It’s not big and it’s certainly not clever

The government has stopped saying ‘Big Society’ every ten minutes, but they haven’t stopped thinking it. They are still running the country on the basis that anyone offering to do the state’s work should be allowed and encouraged to do it. The state shouldn’t have to do anything that someone else is offering to do for free. As if running the country is a bit like tiling the bathroom or putting up shelves.

The Big Society, as a phrase, has spectacularly failed to ignite the public imagination. Partly, this is because those two words don’t match the idea they’re trying to describe: it’s not big and it’s not a society. Nothing is less accurately described, apart from possibly Irn-Bru, and at least they’re joking.

It’s a phrase that is participating in an argument that no one else is having. No one is suggesting changing the size of society. No one is proposing a Small Society, to which this is the alternative. Maybe someone once said, ‘You’re David Cameron. You used to be big.’ And he replied, ‘I am big. It’s the society that got small.’ It would make no less sense.

A better name for it would be “Small State 2.0”. One of the defining qualities of right-wing thought is that the state should be small - as small as possible. The more the state does, the more it impinges on the personal freedom of the citizenry. If every street light, hospital, and bin-man strikes you as an infringement of your liberty, then this is the philosophy for you.

But even the right have noticed that if the state is smaller, it will end up doing less. And some of the things it does are quite popular. When the right talks about the state, you would think it was staffed entirely by tax collectors and traffic wardens. But even they have noticed that some people might be a bit cross if all the brain surgeons and lollipop ladies disappear.

The problem with the first generation of the Small State idea - from Thatcher onwards - was that when the state got small, people complained about the bits that disappeared. Small State 2.0 ingeniously allowed the state to shrink, but nothing would disappear. For every state service removed, it would be replaced by a non-state version. Everything would be just as good as before, but now some of it would be free. It was like the tax-payer had got a Nectar card.

When the Big Society says, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if all these things were provided, but not by the state?’ the real answer is, ‘No, it wouldn’t be’. How do we know? Because that’s what we used to do before the state existed. This is actually why we created the state, to do stuff like this. Because the way you’re suggesting wasn’t as good.

The Big Society would be a return to the days before state education, the NHS, and social housing, when charities, churches, and philanthropists took up the slack. Relying on charity was charming and gentlemanly and picturesque. Those who provided it were admirable and excellent; those who received it were enriched and presumably grateful. The problem was, it scratched the surface. Charity can’t provide universal education, healthcare and housing, any more than free taxidermy lessons for all would end unemployment.

Big Society is just the latest attempt to convince people that the old divisions of left and right don’t exist any more. The previous attempt was the Third Way - a name every bit as bad as the Big Society. The ‘Big Society’ is plain wrong, where the ‘Third Way’ managed to be entirely meaningless.

If the best thing you can say about your ‘Way’ is how many ‘Ways’ have preceded it, then maybe you should do a bit more work on it. I’m not sure the Communist Manifesto would have had such a global impact if it had been called ‘My Eleventh Book’.

The Third Way suggested that maybe there was an alternative to the two old options of left and right, without ever quite spelling out what that alternative might be. Surely that doesn’t really count as an idea. I don’t call myself an inventor just because I’ve written ‘butterscotch-flavoured hover bikes’ in my notebook. The Third Way is not an idea: it’s an idea for an idea. It’s not a solution to a problem; it’s just someone saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a solution to this problem?’

The Third Way’s ultimate aim was the electability of the Labour party, rather than increased contentment of the British people. And it worked. New Labour’s repeated electoral successes were the result of excellent communication tactics. New Labour was brilliant at saying the right things to the right groups of people. One group was families, and to them they said ‘Education, education, education’. Another group was centrist political scientists, and to them they said ‘Third Way’. And both groups reacted in just the way New Labour wanted: the families went off and voted for them, and the political scientists went off and wrote some very dull books.

Both the ‘Third Way’ and the ‘Big Society’ have a very negative view of the state. The Big Society takes it as read that less state involvement must automatically be better. The Third Way believed that the old 1970s state-based way of doing things was unpopular, and in New Labour circles there was no greater sin than unpopularity.

If you think less state is always better, you have to think that the state is wholly harmful to every person who has the misfortune to live under one. Whenever right-wingers say the word ‘state’ they should remember to make a face like they’ve just described something icky. In other words, everyone in the world is living under a dreadful curse, apart from those lucky people in Somalia.

