The world may not have ended this week, but the ?big society? did. It was born in David Cameron?s Hugo Young memorial lecture of November 2009, and died in the prime minister?s questions last Wednesday.
It started in a whirlwind of rhetorical hyperbole: ?we need a thoughtful re-imagination of the role, as well as the size, of the state?actively helping to create the ?big society?; directly agitating for, catalysing and galvanising social renewal.?
It ended with Cameron?s blurted admission, in response to Ed Miliband?s questions about the six-fold increase in food banks, that the growth of volunteers gathering food parcels and distributing them to hungry mouths is an example of this ?social renewal?.?At the time of Cameron?s lecture, the work and pensions minister Yvette Cooper warned ?this is a return to Thatcherism, or even 19th century liberalism ? cutting back on government action on poverty, yet still backing tax cuts for the wealthiest estates.? Now, three years later, we can see she was prescient to the point of clairvoyance.
The ?big society? had two parents. One was Cameron?s understanding for the need for detoxification. Ever since Margaret Thatcher expressed her Conservatism in the notorious Women?s Own interview in 1987 when she said ?there is no such thing as society?, those words have been hung round the Tories? neck like an albatross. It was part of the make-up of the ?nasty party? which Cameron knew he had to wipe away. A big society is the theoretical counter move to no society.
But the second parent was the need for a mask for the Conservative Party?s true objectives in government. They always wanted to cut back the state. The new generation of Conservatives is in thrall to the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions. The Cameroons may admire Blair?s smart political moves, but their intellectual nourishment comes from Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and Friedrich Hayek?s Road to Serfdom.
Jesse Norman?s attempt to put flesh on the bones of the ?big society? in 2010 (The Big Society The Anatomy of the New Politics) ended up being a reheated, rehashed statement of classical laissez-faire and an assault on Labour?s ?Fabian? attachment to the state.
Fifteen years earlier, Alan Duncan and Dominic Hobson published Saturn?s Children, a polemic against the state, and exposition of libertarianism. The god Saturn, it will be recalled, ate his own children to avoid being usurped, in the same way that the authors believe the state devourers personal liberty. The book argues for a smaller state, doing less, with lower taxes.
The pair advocate, amongst much else, the legalisation of heroin, cocaine, crack, LSD and other harmful drugs. This chapter, removed from the paperback edition, argues that crime is partly the result of the ?demoralised condition of young people in many inner cities today, and the lack of any culture of self?help and self?improvement in those parts of society where the majority of people are dependent on State hand?outs in both cash and kind.? It goes on to argue ?it is perfectly respectable to believe that people are the best judge of their own interests, even if they choose to consume harmful drugs. Consumption of dangerous drugs might even fall if the thrill of the illicit was removed.? Alan Duncan is today the minister of state at the department for international development (DfID).
So we shouldn?t be too surprised that the government are cutting too far and too fast. It is perhaps more of a surprise they are not doing it even further and faster, because that?s what they would want to do, given the chance.
Where does this leave Labour? One salient piece of sagacity in Jesse Norman?s book is the advice he gives the Labour leader: ?the greatest mistake Ed Miliband could make would be to ignore this gaping intellectual void and assume that current politics is just business as usual.? There is plenty of evidence that Ed Miliband gets the need for a radical approach to the relationship between state, citizen and society. His One Nation theme allows the stitching together of disparate policies and programmes into a coherent whole. His challenge is to create a political platform which chimes with everyday concerns about fairness, reward for effort, common decency and personal aspiration.
Tony Blair understood this instinctively when he launched the Respect Agenda to tackle anti-social behaviour, and reforms of the social security system to get people back to work. Ed needs to display the same deftness of touch. This is the proper stuff of progressive politics. It is the Labour Party?s core business. As David Marquand points out in the Decline of the Public ?whereas the private domain of love, friendship and personal connection and the market domain of buying and selling are the products of nature, the public domain depends on careful and continuing nurture.?
The urgency of such a project was expressed earlier this month by Ed?s intellectual outrider Jon Cruddas, in a speech to the Centre for Social Justice. The key passage reads:
?We in Labour need to build our own story of the ?big society?. Cameron?s version was too abstract. It was based on a simplistic distinction between state and society. It was all about creating active citizens without changing the way the state or market worked. It failed to recognise that it?s the way our institutions work which stop people getting involved. There was no effort to reform public institutions or businesses to reflect people?s sociable instincts.?
A lifetime ago, Hazel Blears expressed a similar sentiment in her pamphlet The Politics of Decency. Cruddas is right to identify this as Labour?s key task in 2013: to develop a compelling vision of what society would look like after five or ten years of a Labour government. There won?t be any money to splurge; but there are plenty of reforms needed to the ways public institutions work and to public culture. As professor Giddens pointed out, no institution can rely on deference or tradition for its continuing existence ? we live in a ?post-traditional? society. Around us the old institutions are being buffeted by crises, events or spending cuts: the BBC, NHS, universities, police, town halls and armed services. The bodies which shape our lives are being recast before us. Labour needs to tell a story about citizenship, volunteering, reciprocity, manners, and altriusm, which goes way beyond Cameron?s food parcels and soup kitchens. As the year ends, the ?big society? lies at the bottom of the ocean, but its replacement is still in the shipyard. The old is dying, the new yet to be born.
Let?s end the last column of the year with Tennyson, and lines written in times of even greater flux and uncertainty than our own:
?Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.?
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Paul Richards writes a weekly column for Progress,?Paul?s week in politics. He tweets?@LabourPaul
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Big Society, David Cameron
Source: http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2012/12/21/the-big-society-lies-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean/
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