Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thinking about the Tories' big idea for their Coalition government, The Big Society, and testing it against not only its most immediate critics down south, but also the Scottish context (to my mind, largely indifferent). As ever, all comments most gratefully recieved.
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I live a bi-polar life on this island: a week in Scotland, a week in London, chasing opportunities and doing family in both. I don’t know whether it affords me any particularly novel insight into the socio-political currents at either end of this landmass at the moment. But sometimes the edges rub together interestingly.
Last week, for example, was dominated by my tentative engagement with the hot idea currently attracting pundits, enterprises and other chancers to its surface, like filings to a magnet: the Tories’ (and now the Coalition’s) concept of theBig Society.
The first thing to say about it, wearing my Caledonian breeks, is how unnecessary it seems in the Scottish context – even in its guise as a detoxification of the Tory brand. With Scotland never having bought into the Thatcherite notion that there was no such thing as society, Cameron’s revisionism – “there is, but it’s not the same as the state” – has very little velcro up here.
Also, our relatively advanced constitutional set-up has meant that the SNP minority government has had to find overlaps with the Tories on their pet issues (bobbies on the beat, support for small business). But in doing so, they’ve dragged the Conservatives into the social-democratic consensus of Scottish policy on public services. They either tacitly or actively support budgets and settlements to extend or defend social provision, in ways that the deficit hawks currently running Whitehall would screech at.
However, in an England under the full writ of Westminster, the mood is much more febrile. My favourite groups down here at the moment are the Compass grouping within the Labour Party – the intelligent centre-left – and the New Economics Foundation, a green think-tank. Both are extremely lucid about what the Big Society means – essentially a cloying ideological smokescreen shrouding an audacious privatisation of public services and the welfare state.
The standard line is that the Big Society’s appeal to the joys of volunteering and social enterprise is incredibly naïve and ill-considered – as if hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed public sector workers somehow “clears the way” for charities and NGOs to fill the gaps left in social services. For example, closed libraries are now offered to communities to run on a voluntary basis – as if a public library service was an amateur activity on a par with craft classes, and should be allowed to prosper solely on the vine of local enthusiasm.
And as the NEF’s Anna Coote says, with much of the debatably-deficit-driven cuts meaning the withdrawal of grants to voluntary organisations from local councils, the Big Society comes to seem faintly pathological. They urge a new age of pro-social activism, while kicking the guts out of the fabric of charities and enterprises that could deliver it.
Even when the Big Society advocates think they’re stealing the clothes of the early socialist movement – for example, encouraging nurses to come together as cooperatives or mutuals, to pitch their caring services to newly deregulated health markets – nobody really trusts them. There have been too many slavering statements from thelarge commercial public service providers, looking forward to picking up business as these inexperienced initiatives crash and burn.
As far as the English debate goes, it seems to be that the centre-left is marshalling its arguments and forces quite well. I attended a Westminster committee-room public meeting on the topic last week: and other than the usual mist-wreathed Hogwarts-like experience of walking through the halls of the Mother of Parliaments, the speakers sounded completely tooled-up and ready for the coming few years of battle.
But I’d had a strange experience with the writings of the single Tory represented in that meeting, Jesse Norman MP (author of a book on The Big Society) – an experience which I agonised over in a lunchtime seminar to the Young Foundation last Tuesday. On the Monday, I’d been wearing another of my London hats as a creative consultant – devising strategies to convince large companies that they should adopt a play-based approach to their ad and marketing expenditure. We cited the work of computer-games analyst Sebastian Deterding, for whom the test of a great game experience is that it allows “meaning, mastery and autonomy”.
That evening, preparing for the next day’s presentation by reading Norman’s book, I came upon a passage where he talked about the main motivational drives behind the Big Society, which were – you guessed it – “meaning, mastery and autonomy”. I worried away at this for about an hour, in discussion and slides, with the collected wonks and wonkettes.
So, shock-horreur: does this mean that my play-advocacy, after all these years, is really an example of blithe New Tory incoherence (at best), or mendacity (at worst)? Ehm, no. But what it did sharpen up is my sense of how unscrupulous the Cameronistas are in their attempt to unravel English social infrastructure before the next general election.
It’s very easy to see the Big Society as an attempt to gull the aspirational and “creative” classes into supporting widescale privatisation, by talking their beloved language – specifically, appealing to their desire to achieve personal wellbeing through pro-social activities.
Even if one puts to the side the accurate objections of the centre-left, the Big Society falls down on its own terms, unravelled by the Oscar Wilde one-liner about the problem with socialism: “it will take too many evenings”. One might imagine that there could be a joyful, playful volunteerism to be pursued – if the Conservatives got tough with business and regulated for a shorter working week (say 30 hours), without a directly proportionate wage reduction.
This would provide a rich systemic support to all that volunteering which, of course, has already been going on (one of the sharpest objections to the Big Society is that it’s an opportunistic re-branding of what already exists). But really, can you imagine a party that’s brazen enough to preach democracy in Egypt, while hawking arms to Arab autocracies, taking that kind of stand against squealing employers?
So, an odd few days in Londinium. I regularly meet many good, solid and intelligent people there; but I’m gradually becoming aware that – even before any constitutional upheavals – there is already an inexorable break-up of Britain going on, in terms of basic policy agendas.
Some places are even odder, though. The two headlines that met me at Glasgow Central Station were, on the progressive side, Scottish Labour falling in with everyone else on the end of tuition fees; and on the regressive side, the snarling pointlessness of Old Firm machoism. “I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be/Whaur extremes meet”, Hugh Macdiarmid once wrote. Exhausting, but true.