of the brain but it is difficult to rule something like that out. Well this takes us absolutely directly. I'm sorry I should be sure we have to keep moving to Lisa Apignese's book All About Love Anatomy of An Unruly Emotion because you make the distinction very early on in the book between a sort of confusion perhaps in our cultural minds between very limbic or instinctive erotic love the overwhelming physical passion which the poets have described forever and makes hearts quake and hands poor with sweat and so on on the one hand and all sorts of other forms of love which you argue may have been undervalued have been undervalued on the other including the love of children love of parents love of friends. Yes I think what I was trying to do was to set a kind of bigger picture what tends to be talked about is in the media particularly is passionate love sexual love our raptures and even that perhaps not as fully as we might do or might once have done but we tend to not speak so much of the other kinds of love that are also very much part of our every every child's upbringing of a kind of love that is there in the family with its lacks and its dark sides and its various stalking partners of jealousy and so on and the kinds of loves that we have eventually for our partners our children and indeed our friends and to go back to the Archbishop to society as a whole because love is also one of the energetic bonds that binds us to others and those others are there in the polis in the wider world so I wanted to draw a very wide picture of love and actually set not necessarily set the various kinds against each other because in the richest of lives we would of course all have our very grand passions and perhaps even our great sufferings which temper us and make us endure through life but we would also experience the if you like the subtleties and the deliciousness of those other kinds of love as well. It's a very analytical book in a very different way from David Eagleman's book in other words you have ransacked world literature to write to this book it's got the sort of arc of a biography or indeed many kinds of novels in that it starts with young love and it starts with kind of 15 or 16 year olds exploit their bodies kind of exploding and their minds unable to cope with it really and it and it ends with or ends moving towards the love of people who've been together for a very long time or for their children and the love of friends I like to ask you particularly about the love of friends because we don't talk about that very much it is something that's underrated and yet you would argue that's kind of essential to a whole and happy life. I think it's very very important I mean as a child one of the most important things that happens in your life is that you make friends you move out of the family you begin to see more of the world those friends are people that you also might identify with and that shapes the kind of person you become and then you know the as you move into youth and adulthood there are those very very important friends through whose conversation through whose argument as Aristotle would have said you actually become you understand your life and you measure your life. Absolutely absolutely and this is very much part of the good life I mean I think it's not coincidental that you know the tv series friends came into being at a time when people felt atomized and lonely in the big city and you know families had been left behind and there was a kind of way of being which was a group maybe but perhaps perhaps too light but but you know important to many people what I think one of the reasons that I wanted to stress friendship in this old Aristotelian way and as it's come through you know the humanist ideal that Shakespeare gives us and into our own time is that we live in also increasingly in a virtual world where our friends are the people who we have clicked relationships with and we put this information out and and about ourselves and those people who happen to fall upon it are our friends well I wanted to again give a greater depth to this idea of friendship which is far more important than that very superficial if you like form. If you have access to world literature he said pompously if you've got a few books around then you have got descriptions of all kinds of love you've got very wonderful descriptions of friendship love it's it's wonderful sight and it's dark sight in families in marriages in all sorts of ways but if your main access to stories is in contemporary culture do you think we have two narrow and attenuated a range of descriptions of love in other words most of it is erotic love maybe a little bit of family love and that's about your lot it's quite a narrow band of description. Yes I mean I think you know several things have happened and of course the book as well as you know drawing on literature drives on psychology and psychoanalysis and what I've left out quite deliberately is the neuroscientific field and evolutionary psychology because I think one of the dominant descriptions of love in recent years has come from the evolutionary psychologists and and what they've given us is this very animal or a selfish gene like notion which is very very narrow in that what it seems to to shore up is this idea of the rampant self-interested self-gratifying male. I can't help myself it's midgings absolutely 70,000 years on the Serengeti has made me this way absolutely and and on the other side the nesting woman as a you know woman who who lives quite long these days doesn't necessarily die in childbirth is actually only a reproductive species and a nesting species so I wanted to stay away from that and give a fuller picture. I think the the rest of the the influence if you like from contemporary culture is that we do live in a capitalist and consumerist world where we all are taught from a very young age to desire the next product or the next person who will somehow satisfy us and fulfill us without necessarily always looking at the nature of our own desires and our own lacks and failings and deprivations and so on and again I wanted to draw if you