The Big Society is still central to the government’s thinking, but even they’ve noticed it isn’t really catching on. It is a long time since the government announced that a charity or well-meaning billionaire has stepped in to provide a public service. There are some free schools, and some libraries run by volunteers, but it’s hardly changed the landscape. Instead small state 2.0 is increasingly reverting back to small state 1.0. The government wants businesses to run public services, or they want public-owned organisations to become businesses.

It sometimes seems that the Big Society was only floated as an idea so that, when everyone said it wouldn’t work, the government would then have an excuse to return to massive privatisations on the basis that no one liked the alternative. Like a bully punching you in the face because you said you didn’t like being kicked in the stomach.

This government has privatised, tried to privatise, or brought privatisation into: the NHS, the Royal Mail, the forest, the courts, forensics, prisons, disability assessment, and child protection. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list. It’s hard to pick which of those is the most awful.

Maybe it’s the range that is the most shocking - all of those services should, in the government’s opinion, be run by private service companies. That suggests an unhealthy fixation. This government looks at people trying to protect abused children, it looks at scientists analysing murder evidence - it even looks at a sodding forest - and it gives exactly the same response every time.

That must be crazy, whatever the response. It’s surely even crazier when the response is: “I tell you who’d sort this out - Capita’.

What's the big idea?

We don’t like ideology in this country. Beliefs and principles make us uncomfortable and suspicious. We don’t think of ideology as a platform to stand on proudly, but a guilty secret. If you can find a way of calling your opponent ideological, you’re half way to branding them a maniac.

We have two parties of government, a left-wing one and right-wing one. But they do everything they can to avoid being described in that way. Even their names are rather avoiding the point. No one ever asks Labour why they’re called Labour any more. It would make sense if the other party were called Capital, but they’re not.

And Conservative is an equally useless name for a party. This is presumably a hangover from a time when ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ were the most common political labels. But they are really not useful descriptions, as they do not represent any kind of political principle. Conservative and radical are not ideologies, they are two kinds of psychosis.

If you were asked, ‘Should we change this thing, or keep it the same?’ you would, quite reasonably, want to know what the hell we were talking about before deciding. Some things should change, and other things should stay the same. Generally, bad things should change, and good things should stay the same. Stop me if I’m going too fast.

Some people are inclined to want to keep things the same, and others to rip things up and start again. And some people manage to keep these two instincts in check, and simply judge matters on their merits - but we can ignore that kind of weirdo for the time being. Conservatives reckon things should stay the same, without first checking if any of those things is an alligator in a playgroup. And radicals are just as bad, entirely apathetic about the difference between a baby and some bathwater.

And although we no longer group our politicians into pro-change and anti-change, those two flabby ideas still disproportionately inform the debate. Often, the argument against a reform says nothing more than: “We can’t change that, because then it would be different.” The case against the Alternative Vote was shaped in exactly this way. “If we have AV, then the winner might not win!” they would carp. Wrong. If we changed the system, the winner would still win. It might be a different winner, but that’s what ‘change’ means. Surely there was a better argument against AV than ‘it’s not the same’.

And the mindless love of change - the ‘something must be done’ tendency - is just as dangerous. We see this in areas like education, where successive governments tinker constantly with the school system. Occasionally, there is an ideological trend: comprehensive schooling belongs to a left-wing agenda, and free schools to the right. But between these two inventions lie 45 years of education policies, very few of which have made a useful contribution towards the education of the nation’s children. And if you randomly selected these policies out of a hat, you would struggle to name which party had introduced them. (This excellent game is a very useful way of getting rid of lingering dinner party guests.)

These days, it’s not particularly a party political issue, as the Tory party is no more or less conservative than any other party. The Tories’ most conservative statement of recent years was ‘no top-down re-organisation of the NHS’ and we know how that ended. Once in government, the conservative instinct was replaced by a right-wing desire to introduce the market into as much of the NHS as possible.

Whatever you think of the disgusting changes to the NHS over the last few years (I must remain judiciously impartial, as you can see) at least there is some thought under-pinning it. The Tories’ promise to leave the NHS alone did not come from a feeling that the NHS was perfect as it was, but from a weak conservative instinct to leave well alone. But the decision to start changing it came from a firm ideological position - though they would never admit it. The only people calling it ideological were its opponents - ‘ideological’ has become an insult.

When I argue with a right-wing friend, I try to remember that they are not secretly trying to take over the world, using the poor as fuel, food and furniture. My ideology may say that their policies will lead to those ruinous outcomes, but their ideology says that it won’t. It’s not that they hate the poor and don’t care what happens to them. It’s that they think their policies will ultimately do so much good that even the poor will benefit. And they think that my left-wing priority of starting with the poor would actually be counter-productive.

