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.

The Conservative vision for our society is driven by an ideology that is outdated, philosophically unsound, and lacks basic human compassion.
I wasn’t in Britain during the Thatcher years, and even if I had been, I would have been too young to really understand and remember the political landscape. I came to this country in 1999, when New Labour had been in power for two years but was still shiny and new, when things still “could only get better”. My political consciousness when it comes to Britain therefore was shaped by a landscape where for a long time the Conservative party was beyond the pale, where they and their ideas were hardly even taken seriously. A procession of failed Tory leaders filed past, consigned to history, with me hardly noticing. The most remarkable thing about Michael Howard was that there was “something of the (k)night about him”, and in my memory Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership has no distinguishing features whatsoever.
And then along came David. I remember the Davis/Cameron leadership contest, and I remember finding it distinctly disturbing that the latter was – occasionally – making points I could agree with. This was clearly the man who was going to make the Tories electable again, and that gave me a vague sense of unease, though beyond pointing at specific policies I disagreed with I couldn’t have told you why. It has taken the Tories getting into power for me to realise where my real fundamental disagreements with them are, and I think it’s worth writing about – to make it crystal clear for all those of us who, for one reason or another, don’t remember the Thatcher years.
It is very rare in politics these days to speak of visions. The end of Communism, the fall of the Iron Curtain, heralded an end of ideology, and it is a lot more fashionable these days to discuss specific policies than grand visions. And yet, the vision is still there behind all the the detail, shaping that detail all the time, even if we can’t see the wood for the trees. Once the Conservatives were in power – and let’s face it, coalition or not, these are mostly Conservative policies that are being pushed through Parliament right now – their actions began to reveal the vision that drives them.
One of the first things to note is the Tory obsession with cuts. Ostensibly, this is to do with reducing the deficit. And yet, both the extent of the cuts and how they are being implemented goes well beyond that. Take, for instance, education and schools where the previous government’s Building Schools for the Future programme has now been thoroughly dismantled by Michael Gove, while parents, teachers and private companies are urged to apply for government funding to build new “free schools”. There is no argument on earth that can convince me that this is being done simply to reduce the budget deficit. Rather, it is driven by entrenched Tory ideology – the ideology of the small state, where the public sector must be dismantled and handed over to private enterprise. There is a blind belief here that “the market” does everything better and more efficiently than the state and that therefore as much as possible should be taken out of state control and handed over to the private sector.
The vision of the small state at any cost is highlighted further by calls from the Tory backbench and well-known Tory commentators like Tim Montgomerie for even the ring-fenced parts of public spending (foreign aid and the NHS) or the BBC to “feel the pain”. Such language makes me think not so much of reducing the deficit in order to ensure economic stability (and whether that works remains to be seen anyway) but of an almost childish, vindictive and willful destruction of the state.
Along with the small state, another key pillar of the Tory vision for our future is the family. David Cameron declared back in January that he wanted to lead the most family-friendly government in UK history. And yet, his government’s actions betray a sadly and shockingly narrow definition of family. The emergency budget hits women disproportionately harder than men, and single mothers even more so. Child benefit, housing benefit and a number of other benefits, allowances and services suffering the most severe cuts are disproportionately used by women. The proposed tax breaks for marriage – and I have no doubt that they will be back on the agenda soon enough – would only have applied to married couples where one partner didn’t work. This sends one message loud and clear: If you are a woman, get yourself married and preferably stay at home. No matter how many times David Cameron declares that when he says marriage he also means civil partnership, his vision of families is narrow, restrictive, and in the 21st century unrealistic. We are unlikely to return to the 1950s, regardless of the punishing cuts burdening single mothers or the “carrot” of a tax break for marriage.
And thus the twin visions of the small state and the nuclear family as the core unit of society are being rammed down our throats at any cost and by any means available. Learned-sounding men are telling us how it’s all about numbers and the deficit, how if we don’t do this we will end up like Greece, how it’s all about economics and there is only one way. What is important to realise is that there is more than one way.
Economics barely qualifies as a science. I can say this – I have a degree in it. Economics tells us that certain monetary and fiscal policies are likely – but by no means guaranteed – to produce particular outcomes. Economics does not tell us which of these outcomes are preferable. It can’t – it has no way of making that judgement. We as people make that judgement based on our values; our leaders make that judgement for us based on their values. It is very important to realise that any political debate at its core is not about outcomes – those are secondary. It is about values.
I am not going to try to second-guess Conservative values at this point. I can make some educated guesses on the subject, but ultimately those values are alien to me if they lead us to the small state and the nuclear family at any cost – which they clearly do. My values are different. Like many Conservatives I do value individualism and achievement – but only to an extent. Unlike most Conservatives, I realise that no one ever achieves anything entirely by themselves: There is a whole structure and society around us, a whole lot of factors like who our parents are or whether we were born black or white, male or female, straight or gay, that either limit or enhance our opportunities and choices in life. I believe that we as a society should counter-act those accidents of birth and should strive to create structures where their influence on choices and opportunities is minimised. I also believe that the more fortunate among us have a duty to support the less well-off. I firmly believe that the welfare state and progressive taxation are good things (and I say this as a higher-rate tax payer). I believe that while the market can create efficient outcomes in some situations, it is worth sacrificing some efficiency in order to gain social justice. Additionally, as an economist I recognise that in most real-life circumstances the market isn’t as efficient as economic theory would have it, and that there is a very good case for public provision of a significant number of goods and services.
And this is where any flirtation I might have ever considered with David Cameron’s Conservative party must end. Their vision, their fundamental values, are irreconcilable with mine. Their economic ideology is based on flawed assumptions as well as lacking the basic human quality of compassion; their social vision, too, is flawed and outdated.

