You recieved an OBE for you role in founding the Citzenship Foundation, what is it?
The Citizenship Foundation is a charity that exists to try and help all young people, of all abilities, to take their place in society, with a positive sense about what it is to be a citizen of that society. Given that we've constructed a society of byzantine complexity, where now, not merely young people but the majority of the population feel disconnected from what's done in our name in Westminster and Whitehall. We feel, in some sense, even alienated from it because nobody asks anything except at election time, and some times when they're are asked, the answer they give is not heeded, and so on. It was long ago I conceived the notion that if I got on in the world, I'd like to try and do something about that. I remember when I was in Sudbury here, my father used to run some of the local magistrates courts on a part time basis. I used to flog around with him to Longmalford and Boxford and Hadley and Sudbury. Very often then these juvenile offenders, pretty small boys in those days, might have given someone a punch in the jaw after a Saturday night beer-up. You'd always get this sort of pervasion report giving us their background. I always used to think, there but for the grace of god go I. And what is more, even then, I thought, how on earth do they develop a respect for law and order? How did they get on the right side of the tracks? So when I "got on" and had set up my practice, I decided, first of all, I got the Law Society, god bless them, to fund a really major experiment to see whether you can develop teaching materials for all abilities to, so to speak, get across to teenagers the idea of what the law was. This included what the values underpinned the law were, roughly how it worked, roughly how you could change the law, and how it affected them, and how they affected others. I actually had a class in one of the schools in Sudbury for a year, once a week, to see what I could do with them in 1969. I found I could do a lot. It was naturally of interest to them, because it's real. So I got the Law Society to put up a third of a million pounds in 1983 for a national experiment working with the teachers body. That was a huge success, for 3 years, and it was a huge success. On the back of that in 1987 or 1988, I founded the Citizenship Foundation as an independent charity. Fortunately it's thriving. We have to raise 3 million a year now to continue it's work. We have a full-time staff of 40 and an army of volunteers, most of them solicitors and barristers. We work right across the UK education spectrum, including primary schools, incidentally.
