It's not really my question, but one chosen by the BBC Radio 4 program iPM - a spin-off from the daily PM program.

iPM asked for listeners to pose a question to the Nation - many fine and worthy suggestions were made concerning lots of pressing issues, but one question; "Do you know your neighbours" was immediately capturing for me when I heard it listed amongst the other suggestions - and to my astonishment, 'won'.  The question was then mangled into pollster-speak, but that's to be expected and to a greater extent totally irrelevant.

So why is this question so important and interesting?

For me, simply because it's so blindingly obvious - yet very rarely asked.

The Government spend lots of money on grand social regeneration initiatives, and use all sorts of meaningless words and phrases that often do more to alienate than encourage.  Terms like 'Stakeholder Involvement' and 'Community Cohesion' mean fuck all very little to those for whom they're aimed and can cause confusion and contempt.

Superficially "Do you know your neighbours" is a throw-away question, it does seem obvious doesn't it?  "Of course I do" would be a reasonable and expected answer - and that, surely is that.  Or is it?

Such 'quippy' questions often lead to later reflection, and upon such reflection we may legitimately consider whether indeed we do actually know our neighbours.  This is in part due to the non-qualititive nature of the question as posed.  It's beautifully vague and lacks any methodological or scientific basis.

It fails to define terms such as 'neighbour' - are neighbours those who live directly adjacent or those who live nearby? - thus potentially extending the interpretation to encompass immediate 'community'.  What do we mean by 'know'? - Do we know them to nod at in the morning? Do we know their names? Do we know what they do for a living - or their social, leisure and political interests?  Do we know them well enough to trust them with spare keys to our house or car - would we ask them to come in and water the house-plants while away on holiday?  - all magnificently vague and consequently invaluable in terms of enabling an exploratory evaluation not only of our neighbours, but more importantly, ourselves.

A logical extension would reasonably be to ask; "are there things we think we know about our neighbours that are based upon assumption rather than fact?" - I'm not going there in this particular wibbling, enough to say I hope iPM further explore the significance of the question as posed, and perhaps we could all benefit by asking it more often.