Can I ask whether you would be interested and have the funds to allow the Institute of Community Studies to launch what I have for the moment called a National Suggestion Scheme?
Why bother with such a scheme at all? I have asked myself this many times over the last month and fear I can't give a wholly convincing answer, convincing to me or to you. I think I would have put the idea to rest if I had not had the survey made [reported in a paper attached to the letter]. A cross-section of people, from Scotland to the South-West, were asked what suggestions they would propose for making things 'run better' in Britain. I did not expect anything much to come out of it. As it turned out, I found the results very touching. The tone of the replies hinted that people were so concerned about some of the things that are wrong with the country - as though for many of them too, as with Bertrand Russell, one of the strongest emotions in their lives is love of Britain; and on top of that many of them had something positive, however tiny, to contribute. There were the obvious grousers of course, but they were in a minority.
It all takes me back to the discussions we had in the early days at Dartington before the Estate Committee was set up. We were searching, I suppose, for new devices for allowing ordinary people to make their contribution to society. On the national scene I think there's just a chance that a National Suggestion Scheme would do what the government is too frightened to let the ombudsman do, ie act as one of the new devices that a democracy needs if it is not going to get stuck.
We have a wonderfully sensitive system of government, I think, but on the whole it only reacts to the insiders and the pressure groups; the man on the 3-30 bus to Blandford isn't one of those, and probably doesn't know how to get his ideas across even to the bus company, let alone anybody else. The scheme would provide a kind of general post office to which he could send his ideas. We would have people whose job would be to sift, pass apparently decent suggestions on to the right quarter and in suitable cases publish.
My hope is that it might be self-sustaining after say, three years, but the Institute would need support in that period to get it going. My estimate is that it would, to be safe, need about £20,000 a year for the three years.
Michael Young, Institute of Community Studies, 18 Victoria Park Square, London E2 9PF (tel 0181 980 6263; fax 0181 981 6719).
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