I think they are wrong. I think they are totally, disastrously wrong. But only according to my ideology. According to their ideology they are right. We have that in common - the belief that your political ideology should inform how you think the world should work. The argument becomes a fascinating search for our fundamental differences, and once we understand each other there is mutual respect - without either side necessarily shifting an inch. This imaginary argument ends in a hearty handshake, an increased love of the diversity of humankind, and a round of drinks.

Why does no national political debate ever look anything like this? When political opponents go head to head, there is never any investigation of the ideological under-pinning of the opposing policies. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a parliamentary debate concluded with both sides saying, “I have a new-found respect for my opponent’s views, as I find them to spring logically and coherently from a central belief. I respect, but do not share, that belief.”

It is, of course, never anything like that, and the argument gets stuck on the points-scoring level. They say: my opponent is lying. The last time my opponent’s party was in charge, there was a disaster. My opponent’s party hasn’t yet officially got round to jettisoning a discredited policy. My opponent’s colleague has recently said something foolish, been photographed making a silly face, or been exposed in the tabloids in an adulterous act of baroque depravity, which I secretly admire.

Some say that politics is not ideological any more. Politics is still ideological, it cannot be otherwise. Any policy is a choice: individual freedom against collective responsibility; state interference versus the law of the jungle, and many others. The policies themselves still bear the imprint of fundamental political ideas, but we have lost the discursive tools with which to analyse, understand, and improve them. It is political debate that is no longer ideological.

But we could get it back. The politicians aren’t going to do anything about it because they don’t see any competitive advantage in changing the tone of the debate. But the media could, if it started to take a more adult view of what neutrality is. Neutrality, as currently practised in the broadcast media, is a brainless process of recounting each side’s position, summarising each side’s critique of their opponent, and ending it all with a shrug and an ‘I dunno’.

But if we had intelligent neutrality in the media, a political commentator would explain the ideological under-pinning of each side’s argument. They would ignore the point-scoring, the cheap shots, and the 'I’ll take no lectures from…'. The ultimate message to the audience - and, importantly, the electorate - would be so much more than the current ‘it’s over to you’. It would explain that this party’s policies represent a particular set of principles, that they have made a choice. This kind of political comment would get its hands dirty and say, ‘If you believe x, vote for this party; if you believe y, vote for the other lot.’

Then maybe the politicians would spend more time explaining why they think their policy is a good idea, and less time sticking their tongues out at the opposite bench. And maybe eventually, somewhere, a politician might quietly confess to believing something.

Make your mind up

Fans of the monarchy will generally make two claims: ‘monarchy is a good system of government’ and ‘the Queen does a very good job’. There is a strong case for believing either of them. What seems astonishing is how many people manage to think both at the same time.

Monarchy is justified in the modern world on the principle ‘well, someone has to do it’. Someone needs to read out the Queen’s Speech; someone has to sign the bills to make them laws; the prime minister needs someone to resign at. A country without a monarch is like a living room without a television. Under a monarchy, the country knows which way to point the furniture.

This is the ‘monarch as Muggins’ argument. When the speaker of the House of Commons is chosen, they are ceremonially dragged to the chair, to create the impression they haven’t been ruthlessly lobbying for the position for years. Similarly, it is nice to think that the monarch would dearly love to be a newsagent in Retford but, due to the overwhelming peer pressure of an entire nation, has reluctantly agreed to be head of state until death.

So, a monarch just needs to be, rather than do. It’s appropriate, then, that we have found an unusual way of choosing who has to do it. Hereditary is really just a nice way of saying arbitrary. Which is just a posh way of saying, ’Shut your eyes and hope for the best’.

Jobs that involve doing something need to be chosen on the basis of ability or experience. But if your only requirement is to be, you need different selection criteria. You can’t choose someone at random, like jury service, and tell them they’re the Queen - as they could, with some justification, deny it. So we’re lucky that we have a family of volunteers to have their face on the stamps.

Maybe this is a snide and ungrateful view of monarchy. But at least this argument works. If monarchy is a good idea then the monarch must be essentially a mannequin. It needs to be a job that cannot be done well or badly. It needs to be as difficult as having a birthday. Because otherwise it is far too central a role to entrust to someone chosen by a kind of genetic roulette.

