Liam Byrne

And the response was not, oh my God, this is terrifying.

Let's go back to the farm and the village.

It was, right, a revolution in civic inventiveness.

We invented this kind of incredible clubs.

We invented the powers of municipal government back then, gas and water socialism.

It wasn't a terrified response.

It was an inventive response.

And people like Robert Putnam have written about this for a long time.

This kind of reinvention of...

social capital and civic connectedness is what we need to glue communities back together again.

And this is where the government has actually got its plan bang on.

So this big multi-billion pound pride in place fund that it has launched, 10-year fund, a bit like our neighbourhood renewal fund back in the day, is actually one of its biggest and boldest and best ideas.

A struggling Catholic.

Does that mean you go to confession a lot?

No, it means I worry about not going to confession.

It's been important, but I mean, if you think about a lot of our communities today, it is actually the faith institutions that have held things together.

So I, you know, had to spend a lot of time over the last 10 years running food bank collection systems in my constituency because they have very high rates of child poverty.

You know, very often it's the churches and the temples and the mosques that I'm working with, as well as the primary schools, much underrated, actually.

The way primary schools kept our communities together over the last 10 to 15 years has been one of the unsung miracles of British national life.

We should be giving OBEs to headteachers, in my view, left, right and centre.