Communities

Labour’s ‘levelling up’ agenda – Michael Gove interviews Steve Reed

28 min listen

On the eve of Labour’s party conference, the Spectator‘s editor Michael Gove sits down with Steve Reed MP, the new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government. The government has announced an historic £5 billion package of funding for ‘national renewal’ – designed to revive high streets, parks and public spaces. Reed explains how he thinks Labour can win back ‘forgotten’ communities through building 1.5 million houses through this Parliament, allocating fair funding for councils and devolving more powers to local government. Is this Labour’s own ‘levelling up’ agenda?

The difficulty of building heaven on Earth: why utopias usually fail

The years after the first world war were a boom time for utopian communities. As the survivors of the conflict began to recover, many were drawn towards experimental ways of living. Anna Neima looks at six of these communities, asking what brought them together, what kept them going and what legacy, if any, they left behind. In doing so, she offers an original perspective on the entire period and a new way of navigating its artistic and ideological upheaval. She begins with Santiniketan Sriniketan, the community founded by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal. Part ashram, part school, part agricultural college, it promoted the twin causes of