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Vive la Commune!

I'm back!  Je suis de retour!  Back from a diplomatic mission to Hennebont in South Brittany, to forge new twinning links between Wales and the Breton homeland.  I seek your help and advice, if you have had any experience of the European "twinning movement".

"Twinning" between communities was an emanation of "reconstruction" after WW2.  It was a highlight of relations between France and Germany, and the UK was quickly included in the triangular relationship.   The City of Swansea has long had a fruitful range of contacts with the City of Mannheim, and they have served to enrich the lives of both communities, having some marginal effect in influencing attitudes and prejudices "between  nations".  Swansea school children have greatly benefited from this network, over the years.  General De Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer both gave high priority to the twinning movement between France and Germany, as a primary contributor to reduction of aggressiveness between their countries.

Does "twinning" still have a role to play in our lives?  I believe it does, though perhaps not the same role as in the late 20th century.

First: it is a means of cultivating, and of satisfying, one of mankind's most powerful drives - namely curiosity about other people, other people's homes and lives, other people's idiosyncracies.  And if a community can create, for its own citizens, a welcoming "home from home" in another society, that is a constructive and creative project.  For too many, foreign travel still resembles space travel, limited by language, where ones view is constrained by the inside of the capsule, where the "other" is seen so completely in terms of ones own perceptions that its "otherness" cannot be understood.

Second: for teenagers (whether studying the target language or not), community twinning generates real opportunities to open their personal horizons.  A foreign visit at the age of 13 or 14 or 15 can exercise a profound influence upon a teenagers emerging image of the world.  "Education of the young" represents a powerful motive - perhaps the most important motive - for persevering with twinning relationships.  The creation of opportunities to stay with, and live for a time with, a family from a different culture, remains high on the twinning agenda.

Thirdly: there is the pursuit, in an "international" arena, of sporting and cultural activities that are already "on the home agenda".   Opportunities to travel and play football, or to cycle or to fish or sail or sing - perhaps even to engage in serious competition with those from other communities is clearly a source of great interest and enthusiasm for engaged in these pursuits, and the bond of common interest and enthusiasm lends an additional dimension to the twinning relationship.

There are nevertheless formidable motivational and organisational hurdles ahead - can you advise me?  Drop me a line

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The failure of the senior Civil Service to understand these matters has crippled successive Labour and Tory governments.  The development industry has been grossly underestimated, traduced, ignored.  Our national house-construction programme has now collapsed (to the 2002 total of 170,000, or well under 1% of the housing-stock each year...) simply because Governments have failed to heed to warnings of the development industry.  Many of the problems are reflected in the awful fallacies which grip the town-and-country planning system.

But more important is the failure of Labour to overcome the awesome failures of the 1980s Tories, in particular the anti-development Ministers like John Gummer (where is he now..?)  I am mortified by Labour's failure to get to grips with this primary element of civilised life - and I fear that John Prescott's panic moves to make up for lost time, around Cambridge and the Thames Gateway, will come to a sticky end.

• Release Green Belt land for housing, wherever it is not being put to a higher-priority urban use (e.g. parks, nurseries, market-gardens, nature reserves, active farms, sports facilities)
• Declare a presumption in favour of development in the case of all non-designated land (known as "white land" in the planning systems);
• Abolish the abusive practice of reserving "affordable housing" out of private residential development schemes;
• Restrict the range of oppressive "deals" capable of being imposed by local planning authorities, who widely abuse their powers under Section 106 of the principal Planning Act.