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’.
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