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My research, entitled ‘The negotiation of belonging among long‐term West Indian migrants residing in a sheltered housing scheme in Brixton, London’, examined the intricacies of identity and placement. The Supporting People Framework governs this BME supported housing scheme within the Council's equalities ethos. My research sample of 26 women and men aged between 60 and 86 were working‐class migrants who had moved to England in the 1950s and 1960s. Influenced by Gramsci's (1990) ideas about the involvement of ordinary people in social change, and Bhabha's (1994) idea of placement, I investigated how the elders, assisted by others who acted on their behalf, negotiated their place in British society as recipients of support services, and engaged in consultation and user involvement processes. Both conflicting and supportive service provision arose. This created shifting boundaries in relation to belonging that emerged between the elders, their place of birth, their formative culture and their on‐going engagement with new experiences, other groups and the state.

By these we mean the parliamentary counsel responsible for drafting the many statutes and statutory instruments of every kind, against whom there has been much criticism in recent years for the mass of indigestible legislation, a little of it almost incomprehensible, inflicted on society generally. What prompts us to return to the subject, after so recently castigating it as “hurry scurry” law, is the Labelling of Food Regulations, 1970. Not that this particular measure is anything but good, but looking at it, one cannot help wondering what was the purpose of the 1967 Regulations; a useless exercise in law‐making, since they will never come into force, being precipitately revoked by the new ones. Nor does it seem to have been hurried legislation, since it followed the reports of the Food Standards Committee after a lapse of several years. However, instances in which measures have been rushed through the legislative process, to prove subsequently inadequate, perhaps unworkable in parts, and sometimes completely disastrous, are multiplying during the life of the last Parliament. This may not always be the fault of the ligislature, for sometimes a new problem emerges or grows so rapidly that the law cannot keep up with it; then there is excuse for measures being rushed through to cope.