Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington

Early life and education

Young was born in Manchester, the son of Ernest Gibson Young, an Australian violinist and music critic, and Edith Hermia Dunlop, an Irish Bohemian painter and actress. According to Michael's son, Toby, Gibson was a "ne'er-do-well", and "the only silver his forebears possessed was what they were able to steal from the gentry."

Young grew up in Melbourne. He returned to England at the age of eight, shortly before the end of his parents' marriage. There he attended several schools, eventually entering Dartington Hall, a new progressive school in Devon, in the 1920s. He had a long association with the small school, as student, trustee, deputy chairman and historian. He studied economics at the London School of Economics (BScEcon, MA), then became a barrister when he applied to be called to the Bar in 1939.

Young began studying for a PhD at the LSE in 1952. His thesis, dated 1955, was titled "A study of the extended family in East London".

Social research and community activism

During the Second World War, Young served as director of the Political and Economic Planning think tank and became director of research for the Labour Party, where he wrote the manifesto for the 1945 general election and the vast speakers' handbook. He served under the Labour government led by Clement Attlee. In 1947, he called for the establishment of a Social Science Research Council and became its first director 17 years later. He left the Labour Party in 1950, saying the party had run out of ideas.

Young's studies of housing and local government policy in East London, which developed from his doctoral thesis, left him disillusioned with the state of community relations and local Labour councillors. This prompted him to found the Institute of Community Studies, which was his principal vehicle for exploring his ideas of social reform. Its basic tenet was to give people more say in running their lives and institutions. Lise Butler argues that the Institute drew upon existing bodies of research in social psychology and sociology to highlight the relevance of the extended family in modern society and to offer a model of socialist citizenship, solidarity and mutual support not tied to productive work. Young promoted the supportive kinship networks of the urban working class, and an idealized conception of the relationships between women, to suggest that family had been overlooked by the left and should be reclaimed as a progressive force. The goal was to strengthen the working-class family as a model for cooperative socialism.

He also founded the Mutual Aid Centre at this time. Young co-authored (with Peter Willmott) Family and Kinship in East London, documenting and analysing the social costs of rehousing a tight-knit community in a suburban housing estate (known affectionately by sociologists as Fakinel and invariably pronounced with a cockney accent).

In 1958, Young wrote the influential satire The Rise of the Meritocracy for the Fabian Society, which refused to publish it. The book critiques the concept of "meritocracy" as unachievable and undesirable, describing a dystopian future of a society in which "IQ + effort" have replaced all other values.

Although unwilling to maintain a conventional academic career, Young was a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, from 1961 to 1966, and president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 1989 to 1992.

Organisational activity

An energetic and resourceful man, Young established many new organisations with the aim of providing "bottom-up" practical help to ordinary citizens. In the 1950s and 1960s he helped to found the Consumers' Association and the National Consumer Council, claiming that "politics will become less and less the politics of production, and more and more the politics of consumption," presenting the ideas in a booklet, The Chipped White Cups Of Dover (1960).

In 1960, he started the Advisory Centre for Education the National Extension College and, with Peter Laslett, a dawn university on Anglia Television, which became prototypes of the Open University which Harold Wilson launched in 1964, building on his vision.

In the mid-1980s, Young co-founded International Alert, together with Leo Kuper and Martin Ennals. Later on that decade, in 1987, he founded the Open College of the Arts, confounding critics who maintained that the arts could not be taught by distance methods. He also founded Language Line, a telephone interpreting business, to enable non-English-speaking people to have equal access to public services. He fostered the work of many younger researchers and "social entrepreneurs," and founded the School for Social Entrepreneurs in 1997. Aspects of Young's work were developed by the Young Foundation, created from the merger of his Institute of Community Studies and his Mutual Aid Centre, under the direction of Geoff Mulgan.

Throughout his life, and particularly in later life, Young was concerned for older people. In 1982 he co-founded the University of the Third Age with Peter Laslett and Eric Midwinter, and Linkage, bringing together older people without grandchildren and young people without grandparents. In 2001 he co-founded the charity Grandparents Plus to champion the role of the wider family in children's lives.

Later political career

Although he maintained steadfast egalitarian convictions, Young accepted a life peerage on 20 March 1978, taking the Labour whip and the title Baron Young of Dartington, of Dartington in the County of Devon. His many projects required frequent travel to London, and the peerage offered free rail travel and attendance allowance at a time when he had run out of money.

In 1981, Young defected from Labour to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and was one of 100 supporters whose names were published alongside the SDP's founding statement, the Limehouse Declaration, that February. Although hitherto largely aloof from the factionalism then devouring Labour, Young's disregard for the statist and trade union-oriented aspects of its post-war social-democratic philosophy meant he was receptive to the idea of a new progressive party forming in its stead (he had already tentatively advocated the formation of a "Consumers' Party" in The Chipped White Cups of Dover). Upon joining the SDP, he became a member of the party's policy committee and director of its in-house think tank, The Tawney Society.

An associate of the SDP's second leader, David Owen, Young refused to back the party's merger with the Liberal Party in 1988 and instead followed Owen into the 'continuing' SDP. A year later he chose to return to Labour after, in Owen's words, the party's "big switch on the EEC, market economics and Trident." Young remained sceptical of Labour's ability to win the next election and believed that it still had to face up to the task of modernising socialism, which had, he said, "lagged so badly since Tony Crosland died."

According to Young's friend Eric Midwinter, "All his thought, all his incisive writing, all his brilliantly conceived schemes, all his astutely handled initiatives were guided by a salient method. He was a utopian socialist. His thinking stemmed from the views of 19th-century radicals like Robert Owen, Saint-Simon or Charles Fourier, with their hatred of massive institutionalism, be it in the hands of the public authority or of the large commercial company."

Personal life

Young married three times. In 1945 he married Joan Lawton, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. They later divorced, and in December 1961 he married Sasha (daughter of Raisley Stewart Moorsom and a descendant of Admiral Sir Robert Moorsom), a novelist, sculptor and painter with whom he had a daughter (who was born before their marriage) and a son, the journalist and writer Toby Young. Young and Moorsom worked together on several projects, including in the townships of South Africa. Moorsom died in 1993 and in 1995 Young married 37-year-old milliner Dorit Uhlemann, with whom he had a daughter Gaia, who died in July 2021 aged 25.

Death

Young died on 14 January 2002, aged 86. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, north London.

List of institutions established with the involvement of Michael Young

Institute of Community Studies, 1954 (director 1954–2002, now part of the Young Foundation)

Consumers' Association, 1957 (chairman 1957–65, president 1965–93)

Research Institute for Disabled Consumers, 1963 (chairman 1963)

South African Committee for Higher Education, 1959 (founding sponsor)

Botswana Extension College, 1959

Lesotho Distance Teaching Centre, 1959

Advisory Centre for Education, 1959

Bethnal Green Exports Ltd., 1964–66

Social Science Research Council, 1965 (chairman 1965–68)

Thameside Research and Development Group, 1967–69

National Consumer Council, 1975 (chairman 1975–77)

National Extension College, 1962 (chairman 1962–71)

Open University, 1964

National Innovations Centre, 1968–74

Institute for Social Studies in Medical Care, 1970–94

International Extension College, 1971–2006

Social Audit, 1972