I’m on a business trip in the States this week, so feeling very out of touch with what’s happening in the UK. So here instead a more general piece prompted by events from the last month or so on diversity and representation in politics.
Much has been made of the straight(ish)-white-male composition of the new cabinet over the last few weeks. Let me throw in my 2 Eurocents. Incidentally, this post deals mainly with the “how” of diversity and representation, and not with the “why”. I am assuming that the case for diversity has been made loud and clear – though some recent events and comments do make me wonder. But that’s a thought for another day.
Jane Manning writes over at LDV:

Racial integration is a marvellous bridge. If representation is about sending a message of inclusion to a part of society that has been marginalised before then I don’t need a Brown face at the top to make me feel included. Those days of John Taylor not being selected as a Conservative candidate in the 1992 general election because of his colour is what made me feel deprived and hopeless and gave me sleepless nights. The gates of politics have since opened wide to people like me. We aren’t excluded. If we don’t go through the gate it is because we choose not to for reasons based on individual choices, not because we are barred.

I agree with Jane that a lot progress has been made in the area of diversity and representation in politics. But I strongly disagree that the gates have been opened wide; a crack perhaps, but most certainly not wide, and the make-up of the current cabinet only serves to underline this.
Unlike Jane, I am not writing this from an ethnic minority point of view. I’m writing as a woman and with some insights into the LGB community. However, I do believe a lot of the points I’m making apply across the six pillars of diversity and beyond, and I’d be very interested in hearing other thoughts, especially from those six pillars of diversity[1].
The first thing to realise is that it’s not enough for anyone, and especially not Parliament, to just put up a sign saying “Women (or of course any other of the 6 groups) welcome”. It’s just not as simple as that. While outright direct discrimination has become very rare, there are still deep structural issues which act as barriers to entry. Jane in her article claims that the doors are wide open and it’s only a matter of personal choice that we aren’t seeing more women or people from ethnic minority backgrounds in politics. I would argue the opposite: It is very easy to make the choice to go into politics if you happen to be a straight, white, middle-aged, upper/middle-class man; if you don’t happen to fall into that category, suddenly a lot of other barriers pop up that are easily disguised as personal choices but really are not.
I have been known to quip that one of the ways to address gender equality in politics is to turn some of the 47 bars in Westminster into creches. People are amused by this, but there is a more serious point behind it. Providing 47 bars and a shooting gallery but no child care arrangements for your employees is on the same continuum of discrimination as not having ladies’ toilets or as City firms doing business in strips clubs. The latter is obviously worse as it is actively degrading for those companies’ employees to work in that kind of environment but the former is one of those things that allows us to point at the absence of women in politics and say “It’s a personal choice” while we haven’t actually set up the infrastructure to allow women to make that choice freely.
Here’s another example to reinforce this: Yvette Cooper was questioned a couple of weeks ago over whether she would like to stand as a candidate for the Labour leadership. The reason she gave for not doing so was that she had three children under the age of 14. Yet Ms. Cooper’s husband, Ed Balls, seems to have no such issues. This is an issue so deeply ingrained in the structure of our society, it’s only in these rare cases that the true absurdity of it becomes visible.
And another one: Recent quips about colour-coded ties notwithstanding, male politicians rarely get judged on their outward appearance, provided they meet a basic standard of appropriate dress (i.e. wear a suit). Yet Theresa May’s shoes and the jacket she wore to her first BBC Question Time appearance as Home Secretary somehow seem to be more worthy of media comment than her attitude to gay people.
Now, I’m an agency over structure kind of girl most days. I firmly believe in the power of individual action to overcome structural barriers. But to do so, we first need to recognise that the barriers are there. Here is a non-exhaustive list of structural barriers to wider diversity and representation in UK politics – feel free to add your own:

