What Edmund Burke Can Teach Us About SRGs and Community Enterprise in 2025
by Richard Kirtley
When Edmund Burke wrote in 1790 that society is held together not by governments or grand institutions but by “the little platoons” (small, voluntary groups where people learn responsibility, mutual care and a shared sense of life) he was making a point about human nature as much as political structure. He believed that real belonging, the kind that shapes character and community, begins in small circles long before it is ever shaped by national policy.
More than two centuries later, Burke’s words have resurfaced with surprising resonance, not in the realm of political theory but in community halls across Wales and England. Here, small groups of people meet each week as Self-Reliant Groups: informal circles where neighbours and community members save together, learn together, support one another and often start enterprises side by side. Burke would never have imagined an SRG, but he would have recognised the spirit instantly.
The fact that an 18th-century idea still feels so relevant is, in some ways, disquieting. It suggests that the modern State, wealthier, more complex and far more capable than anything Burke witnessed, has still not resolved the deep inequities that fracture people’s lives today. Poverty, exclusion and precarious work remain enduring features of our national landscape. Too many people continue to be shut out of opportunity, connection and confidence despite decades of policy innovation. But Burke’s insight was never primarily about the failure of government. It was about the limits of what large systems can deliver. Institutions can provide services, but they cannot manufacture belonging. They can design programmes, but they cannot cultivate trust. The work of identity-building and of rediscovering the sense that one’s life matters and one’s contribution counts, happens in small groups, person to person, long before it becomes visible in the metrics of a national strategy.
This is the meeting point between Burke’s little platoons and today’s Self-Reliant Groups. An SRG is, at heart, a simple thing. Five to ten people gathering weekly, sharing skills, solving problems together, saving modest amounts and slowly finding the confidence to try ideas they once dismissed as impossible. There is no professional facilitator, no clipboard, no bureaucracy. There is only a group of people learning to rely on one another and discovering, almost accidentally, that they have the capacity to change their circumstances.
What happens in these rooms is remarkably consistent. A sense of “we” emerges before anyone talks about income. People who arrive isolated and wary become part of something communal. Responsibility stops being outsourced to external agencies and becomes something shared, lived and reciprocal. Identity is rebuilt collectively as members begin to see themselves through the eyes of a group that values them. In this environment, enterprise blossoms. Ideas that once felt far-fetched take root because the group believes the person behind them is capable.
There is nothing glamorous about SRGs. They rarely, if ever, make headlines. But if you want to understand how social change begins, it is far more honest to look at a community centre on a weekday morning than at the launch of another national initiative. Small groups succeed where systems struggle because they operate on an entirely different logic. They are built on relationships rather than transactions, on agency rather than dependency, on talents that formal structures consistently miss, and on the slow, human pace at which confidence truly grows. In communities facing social, economic or cultural pressure, these groups often become the first place where people rediscover their own capacity to act and regather their own social agency.
At Purple Shoots we see daily how SRGs quietly transform people’s lives. The enterprises that emerge from them are often small, likely a craft venture, a community project or a local service, but the effects ripple outward. Renewed pride, stronger relationships, a sense of purpose and small income that was once fragile or absent. In these groups, change is rarely dramatic, but it is deeply rooted.
Burke’s idea extends beyond SRGs themselves. Microbusiness owners frequently form their own little platoons: informal alliances of makers, traders and service providers who support one another because they understand that economic life at this scale is relational. A baker shares a stall with a coffee seller. A builder passes work to a carpenter. A photographer collaborates with a local venue. Community-level enterprise is sustained by trust, reciprocity and an instinctive awareness that success is shared. These were the very qualities that Burke believed kept society healthy.
It is both sobering and encouraging that the little platoons remain necessary today. Their persistence highlights the unfinished work of economic justice and the limits of top-down solutions. But their success also reminds us what remains possible. Every year, hundreds of people create new futures not because a system rescued them, but because a small group believed in them and walked with them. We would love the number of people to be in the thousands!
Self-Reliant Groups will not solve the inequalities of the nation, nor are they meant to. Instead they create the conditions in which people can grow, make decisions, take risks and imagine something better. They do what institutions cannot in that they make belonging tangible. As long as inequality persists (and it does, stubbornly) we will continue strengthening these modern little platoons. In the end, real change still begins in rooms where people sit together, share their lives, and discover, often to their own surprise, that they are capable of more.
Burke wrote that society is held together by the little platoons.
Today, we simply call them Self-Reliant Groups.