The alternative view is that the Queen does an amazing job. She performs a range of delicate balancing acts: being ceremonial yet human; engaging with the country’s well-being, yet remaining politically neutral; being a figurehead, yet also a servant. And all this in a country that is unrecognisable from the one in which she started back in the early 1950s. In public life, only Cliff Richard comes close to her achievement.

But if it can be done well, it can be done badly. This is more than simply ‘the Charles problem’. Charles is just a glimpse of how harmful a bad monarch could be - especially if we believe all the praise the Queen receives. For every positive thing the Queen has done, we must imagine an alternate reality in which it didn’t happen, or that something dreadful happened instead. That is what being a monarchist really means. Anyone can be a monarchist when there’s a good monarch. The real test is when you get a bad one. Charles III is easy - try Edward VIII. What if the Nazi sympathiser somehow weathered the abdication storm long enough to see Poland invaded. How’s your monarchism now?

So, either the Queen has done a good job, or the monarchy is a good idea. It’s like chips and pizza - you can’t have both. And yet almost everyone who thinks one thinks the other. But then, the subject of monarchy is frequently the site of logical contortionism.

We can ignore the argument that the royal family are essential to the tourism industry. Yes, people like to visit Buckingham Palace. But the attraction would be much greater if the royal family had recently been shot in their beds. No question - if the monarchy had just been violently overthrown, the punters would be queuing round the block. It would be the best thing ever to happen to the British tourist industry. Anyone claiming that tourism justifies the existence of the royal family is basically asking for regicide. It is essential these people are locked in the Tower urgently, for the Queen’s protection.

The next time someone says that tourism justifies the monarchy, just ask them, ‘Have you ever visited France? Sorry, let me re-phrase. Has anyone ever visited France?’

A more defensible pro-monarchy position points to the stability, the continuity, the certainty that it offers. Other countries are changeable. We, thanks to our monarchy, are resolute. And the present Queen’s long reign is a fine example of that quality.

But where does this long reign come from? To be a long-serving monarch requires more than just your own longevity - you also need your predecessor to die young. So a lot is down to the fairly early death of the Queen’s father in 1952. If the Queen’s father had lived as long as her mother did, Elizabeth II’s reign would not have begun until August 1997 - about three weeks before Diana died. Then how much credit would she currently be getting for her 16 long years of dutiful service? I have longer-serving shirts.

The circumstances of the current queen’s reign create an illusion of stability and certainty. But that is simply not borne out historically. Having a royal head of state has caused plenty of uncertainty in the past. Most of the stable features of the last 62 years of reign are the exception rather than the rule.

Because we all know what the norm is, don’t we? Every reign, unless something bizarre happens, fits this description: ‘The oldest child reigns from the parent’s death until their own.’ That is a basic summation of how the system always works, barring the occasional mishap.

Except that it hardly ever happens. That description certainly applies to the reign of Elizabeth II (unless something very unexpected happens before she dies). But the last one before that? I’m going to have to hurry you. No? It was George II, 1727-1760. In the nearly 200 years between 1760 and 1952, not one of the eight monarchs had a reign that can be described as: ‘The oldest child reigns from the parent’s death until their own.’

Maybe they just had a run of bad luck. So when was the previous one? Then, you’re looking at an even bigger gap - over 300 years. It’s Henry V, who reigned 1413-1422.

OK, best of three, who was it before that? Between Henry V and the Norman conquest there were just two more - Edward I (1272-1307) and Henry III (1216-1272) - the only time we’ve ever had two back to back.

Of the 42ish monarchs from William the Conqueror until today, only five fit the pattern of ‘the oldest child reigns from the parent’s death until their own’. Based on that historical analysis (if half an hour on Wikipedia merits such a lofty description) the odds of a monarch’s reign qualifying for that reassuring definition is worse than eight to one.

We want to believe in the smooth handover. It certainly feels as though monarchy provides certainty and continuity. But that is an optical illusion based on where we’re sitting. It’s not normally like this. We have convinced ourselves that, under a monarchy, the smooth handover is inevitable. The truth is, it has only happened once in the last 250 years. And that’s pretty long odds for the country to spin that roulette wheel.

Straight on or right?

In the last 30 years or so, two ideas have become indistinguishable in British politics: going forwards, and turning right. Any move to the right - privatisation, deregulation, anything that enriches big business - is presented as progress. Resisting these changes, or even, God help us, suggesting a move in the opposite direction, is an offence against modernity. A left-wing stance is not a viable political alternative, it is a betrayal of tomorrow. If you don’t trust market forces to run the world, you basically don’t love your own children.