• The way Westminster works is based on the premise that either all MPs are single gentlemen with housekeepers or that they have a 1950s-style family with a devoted wife waiting at home with their dinner. And let’s face it, this doesn’t just harm women – any man who wants to be a part of his children’s lives would be put off by the hours, the travel, the sheer family-unfriendliness of the place. And these are the people we expect to pass laws to increase the family-friendliness of our work places. Having said that, having a Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister both of whom have young children and both of whom appear to genuinely want to be involved in their children’s lives seems to be doing wonders for the family-friendliness at least in the Cabinet. I found this article utterly delightful.
• The absence of visible role models – for any disagvantaged group – doesn’t help either. It sends a subliminal signal to women, people of ethnic minorities, gay people, etc. that this place is not for them; that they aren’t welcome; that they can’t have a meaningful career in that environment. New Labour was pretty good at providing role models for some kinds of disability, with both David Blunkett and Gordon Brown (I didn’t realise until fairly recently how significantly visually impaired Brown is.), as well as Alastair Campbell speaking about his depression. But even they rarely spoke out about how they got to where they were. It is not enough to be the first woman/gay/disabled person in your position, as I’m sure we know from the Margaret Thatcher experience. You have to help other people like you see the way from where they are to where you are.
• The power of networks is huge in male-dominated workplaces. There is actually a good reason why there are 47 bars in Westminster, and it’s that a lot of the actual business gets done there. There is a certain stereotype that women tend to have the meeting in the meeting, while men tend to line up their ducks in the coffee breaks and use the meeting only for rubber-stamping purposes. This, too, is an extension of the power of networks. Yet, it can be remarkably difficult for women and members of minority groups to gain access to those networks in the first place. There is something cultural about the way women are raised that makes a lot of us instinctively cringe away from doing business that way, and from self-promotion. The same applies to some ethnic minorities too. I have been challenged on a number of occasions at work as to why it is right to organise women-only networking events, or awareness trainig for LGB issues in the workplace, when there is no such support available for white, straight men. The answer is simple: Everyone is being forced to play by straight, white men rules. Straight, white men do not need help to understand or adjust to those rules. But our efforts to bring everyone else up to speed with the rules still don’t seem to be paying off. Perhaps we need to consider changing the rules.
• Another one on the cultural front, and this one applies especially for women, is the social taboo surrounding the expression of ambition. Women who openly express ambition tend to be seen as pushy and aggressive. Men doing the same thing are strong leaders. There was a very telling interview with three new women MPs (one from each main party) on Woman’s Hour the weekend after the general election. Each was asked what her ambition was as a new Member of Parliament. And each in turn answered that this was a great new challenge for them, they still needed to learn the ropes, they were committed to their constituency, and wanted to do the the best by their constituents. None of them expressed ambition beyond that. When was the last time you heard a new male MP admit that they had a lot to learn?

