Big Society isn’t just a Big Con, but that’s how it’ll be remembered

The big society is not going away. Rather than conceding defeat and gradually abandoning the idea after two years of condemnation and ridicule, as many predicted would be the case, Cameron has launched a big society counter-offensive. Putting a comically positive spin on matters, the PM chirped that he was “very upbeat about the torrent of newsprint expended on this subject”. “I have a compelling plan”, Cameron insists, “the big society is here to stay”.

But a glaring inconsistency remains – spending cuts are systematically weakening civil society organisations and damaging people’s capacity to engage in community work, two vital aspects of the big society. How can we explain this conundrum?

The left’s instinctive answer is to explain the big society away as a PR ruse, a strategic con designed to make the most severe spending cuts in history look like a means to a rosier end than just privatisation and a minimised welfare state. The unions write the big society off as “smokescreen to cut public services”. It is a mere “cloak for the small state”, says Ed Miliband. Given the domination of big society talk over big society action, this is an understandable position. And it’s not just the political left – most of the public agree too. 59% of people in a recent YouGov poll thought big society was “mostly hot air” and a “cover for cuts”.

But this perspective fails to explain the Prime Minister’s dogged persistence with the idea. Big society has clearly failed to provide cover for cuts – if this was its primary purpose it would have been dropped long ago. Instead Cameron storms on, declaring it his “passion” and his “mission in politics”. It seems to me we should take these claims seriously.

Yet for a man with such alleged passion, there is no doubt that his government’s policy is consistently, devastatingly undermining it. If it’s civil action and the voluntary sector that’s meant to patch up the £81bn wound being hacked out of the state by the Coalition, it won’t.

Ripping the funding from under the third sector’s feet (up to 40% cuts, according to New Philanthropy Capital), putting the squeeze on families by raising VAT, shoving 500,000 public sector workers onto the dole, and relying religiously on private sector growth whilst unemployment soars – these are not policies likely to increase levels of volunteering and philanthropy. Cuts are “destroying the UK’s volunteering base” according to the recently departed head of CSV, and she should know.

Tentative hope at the outset – most welcomed a national debate on enhancing the voluntary sector’s role – has been replaced with a deep scepticism amongst civil society organisations. The volatility of voluntary sector meetings I’ve attended in Manchester have very much reflected this trend. Charities are now far more cynical towards the big society than they were initially. The Chief Executive of ACEVO supports this claim in his open letter to the Prime Minister.

This is significant, as it these organisations that are supposed to provide the foundations for Cameron’s big society. The government’s unnecessarily severe economic agenda is exhausting a sector dependent on state funding for its sustainability. Hence, as I posted earlier in the week, the private sector looks set to move in en mass.

Tensions between big society rhetoric and government policy exist because Cameron is torn between two incompatible agendas – adhering to his Thatcherite, marketising ideals on the one hand, and forging his own political legacy on the other.

The latter – the Big Society – reflects Cameron’s desire to forever dominate the political centre ground with a new centre-right “civic communitarianism”. But it stands no chance so long as policy is determined by the former, with only a few token gestures to localism, a Big Society Bank, and a £100m “transition fund” thrown in on top (the same amount the government is spending on fixing potholes).

Philip Blond, rightwing radical and chief inspiration behind that big society conception in late 2009, explains that the centre-right should embrace civic communitarianism (the mass transfer of power to “civil society”) because,

“the state and the market have both visibly and manifestly failed … we must not return to the bankrupt version of either”.

This contextual foundation of Blond’s thinking – that both the state and the market have failed, is ignored by the Prime Minister. Cameron has simply embraced the shiny normative ideals of Blond’s vision, called it the Big Society, and twinned it with the same old Tory market-based policy platform that is his real driving force. The problem, as Blond would realise (although his thinktank ResPublica by no means holds all the answers), is that they’re incompatible. Either Cameron is being wildly disingenuous, or he fails to properly realise this crucial caveat.

Privitisation and traditional small-state conservativism have always come first for the Prime Minister, with big society slapped on top a distinct second. Note the telling sequence of events between his flat anti-state performance at the 2009 Tory Party Conference and, one month later, his revised version at the Hugo Young Lecture, where he apparently realised his true calling – the big society.

It is no wonder that even Blond himself, chief big society supporter, has said that government plans represent little more than “Thatcherism Mark II” – which, he says, “will do very much what Thatcherism Mark I did for the poor – and that was to make them poorer”. So long as big society rhetoric is accompanied by neoliberal marketisation, it is destined to fail. The big society might not be just hot air, but that is how it will be remembered.