Going forwards and turning right are different things. It seems ridiculous to have to say that, but the conflation is so widespread it seems necessary. I could understand it if we were French. In French, ‘go straight on’ and ‘turn right’ are very similar phrases - ‘tout droit’ and ‘tournez a droite’, I seem to recall. These phrases are widely used in the French town of La Rochelle to negotiate the tricky path from the town hall to the youth hostel.

But in British politics we have no such excuse. It’s not the language that has introduced this confusion. It was a series of leaders - two in particular - who wanted to take things rightwards. Thatcher and Blair can’t be faulted for following their own principles. Blair occupied a wide-right outcrop of the Labour Party; Thatcher colonised a small island just off the right coast of polite society. So inevitably they were going to tell us all that their vision was progress. The amazing thing is that we went along with them.

Those ideas are now thoroughly ingrained: businesses should run as much of the country as possible, and the state should not interfere, but just sign the cheques. This kind of opinion belongs on the lunatic fringe but, with the huge rightwards drift of the last 30 years, it now shockingly belongs to the consensus. There is a received wisdom that everyone is meant to agree with: kittens are cute, ‘Back for Good’ is a decent song, and big businesses should run everything.

You would think it had ended well. The way this right-wing consensus has emerged, you would think the extreme experiment of the last 30 years had culminated in sun-lit uplands, an end to boom and bust, poverty being made history, and affluent contentment spreading around the nation like bird flu. But it didn’t. It ended in the banks going bust and the state signing cheques that were very large indeed.

How can anyone still think that the world of big business is a superior model to anything? The old-fashioned public sector is still widely maligned, but it never failed like the private sector did. The Winter of Discontent of 1978/9 successfully put people off the idea that the public sector should ever be trusted with anything again. But the financial crisis of 2008 seems to have made no difference at all - except to make people spit after using the word ‘banker’.

The bins may have stayed uncleared and the dead unburied for a period in 1979, but that failure represents a level of competence and effectiveness that Lehmann’s and HBOS could only dream of. The militant workforce of 1979 may have failed to deal with the rubbish and the corpses for a while, but at least they never built sky-scrapers out of them and told us they were safe.

But ‘Right’ and ‘forwards’ are not the only concepts that have got muddled up.

The Labour party has also conflated a couple of ideas, and once again Tony Blair is the source of the confusion. It is easy to forget now how incredibly popular Tony Blair was. To say, ‘I didn’t vote for Tony Blair’ was, for a while, like saying, ‘I am a loveable British eccentric, given to irrational behaviour such as beekeeping and Morris dancing, and the landscape is the richer for my existence.’ It wasn’t normal. But Blair was. Strange to say it about a man that everyone now sees as a swivel-eyed ideologue, but Blair was deeply, deeply normal.

He always seemed like a pretty straight sort of guy. The only time he didn’t was when he said, ‘Look, I’m a pretty straight sort of guy.’ Out loud. With other people - and recording equipment - in the room. Staggering. But when he refrained from that kind of behaviour, he was dynamite. Until Blair came along, the only politicians you recognised as actual human beings were the flawed, sometimes gaffe-prone, ‘characters’. Politicians were either sleek and professional, or they were recognisably human: only Blair was both. Blair was totally professional, but if you met him in the pub, you knew he’d be pretty normal - as long as he stayed off the subject of his own dazzling normality.

Blair was also on the distant right of the Labour party. While his principles and instincts were more egalitarian than the Tory leaders he followed, the tactics were the same. Thatcher and Major had an ideological belief in bringing the market into public services; Blair just thought it would work. And this non-ideological attitude allowed Blair to drift miles to the right of where any Labour politician had ever been before.

And ever since, Labour seem to have lived by a very wonky piece of logic. Tony Blair was the ultimate election-winner. Tony Blair was very right-wing. Therefore right-wing policies win elections. It’s the perfect ‘therefore my dog is a cat’ deduction. Blair didn’t win all those elections because his policies were so right wing. He won because he was the ultimate performer: it’s the singer, not the song. Blair could have run with the 1983 Labour manifesto, if he believed in it, and still beaten most of the Tory leaders he faced.

So, right and forward are different; and so are right-wing and popular. And all that is required to fix both of these misapprehensions is for Labour to adopt a left-wing platform, sell it well, win a general election, and lead the country to a socialist utopia.

Right, that was easy. What shall we do next?