In the East End, they still hate means testing is Will Hutton's reflection on a new book about Kinship, Race and Conflict - 'must read' say both Trevor Phillips and David Wiletts.
It seems to me to be an example of what Social Science should be all about - incidentally, it is an update of Michael Young and Peter Willmott's Family and Kinship in East London from the 1950s. As a student I got imbroigled in a pointless discussion with a friend, an engineer, who claimed that the Social Science Faculty should be renamed, because it did not deal with facts. True that it did not deal in binary facts. there are rarely yes/no; on/off; black/white facts. And Hutton's sensitive piece acknowledges that. What the writers of the current book appear to have done is spend many years gathering and examining evidence, and analysing it in order to reach conclusions. But even the conclusions are not especially binary. Housing policy is Cinderella to the Key Issues of Education, Health and Crime, but perhaps more than those three is potentially the key to a prosperous cohesive society.
And it's only £16, which surprised me because academic tomes often require a second mortgage.
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