So, David Cameron is really passionate about the Big Society. He tells us so in his greatly hyped speech today.

The Big Society is about a huge culture change…
…where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace…
…don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face …
…but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities.

I think it’s a remarkable feat of rhetoric to propose largely the same idea Margaret Thatcher was talking about when she said there was no such thing as society and call it the “Big Society”. Compare and contrast:

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.” (Margaret Thatcher)

I could quite happily write 6000 words about how those two statements are identical; but really, I don’t need to. I do rather think they speak for themselves. I must admit, though, that a small part of me admires the rhetorical skill it takes to pull this off.
At the very beginning of his speech, the Prime Minister tells us how there are two parts to his job: the bits that he does because it is his duty, like cutting the deficit, and the bits he is really passionate about, like the Big Society. And yet, not 500 words later, right in the middle of being told what the Big Society is all about, we are back on the deficit and how it’s a demonstration of the fact that “micromanagement from Westminster” doesn’t work. So maybe these are not separate parts of Mr. Cameron’s job after all. Which begs the question: is the Big Society a chore he is doing because it is his duty, or is he really passionate about cutting the size of the state and using the Big Society as a vehicle for that?
I must admit I was delighted to see a return of George Osborne’s catchphrase: “We’re in this together.” I thought it had gone out of fashion. Certainly for every “We’re in this together” I hear or read from Conservative politicians or commentators, there seem to be ten calls for this, that or the other (the NHS, the BBC, or any other public sector evil du jour) to “feel the pain of cuts”.
All good speech writers know that concepts come in threes, and David Cameron’s are no exception. First we have the three big strands of the Big Society: social action, public service reform, community empowerment. These are followed by the three key methods: decentralisation, transparency and providing finance. Let’s take them in turn.
“Social action” is looking for millions of people – every single one of us – to give time, effort and money to causes around us. I take issue with this on a couple of levels. Firstly, while there may be people out there who do have the time, I suspect anyone trying to hold down a full-time job won’t. You just need to take a look at unpaid overtime statistics to see that we as a country already give our employers £27.4 billion’s worth of free overtime per year (Source: TUC). Now our government is demanding the same. Secondly, I am not convinced that this kind of social action is necessarily the best possible use of resources, skills and talents. I may one day become a pushy middle-class parent. This does not make me in any way qualified to run a school. David Cameron himself has said in the News of the World that he is terrified about finding a good local school for his children. Would it be the best use of the PM’s time to go off and start a free school? Hardly.
Public service reform appears to be all about getting rid “bureaucracy” and getting organisations such as charities, social enterprises and private companies to provide public services. I’m probably not alone in suspecting that the operative word here is “private companies”. I’ve already talked on this blog about the Tories’ ideologically motivated desire to reduce the size of the state, to hand out large chunks of it to the private sector. This is largely based on the economic theory that free markets generate the most efficient outcomes (for a very specific and narrow definition of efficiency). There are two issues with this: firstly, markets only generate efficient outcomes under very specific conditions which don’t apply to most of the real world and definitely don’t apply to public services, and secondly I believe there is a strong case to be made for valuing things such a social justice over efficiency.
I am tempted to say that the only thing that needs saying about empowering communities is that David Cameron wants to create “communities with oomph”. Not sure which focus group they ran this one by, but it hardly sounds prime-ministerial to me. More to the point though, Cameron’s vision of “neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them” has something of the 1950s about it. As with his marriage policy, there is something nostalgic about this, almost as if he’s in denial of modern life.
As for the methods, I have already talked elsewhere on this blog about “decentralisation”. Cameron wants to devolve power from central to local government, and even further down to what he calls the ‘nano’ level. (Anyone playing buzzword bingo here?) I find it interesting how this plays out in real life, for instance with Michael Gove’s flgaship academies and free schools policy, where the local level is going to be bypassed completely and control put into the hands of whoever fancies a go at running a school. Despite all the rhetoric, there is a very strong legitimacy issue here. Wasteful bureaucracy or not, the local authority does consist of my elected representatives and thus has a mandate to make choices about the delivery of public services on my behalf. Charities, social enterprises and private companies, on the other hand, hardly have such a mandate from anyone except the people directly involved in them.
Under transparency, the PM appears to be strongly advocating vigilantism:

“So, for example, by releasing the data about precisely when and where crimes have taken place on the streets…
…we can give people the power not just to hold the police to account…
…but to go even further, and take action themselves(…)”

Colour me worried.
Under providing finance, a lot of the emphasis again seems to be on getting private capital into the public sector. One thing bears pointing out here: While bureaucracy may be wasteful and inefficient (and that is not something I am particularly convinced of either way), the private sector demands its own tribute in the form of profit and shareholder returns. I have yet to see someone crunch the numbers on how public sector inefficiency compares to private sector profit seeking when it comes to the total cost of operation and taxpayers’ value for money of public services.
As an aside, I am also amused by the PM’s assertion that he believes in paying public service providers by results, about 1000 words after he has dismissed targets as ineffective.
So apart from the buzzword bingo, apart from the flashy rhetoric then, what are we left with?
I for one am left unconvinced. To me, the Big Society looks like a sustained effort to privatise the state, to privatise public space, and ultimately to abdicate responsibility, and I do not subscribe to the small-state ideology. Apart from ideology, though, I see three key issues with the Big Society. (See what I did there? All concepts come in threes.)
I think there is a real danger of ending up with pick-and-mix public services. David Cameron calls for communities to come forward and tell him what they are passionate about, what services they want to run. So my question here is what happens to those bits of the state that no part of the Big Society wants? This is, allegedly, not a “pilot” that will be “rolled out” – so if no one comes forward, what then?
I think the PM’s vision, geographically focused on neighbourhoods and streets as it is, is extremely limited and limiting. This is the 21st century. Yes, some of the issues I care about might be local, but the vast majority aren’t. I don’t share that many common interests with the people in my street, beyond seeing to it that our bins get collected. The people I have things in common with are elsewhere, and townhall meetings are not how we organise. Where is the scope for that kind of activism in the Big Society?
On a related note, the big trick that the Big Society, with its emphasis on decentralisation, misses is scale. Again, there are many local issues, but there are at least as many issues that require a certain scale – or to use Mr. Cameron’s word, a certain amount of oomph – to be tackled. If I passionately wanted to do something about violence against women, I could talk to my Neighbourhood Watch about it; but given the scale of the problem itself, this is hardly the right level to tackle it at. It needs to be addressed in healthcare, in education, in policing, in social services, and above all, it needs to be addressed on a national level.
Finally, for anyone who really passionately believes in the Big Society, I have this one question left: Which public service will you personally commit to delivering from tomorrow, through your own effort, in your own time, with your own money? If you can’t give me an immediate answer to that, and if our collective answers don’t match up to the public services actually needed out there, then this project is a non-starter.