Analysis: Why won’t Britain fall in love with the ‘big society’?
With Britain awash with romance, David Cameron wants us to direct our affections towards the ‘big society’. Why are we so reticent?
By Ian Dunt
It’s valentine’s day. You know how it is. You have these two friends who are just perfect for each other. They both read the same paper, they’re both smart and good looking with a naughty sense of humour, they both love cupcakes. But when you set them up together, it just doesn’t work.
David Cameron has been trying to make Britain fall in love with the ‘big society’ for years now and it appears he’s starting to get desperate. With a steady drip feed of negative news stories filling up the front pages, Downing Street began to panic. So it opted for a big push to take hold of the news agenda, with the traditional Sunday newspaper article and Monday morning speech to frame the week ahead.
But why won’t the ‘big society’ take hold? And is there anything the government can do about it?
Big, vague political ideas like the ‘big society’ have one major advantage: they can unite disparate political viewpoints. Every prime minister wants to play the non-political statesman role, standing above the fray. Similarly, the most potent, effective political tactics stand above left-right battles, or at least incorporate both viewpoints into one phrase. Probably the best recent example is the ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ mantra. Tony Blair’s promise managed to incorporate the gut reaction to crime of both left and right, reassuring the left while beckoning the right.
But there is a flip side to that quality: if you get it wrong, you alienate everyone. The ‘big society’ should appeal to left and right. To the right it’s an alternative to an overbearing state. To the left it’s about a cooperative, reliant community where neighbours help each other out. It’s so profoundly inoffensive its creators still insist they’re onto a winner. But the scale of spending cuts, and their dominance in the political discourse, has galvanised the left in such a way that it can only approach the ‘big society’ agenda with suspicion. The left views the initiative merely as a return to Victorian standards, relying on unpredictable private donations as opposed to the certainties of state funding. Meanwhile, the right remains unmoved. It doesn’t play on its political tradition in any clear way, as the ‘tough on crime’ phrase did. It is disconnected from its main agenda. It is irrelevant.
The agenda also appears to fall on deaf ears when it’s offered to the public. Countless Tory candidates at the general election felt cut off and hindered by the obsession with the ‘big society’. It didn’t play well on the doorstep, where people wanted to talk immigration (and most Tory candidates wanted to as well). Most people didn’t understand it, and those who did didn’t like it. Many on the right blamed it for the failure to secure a majority. It’s clear Downing Street shares this concern. Notice the way Cameron’s speech has now attached the ‘broken society’ tag to its defence. The ‘broken society’ agenda was much more effective, and it’s now being adopted as the problem for which the ‘big society’ is the cure.
The standard left wing attack on the ‘big society’ is also partially vindicated by the effect of spending cuts on charities. Government ministers are nonplussed by this argument. Most charities don’t require state funding. In addition, many experts are becoming increasingly concerned by the way many major charities cease to properly criticise government policies (notice the silence from major players over the forestry sell-off) because of their reliance on the state for funding.
But Cameron’s attempt to siphon off the blame for spending cuts to local authorities is disingenuous. The new Office for Civil Society (OCS), which replaced Labour’s Office of the Third Sector, quickly cut £11 million from existing organisations. Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, who took the prime minister to task in the Q&A after his speech, points out that 70% of extra voluntary funds came from the state under Labour.
Council figures aren’t collated centrally, giving the government an advantage when it comes to showing the effect of cuts on voluntary services, but there is a certain in-built incentive for local authorities to cut funding for charities in a bid to reduce costs. Namely, redundancy payments. If you cut your own staff, redundancy payments limit the extent of the financial savings. Cutting contracts – be it with charities or private companies – has no such consequence.
Cameron will argue that it’s not all about money, it’s also about devolving decision making to a local level. But politically, the agenda means too little to too many people for it to earn any significant advocates and its arguments are too vulnerable to defeat by its many opponents. No matter how enthusiastically the government is trying to save the ‘big society’, the problems with it are so vast and fundamental that Britain is unlikely to fall in love with it any time soon.
