It sounds nice, but we don't want to live there

'COMMUNITY . . . unbroken chain of community . . . little unions of communities . . .' Thus John Major last week, working towards the peroration of vision at the Carlton Club. And then: 'Your communities . . . our communities . . . the communities of our land . . . together in our communities.' Thus John Smith's answering peroration four days later.

'Community' is in danger of becoming the ruling banality of our times. Politicians linger on it, roll it round their tongues and repeat it with a reverent relish, as if they thought it could turn any phrase from dross to gold. And, up to a point, it can; cosy, nostalgic and vaguely moral, it strikes a chord in most of us. It has survived, untouched, the ambiguities of 'community care' and 'community policing'. It has even survived the Community Charge. Whatever community is, we all want some of that stuff.

It is a strong word, despite its overuse, because it is associated with a golden memory of the Fifties, or even earlier, when we were a kinder, more united country. Mr Smith, striving to look forward, merely alluded to this with phrases about renewing belief, recapturing confidence, continuing faith and so on. Mr Major, the conscious conservative, addressed it directly: 'I sense a growing fear that we may lose so much that is precious to this country; a feeling among people that our deepest values . . . are being threatened.'

But, like freedom, the Eighties political buzzword, community is vague enough to allow rival parties to wrestle over it. It was the Liberals who developed 'community politics', but Labour believes that its whiff of social solidarity shows its origin to be farther left. Many Conservatives, notably Douglas Hurd during his time at the Home Office, have developed a Tory rhetoric of community.

At its most trivial, community has come to mean a modest amount of social cooperation, epitomised perhaps by suburban Neighbourhood Watch schemes. A willingness to take one's garbage to the recycling station and stand as a governor for the local school are extensions of this. Worthy, yes, and even useful - but still light years away from the deeper involvement with neighbours that previous generations would have taken for granted. Instead of peeking round their curtains at shadowy figures trying car handles, they might have known the youths and confronted them, or indeed their parents. Instead of phoning neighbours to lobby for school elections, they would have been standing on doorsteps, gossiping.

For most people, that way of life has been ended forever by affluence and technology. (Mr Hurd's 'active citizen', who made a fleeting appearance during the Thatcher years before he was put to flight by frantic strivers, was a more substantial figure altogether, sitting on committees, stalking the streets, ceaselessly helping his neighbour. But, as I say, A. Citizen never quite caught on during the decade of individualism and freedom.) We should, anyway, be cautious about any definition of community that reduces itself to the self- protection of social islands. It leads to those rich people's compounds surrounded by electric fences and security guards - which, in the United States, also call themselves 'communities'.

The difficulty is that a more generous definition of community, including a belief in social cohesion as a better way of living, involves sacrifices many people would now reject out of hand, even as they yearn for 'a sense of community'. If everyone sent their child to the local schools, Britain would be more communal. If petrol prices were much higher, so that we had to travel more by public transport, ditto. If there were no subsidies for private health care, ditto. If more families kept their old folk with them until death, ditto. If local authorities were stronger, ditto.

But, given the cash, individual parents, drivers, employees, families and voters have made different choices. Particularly in the suburbs of the South and Midlands. So it is fair to ask whether the whole community thing is mostly an exercise in the higher hypocrisy - or at least in wolfing our cake, and then whining about its disappearance. How much do most voters really want a greater sense of community along with the lifestyle changes they would have to make in return? Were the British ever particularly communal, or was it only poverty that made us so? In all affluent societies greater wealth has been used to buy less community and more privacy.

It is just possible that the consequences of social atomisation - in crime, congestion, urban loneliness and even the inner unhappiness of a social animal changing its ways - are such that millions of people are rethinking, at some deep level, the pay-off between individualism and community. It is conceivable that a revolution in attitudes has begun, and that politicians are picking it up.

But if so, where is the political programme? The Government's education reforms hardly amount to empowering communities. Labour's new interest in lower taxation, attacking private monopolies, standing up for individual ambition and so forth may be electorally right (I think it is), but it has nothing much to do with communities; quite the reverse. If politicians are giving us the rhetoric of a return to community values, while fighting shy of the substance, then perhaps they are shrewd judges of the national character. For too many Britons, a community is something we would like to live in, but not something we want to be part of. We all want more grass round our houses.