Neigbourhood Aid would help solve several problems at the same time: unemployment would be reduced with the creation of many worthwhile jobs; and we could even begin to regenerate our inner cities. The Easterhouse Festival Society found that celebration and festivities are the best ways to begin the revival of morale in run-down urban areas. Once people begin to join together to eat and drink and sing and laugh and dance, social problems which might have looked hopeless before, begin to be seen as challenges needing to be tackled.
Neighbourhood Aid would have an effect on that curse of modern urban life - loneliness. People would have the opportunity to begin to get to know their neighbours. The act of forming the mini-councils would also help define, like a second Domesday Book, the boundaries of each neighbourhood, revitalising these well-nigh obliterated but vital foundation blocks of the wider society .
Finally, Neighbourhood Aid could grow as a 'human scale' supplement to the mass scale work of the aid organisations. At best I can envisage a future in which every neighbourhood in Europe is allocated a twin village in Africa, India or elsewhere in the Third World, with Neighbourhood Aid projects raising money for the twin, but also arranging the training and sending of skilled volunteers. In the process First Worlders would get an invaluable education in the long-term problems of the Third World. Such twinnings already exist - Bishopston, a neighbourhood in Bristol, has for many years done valuable work in its twin area of Kuppham in India, so there is experience on which to build.
Nicholas Albery, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434).