like a fuller picture. Now there are a couple of sentences which will come straight out of one of Vincent Nichols articles I think. There's last two I hasten to add. Well I think Lisa's book is is really very attractive and of course the whole topic of love in sense goes straight to the Christian mystery that we say in God is love and eternal life is this to know the one true God and Jesus whom is sent and so this whole discourse about love is very very central and it's no coincidence that the the present pope of Benedict who I think came across in a much more realistic light during his visit to this country. His first public teaching document was about love. It was a long meditation on the nature of Eros and the nature of Agape and how the two tutor each other because his fundamental point was that we are as human beings both spirit and body and we have to hold the two together. They cannot be divided out without each losing the other and so Eros and Agape belong to each other and tutor each other and one is a word lifts us up and the other gives us. One is the ascending love the other is the receiving love and his meditation is is really very remarkable but it takes us right to the heart of this mystery of life. Lisa talk to us a bit about Eros. We know about Eros the naughty boy but what about Agape? Well I think you know Eros is hard for you. What do you mean by Agape? Well I don't want to do a straight typology because many typologies love have been done and Agape is of course means the kind of ordinary affection that we have for people around us. You know it's very difficult because I am sitting here with an Archbishop to actually talk about the importance of passion too and not only the Christian passion but but you know the elaborations that we give to our physical desires because I think they are the root of many of the stories that we tell ourselves through our great literature our great art. I mean I do think there is an importance to finding meaning in passion. And yeah he always seems to me this this word love is making a ludicrously straddling two very very different things physical fleshly passion on the one hand and the kind of mature enjoyment of a conversation between two old friends on the other. These are so different that using the same word to describe them seems. But we do have the same word you know the Latin languages are perhaps in that sense luckier because they have a moure and amiche you know both forms have a kind of if you like a spiritedness in them and so but love is a good word it's a four-letter word and because it's a four-letter word it includes all those other four-letter words and there is nothing wrong with that I'm not I'm not trying to say you know passion or iris is a bad thing I think one of the things we've done to it is we've turned it into hard work by by by being good overwhelmed by the the advice literature the advice about sex the advice about you know there is only one man in your life or one woman in your life and we're constantly disappointed in the wrong kinds of ways if you like. So I've just tried to draw a bigger picture and and to also say we live for a long time and as we live we keep all those loves we've had in the past within us the the kinds of riddles that you have in the family plus the early passions but then we also have to take on the new at all times and enjoy learning to take pleasure in our children rather than than only see them. We're a household we are a household of memories of different kinds of love which takes us the households in another sense because in in the new film Michael Collins you've called it it's called I think the council estate the greatest state the greatest state the greatest state doesn't the greatest but not the greatest skate because for an awful lot of people this was where they settled it's it's a history of the council house and the council estate in Britain and you're trying to first of all reclaim it the council house as a a wonderful place a good place to be a place that gave people their first real houses and many people's memories of the best times in their lives including your memories of the best times in your life go back to a council house. Well my experience of the council house was quite short lived it was because my parents moved into a rented place afterwards but they were they were on the council list for about 12 years so it's it's relevant in that way but myself and the director Chris Wilson wanted to make it a film that celebrated council housing to some extent before the right reasons which is the people themselves because as you say there were generations and generations of people that moved into council homes had all these new amenities had light big rooms had central heating what was sacrificed was a lot of the working-class families that moved into those estates lost the kind of community and the neighborhood and the working-class culture that they were part of and they got new homes for that but these states never fully transported that working-class neighborhood to streets into the sky or these biggest states. Secondly I think we are also touching on the failures within council housing which which have been there from the beginning to some extent and I think that's largely to do with the with a bigger plan the bigger scheme that planners and architects had in mind. You see that right the way back you see that with the post-war new towns where the idea was it wasn't just about an estate it was about town planning it was about creating these new cities to some extent I mean the the post-war town strange it was enough it was Lord Reef the BBC yeah it's fighting father who essentially oversaw the cultural life to some extent of these new towns he wanted to inform educate and entertain the people in these new towns with galleries with cinemas it didn't happen these became one-class towns because of the nature of the industry that came to these towns and then you see a much later the failures with the bigger estates themselves it's a complicated story but I mean one of the things that your film reminds us is that actually there was an awful