There is still a lot of work to do before Westminster is truly representative of the people it is supposed to represent. To achieve this in a sustainable way, we need to not only use the short-term measures some parties are already using, such as all-women shortlists; we need to take an in-depth look at the basic underlying structures of our political system, identify structural barriers to entry, and actively work to eliminate them.
[1] Gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, disability, age, for those who don’t know what the six legally protected pillars of diversity are in the UK.

Michael “I am a banana” Gove [1] appears right now to be doing his best to privatise the UK’s primary and secondary education system. He wrote to all secondary schools yesterday, inviting them to apply to become academies; additionally, he will be pushing legislation through Parliament allowing parents to set up so-called “free schools”. All this is in the name of the “new politics” – a significant pillar of which is to devolve things ever further down: from central to local government, from local government to “the people”. Other buzzwords in this trend include “decentralisation”, “Big Society”, “individual choice”. But really, all of this is code for dismantling the state as much as possible – surrendering control also means surrendering responsibility. And in the current economic climate, with the deficit and debt we’re facing, surrendering responsibility to the mythical Big Society, or to the private sector, is a tempting proposition for any government. In the case of education, this seems like a spectacularly bad idea.
As someone on Twitter pointed out when I first commented about this there, academies were a flagship Blairite Labour policy. I didn’t think they were a good idea then either. Under Labour, the academy structure focused on poorly performing schools. It allowed wealthy individuals or organisations to spend a relatively small amount of money and essentially acquire control of a state school. For a modest investment of a million or so, you could turn one of those “failing” schools into an academy, acquiring control over pay and conditions of staff, teaching and most importantly the curriculum, while the state continued to finance the running costs of the school. This in turn allowed those newly-fledged academies to ignore key parts of the national curriculum which didn’t suit their wealthy benefactors. Don’t like sex and relationships education because the kiddies might learn about contraception or *gasp* that gay people are okay too? Easy – have an academy. Don’t like evolution? Here – this academy teaches intelligent design on a equal footing; or even that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, like the three schools run by the Emmanuel Schools Foundation, sponsored by Sir Peter Vardy. Mr. Gove’s vision for future academies is that they will have complete control over the curriculum.
Let me say this very clearly: I believe that state control of the curriculum – within a democratic society – is a good idea. It allows us to do a number of things: Firstly, it allows us to have a common standard. This is not about league tables and SATs. But it is about knowing that a pupil with a B in maths from one school has a similar level of achievement to a pupil with a B in maths from another school. Secondly, the national curriculum also allows us as a society to democratically determine some key things we feel it’s important our children are taught: things like citizenship, sex & relationships education, and yes – that evolution is scientific fact while intelligent design is a fairy tale. I am particularly passionate about that latter part. I believe the best way to determine what we value sufficiently to teach our children is through public debate and the democratic process, at a national level. Anything else leads to unjustified local variation, potentially disadvantaging whole communities where the local school is controlled by people who, say, happen not to believe in evolution.
Devolving control of the curriculum to the local and school level is not a good idea. Ultimately, as a future parent, I don’t actually want “choice” in my school system. I don’t want to have to check the curriculum of every school in a 20-mile radius to make sure they’re not teaching my child to confuse scientific facts with fairy tales. I want a school system that works – one where, regardless of which school I send my child to, I can be confident that they will have a good-quality, wide-ranging, exciting and engaging education experience and they will learn the things that we as a society have democratically decided are important. Again, this is not about taking creativity away from teachers, or standardising and regimenting everything, testing pupils to death to make sure they conform to some standard. It’s about having an education system that works for all.
Another issue with academies and “free schools” is around access. They would more than likely end up diverting money from local state schools, having a negative impact on them, while having a more selective admissions policy (up to 10%, says Mr. Gove). While initial results of this approach in Sweden were encouraging, more recently free schools have been found to lead to increased social fragmentation and segregation.
Ultimately, the UK education system is already more than sufficiently fragmented. Between public and state schools, academies and faith schools, my future parent self already has more choice than I’d ideally like to have to cope with. I’d much rather see some real effort being put into making sure that the state education system works consistently for all, than see education in Britain broken up further.
[1] Mr. Gove declared publicly on the Today Programme that he was a banana. I have a recording of it. I’m also trying to get as many people as possible to habitually start referring to him as Michael “I am a banana” Gove. Go on. It would make my day.