Is the big society descending into farce?

Less that 48 hours after David Cameron’s attempt to revive his flagship idea with a speech in Milton Keynes last week, Lord Nat Wei–his Big Society tsar–resigned (ironically amidst rumours that he has left the unremunerated post for some proper paying work). Wei isn’t being replaced, and critics have asked how seriously the government can take the project if there is no one responsible for implementing it.

The whole concept has never been hard to lampoon: just go and interview a mum who has enough on with the school run, never mind running the school. And of course it’s de riguer to argue that it is simply ideological cover for cuts.

But while it’s true that Cameron struggles to get the Big Society to resonate with voters or his party (though there are plenty of commendable ideas that would fail to pass those tests), there are more significant things to be said both for it and against it.

If the Big Society is partly about ”detoxifying” the party, then it’s hardly a disagreeable adjustment to the Conservative brand. As Cameron said on Monday, he wants to mine the “‘hidden wealth of our nation”:

“The idea that the centre right is simply about the philosophy of individualism–of personal and commercial freedom–is a travesty of our tradition. From Edmund Burke and Adam Smith in the 18th century, from Hegel and de Tocqueville in the 19th, to Hayek and Oakeshott in the 20th, all have been clear that individual freedom is only half the story. Tradition, community, family, faith, the space between the market and the state: this is the ground where our philosophy is planted.”

For their own part, Blair and Brown would have made similar arguments, though (sometimes) name dropping different philosophers. To an extent, it’s just a part of making politics affective and interesting.

But if there’s one thing we can glean from Cameron’s attachment to the Big Society, when even his allies wonder if he’s flogging a dead horse, is that he really does mean it. If it were purely presentational, then the Big Society would surely have been quietly dropped in advance of the general election. No, the problem is not insincerity. The problem is finding forms of politics that will live up to the rhetoric.

Cameron’s Monday speech focused on two areas, the first of which was public service reform. Here, he really is the heir to Blair. His objective is the improvement of public services, his method is the introduction of contestability, competition, and choice between a diversity of providers, including not-for-profits. Whether in the NHS, rehabilitative services for offenders or in welfare to work programmes, improvements will supposedly be driven by the appropriate application of market principles.

So there might be a wider pool of players, but the game remains the same. Charities will get to the table to the extent to which they satisfy those “market” principles. Of course, parts of third sector are entirely up for that: but it is hard to know whether we should celebrate their confidence, or mourn their co-option. How long until these institutions—the institutions of civil society that Cameron would champion—become mere extensions of market?

Equally, we should not be deceived. According to the FT, out of 40 contracts for the £5bn welfare to work programme, only two went to voluntary or not-for-profit providers. Last week, Capita’s CEO revealed that Francis Maude told him not to overestimate the significance of charities when it came to public sector contracts. Whatever efficiencies and improvements a greater diversity of providers portends, it’s not much to do with the space between market and state.

Where does that leave the talk of “tradition, community, faith and family”? Again, there’s no particular reason to believe that Cameron is insincere, or that they are a beard for the underlying economic neoliberalism. But is he able to accept that the market’s advance is often inimical to flourishing communities and families (what can damage a family more than a combination of low wages and long working hours?) and that faith and tradition are often mobilised in resistance to it?

All this reminds me of the Shops Bill in 1986, which sought to liberalise Sunday trading, and on which Thatcher suffered her only defeat in the House of Commons. It was visited on her by a strange alliance of traditionalist Tories, Labour, religious campaigners, and USDAW.

That sounds like a Big Society to me.

By Paul Bickley (First published by Prospect magazine).