By Michael Faulkner - February 27, 2011
David Cameron’s latest attempt to arouse some enthusiasm for
his ‘passionate mission’ to promote the ‘Big Society’ should be put into
perspective. Consider this:
Charities that are supposedly at the heart of his mission
will lose £5bn through cuts. The 2008 bailout of the banks cost the taxpayer
£117bn, averaging £5.500 per family. Last week, in his ‘Project Merlin’ peace
deal with the banks, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced that
it was time ‘to move from retribution to recovery’. Barclays is to pay £4.5bn
in total remuneration to 22.000 investment bankers employed by its investment
wing, Barclays Capital. £2bn will be paid in bonuses. CEO Bob Diamond will
receive a bonus of £9m. Royal Bank of Scotland, 80% of which is publicly owned,
will pay £1.3bn to executives. That’s the background. It should not be, and has
not been forgotten by the general public. Most people are very angry and remain
completely unconvinced that the ‘Big Society’ amounts to anything other than a
meaningless sound-bite at best and a cynical deception at worst.
The notion is now in big trouble. For months the government
has been trying to get the idea to fly but it has stubbornly refused to leave the
ground. Ministers have struggled to explain what it means, which is not
surprising as some of them have no idea themselves. Now, faced with
high-profile desertions by those who were supposed to have been signed up to
it, the prime minister is floundering. Suzie Leather, chair of the Charities
Commission, told Cameron ‘if you cut the charities you are cutting our ability
to help each other. That is what the ‘big society’ is all about. So you are
pulling the rug from under that.’ Leader of Liverpool City Council, Joe Anderson,
prized as a high-profile enthusiast for the scheme, has just pulled out, with a
letter to Cameron on February 4th announcing that ‘the council can
no longer support the ‘big society’…as a direct result of your funding cuts.’
Anderson writes: ‘How can the city council support the Big Society and its aim
to help communities do more for themselves when we will have to cut the
lifeline to hundreds of these vital and worthwhile groups.’
Cameron is so worried that he has decided to re-launch the
scheme. From someone with his PR background one might have expected a smooth,
hard-hitting, convincing performance. Whatever one thinks of his politics he
has a reputation as someone sympathetic and responsive to the public mood. To
many he sounds persuasive despite the suspect smoothness associated with the PR
man. But this time he sounded completely, even comically, unconvincing. In both
his article for The Observer (13.02) and his speech to an invited audience at
Somerset House in London (14.02) his performance was muddled and meandering.
The strength of his conviction failed to convince. The Big Society, he
proclaimed was something about which he feels passionately. It is ‘his
mission’. The fact that something on which he has staked so much is proving
such a flop should worry him and his supporters a great deal. You can be sure
that when political leaders start to tell us over and over how passionately
they believe something, they are getting desperate. Cameron is beginning to
sound like Blair. Blair never tired of telling us how firmly he believed that
what he was doing was right, as though the strength of his self-belief was
sufficient justification for his actions regardless of how much evidence there
was to the contrary. Thatcher, another ‘conviction’ politician (albeit one from
whom Cameron wants to distance himself) firmly believed in the need for a ‘poll
tax’. The failed attempt to impose it helped to end her career. Her successor,
John Major, firmly believed that the British people needed to ‘get back to basics’,
meaning basic Victorian standards of probity and moral rectitude, only to see
his government overwhelmed by sleaze. And who now is able to explain with any
assurance what Blair’s ‘Third Way’ was all about or how transformative his
promotion of ‘Cool Britannia’? They are remembered, if at all, either with
anger, as in the case of the poll tax, or as empty phrases ‘signifying
nothing’.
When Letter from the UK first visited this subject some
months ago, it was suggested that the idea of the ‘Big Society’ may have been
prompted by Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there was no such thing as society.
Hers was a philosophy of possessive individualism in extremis. In attempting,
towards the end of the party’s thirteen years in opposition, to re-mould, or
detoxify the Tory brand, Cameron was concerned to distance himself from the
Thatcherite right wing. He couldn’t do this effectively without abandoning her
views about society. The concept of the ‘Big Society’ is intended to do that.
It is also intended to counteract what is denounced as Labour’s supposed
commitment to the Big State – top-down over-centralization. The
encouragement of localism, community-based initiatives, charitable
organizations, neighbourhood watch schemes, residents’ associations –
indeed, the whole voluntary sector, is unexceptionable. But it offers nothing
new. In this sense the ‘Big Society’ already exists, and, despite often meagre
funding, has, until now, functioned effectively. Of course, there is room for
more and stronger local initiatives that will empower people, like the
‘people’s co-operative’ singled out by Cameron for special praise. This
venture, inspired by a successful people’s co-op in Brooklyn will, if it
succeeds, provide a cheaper and healthier source of supply to the local community,
utilizing the voluntary labour of the community. But, the likelihood of such
ventures succeeding depends largely on availability of funds. And there’s the
rub.
Some critics have argued that this is a ‘good idea at the
wrong time’, suggesting that if it were not for the unprecedented cuts in
government spending that are decimating the public sector, the ‘Big Society’
would be a great success. This misses the point. The scheme has been launched
now for a very good reason. It is intended to persuade people that with a bit
of effort they can work together to provide the services they will lose in the
tornado of cuts about to decimate local services up and down the country. Local
government budgets are to be cut by 15% to 25%. Citizens’ Advice Bureaus and
public libraries will close as will the Sure Start centers for young children.
Front-line services of all kinds are to be seriously reduced; streets will be
cleaned less frequently; parks will be unsupervised. Every voluntary
organization is under threat, resulting inevitably not just in the
impoverishment of local communities but in large scale redundancies as councils lay
off thousands of workers. As has now been made abundantly clear by
representatives of the voluntary sector and local government, there is no way
that the ‘Big Society’ can begin to make good the damage that will be
inflicted. Whether Cameron really believes what he says is neither here nor
there. His ‘passion’ for the idea doesn’t alter the fact that it will not and
cannot work. That is because it flies in the face of the reality inflicted by
his government. The ‘Big Society’ can only serve the purpose of providing a fig
leaf for the cuts. This is not, as claimed by the diminishing band of BS
advocates, the cynical dismissal of a decent idea. It is the only reasonable
conclusion in face of the facts.
Unless this conclusion proves to be mistaken, which is
doubtful, then the ‘Big Society’ is destined to go the way of the other
‘initiatives’ mentioned above. But there is something puzzling about the way Cameron
desperately clings to it. He says it is his ‘mission’ – using, once again
that tired old phrase so beloved of leaders trying to dignify their mediocre ideas
with a profundity they do not deserve. He has staked his reputation on it. This
suggests that it has become something of an obsession, rather like Blair’s
conviction that he was right to invade Iraq. It may very well turn out to be
his undoing.
As the ‘Big Society’ joins the litany over-hyped, over-blown
pseudo-concepts, it is tempting to look for a more truthful substitute that
accurately describes the real distribution of power in Britain today. Set
against the civil society there is an entrenched power elite, or ruling class,
clearly represented by the members of the present cabinet. What is happening
now is nothing less than an intensified re-distribution of wealth from the
poorest sections of society to the most wealthy. Nothing provides clearer
evidence of this than the way the bankers who brought the economy to the brink
of disaster a few years ago, have been allowed to return to business as usual,
while the rest of us have to tighten our belts and pick up the bill. The
society favoured by the government and the power elite whose interests they
represent, is not the big society. It can be accurately described as The Big
Business Society – or, The Big Bankers Bonuses Society. Let’s coin the
phrases – they may take off.