lot of effort by planners and architects to keep a sense of community whether it's at Thamesmede or whether it's Sheffield whole streets that had been knocked down neighbors were kept together in the new buildings and there seemed to me to be quite a sense in this film that it needn't have been this way that some of our big council estates need not have decayed and that there were clear political mistakes were made on the road not necessarily by all of the obvious culprits which led to the decline of the council estate yeah I think that's true I mean again that goes back to the 50s the high rises that were built very quickly and they were much more about the building contractors rather than the architects and this idea of the high you built the more subsidy you've got and then much later with the the scale of the estates so the subsidy question was a mistake by the then conservative governments in the 1950s but there's a really serious mistake in the late 1970s by labor well that was conservative and labor for that period it was 50s and 60s yeah I think the market factory was always wheeled out as the folk devil when it comes to council housing because obviously the big sell-off but I think the way council housing was managed before that was in crisis council housing was at its peak in the 1970s as far as how many people lived in council homes a third a third but it was the um well the third of the housing stock was council housing mid 1970s but the um its image it was at its lowest ever at that point and partly that was to do with some decisions made by labor councils and labor governments the vetting process the ideas of the sons and daughters scheme where you bring the extended family into an estate and you you know they live there for generation after generation was seen as discriminatory and then finally you get in 1977 for housing act which has largely been for the working classes where it did change in 1949 it suddenly become for the homeless so you get this idea of need and that was open to a lot of abuse and that then breaks down the communities and finally we have the position now where its short-term lease is only and after a couple of years you have to reapply which you would argue is going to be disastrous I think it's going to be disastrous although I think initially that was the plan with council housing you moved in the artisan working class they moved out and then the slum dollars would move in and this is how it worked but I think yeah I think as council housing evolved it became about longevity it became about home for life and if you move people in those estates short-term this is what the problem has been it's been the itinerant uh no sense of ownership no sense of ownership no sense of investment within the neighbourhood or the area and that's what's brought about this lack of cohesion I think Vincent Nichols well I I just loved the film I thought he was so respectful of the people who were speaking and and really very vivid in the portrait that he gave and as I said earlier I was a priest in one of these estates for for a number of years and all the the value that was there is true but also the decay of it with that shift and you didn't know who your neighbour would be and they would be difficult and then rulian and they became little fortresses then and and I but there are still many places now I was in a parish the other week which was basically former council housing with great stability some of those qualities still there three generations of people attending the same primary school taking great pride in it children whose you know self-presentation was absolutely magnificent so there are great benefits to be heard from social cohesion that comes when there's a match between the people in the houses they live in Michael yeah I think a lot of the people themselves some of the characters in the film when they when they're in their homes themselves they feel completely joyous about the homes they still have they maintain those homes but when they step outside the homes this is where they feel slightly landlocked and slightly lost within an environment they no longer recognise them and certainly some of the London estates you do have a slightly beleaguered white minority within those estates or at least that that's how they feel Lisa I know you talk about this as well show this but I'd like you to say it now I mean what is the impact of the kind of architecture that is used in the planning of some of our council estates and the kinds of lives people live in them I mean you know we all love home we all want a beautiful home but we also want to be able to step out into the rest of the world and somehow the planning there the architecture itself hasn't seemed to be right well I think the architects have covered for some bad press throughout the history of council housing um the the the states that went up in the 60s were essentially supposed to be 21st century states 21st century cities and it's those estates that are coming down most of which have lived survived to 40-30 years the original council estates some of the arts and craft inspired council estates still survive I think the so it's it's the latterist state that seemed to have created the problems but I also think it is it is the families some families that bring the social problems to this estate it's not entirely the responsibility of the architect it's always a disappointment when you find yourself living in the future but we've unfortunately find ourselves living at the end of this program we've run out of time thank you to all my guests Michael Collins is documentary the greatest state the rise and fall of the council house is on next Monday on BBC4 David Eagleman's incognito and Lisa apnea nieces all about love are out now and the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols will be speaking on Wednesday at a conference building a new culture of social responsibility next week the excellent Tom Sutcliffe is in the chair discussing Russian literature and history and canine medics with Terry Jones, Ellith Bautumen and Martin Sixmith, but for now, thank you and goodbye.