David Cameron’s recent speech laying out his vision of the Big Society provides a yardstick to judge it against traditional Liberal Democrat (and before that Liberal) beliefs in community politics.
The underlying motivation for the Big Society, as expressed by Cameron, could have come from one of the many Lib Dem / Liberal pamphlets or articles about community politics:
It comes from the belief that over many decades this country has become too centralised, too bureaucratic and too top-down.
And this is not just inefficient and overly-bureaucratic but also has an insidious cultural effect, because it robs people of responsibility.
Regaining this shared sense of personal responsibility goes to the heart of my political philosophy – in fact to the heart of my whole approach to life.
The use of “responsibility” may be more traditionally Conservative vocabulary, but it compliments the community politics ideal of helping people to help themselves rather than doing everything for them.
From this starting point, Cameron laid out three policy areas.
First, decentralisation of power. A radical devolving of power not just to local government, but beyond that to neighbourhoods and communities.
Decentralisation was a Liberal Democrat demand whilst many in the Conservatives were still loving centralisation, though in our party it more often takes the form of believing in decentralising to local councils, but very little further. Cameron’s belief in going beyond councils is not one at odds however with views often expressed at Liberal Democrat conferences, even if more in fringe meetings and speeches from the floor than in expressions of the party’s official position.
Turning to provision of services, Cameron said:
The second key area is public service reform: opening up public services so that anyone can offer to provide them.
Think “free schools” and you get many Liberal Democrats saying, “Here’s where my agreement stops”. However, the party has often had a rather unusual relationship to the question of who should provide public services. The party’s general support of diversity, love of cooperatives or mutuals, belief in local provision and local accountability and suspicions of state power could naturally lead to many forms of local provision of services through means other than staff on a public sector payroll. And yet, it never really quite has on a significant scale.
Then on to Cameron’s third point:
The third part of our Big Society approach is social action people giving their time and effort to support causes that matter to them.
As with his general principle, this fits comfortably alongside the ideas behind community politics.
Overall then Cameron’s speech suggests that much of the Big Society in itself should not provide a problem for Liberal Democrats – and indeed can be welcomed as a different name for approaches the party has long been arguing for. But the party is likely to be put on the spot again and again over the second point: who does the party think should provide services? Is it all about provision by local public bodies answerable to the council, or is it about more than just public bodies and more than just councils?
To find out more about Community Politics, see this short introduction to Community Politics resources I’ve put together.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Dundee - designing resilience into a fragile urban landscape
Potential job losses multiply from NHS England
Adam Harley selected for Strathkelvin and Bearsden
When Not the Nine O'Clock News demonstrated how to deal with chess prodigies
Diversity, Inclusion and Equality Programmes bring out the full capacity of a nation.
Katharine Pindar
David Raw
Mike Peters
13 Comments
I agree with a lot of this. It is good news that the Tories have left behind the centralising tendencies of the Thatcher era, but there remains a big problem with the Tory version of localisation (ie the Big Society);
Lack of local accountability.
————————————-
Local government has a key role and always has done as far as community politics is concerned. Councillors are elected. If they make mistakes they get defeated. This is made easier when we have STV. Local people might have a tribal loyalty to one particular party, but with STV it is easier to vote off a councillor who is underperforming, and people can still vote for other candidates of the same party.
The concern about Free schools is that certainly they will benefit those who participate, but those who do not will lose out.
It is likely to be the middle classes who will disproportionately take advantage of Free Schools and those from a working class background will be left behind. Hence not only the lack of local accountability for those who do not take part (and which if run by local government local councillors would have to take into account), this will also inhibit social mobility, undo any good work that the pupil premium achieves and having made social mobility a high profile issue will contribute to a glaring fail by the time of the next general election.
The problem is that as with the issue of equality, Nick Clegg appears to have gone native with the Tories on this issue and once again the party will pay a high price for that.
The tradegy would be that the electorate would not be aware that the Lib Dems had a better policy all along, but did not fight for it.
I’d say I’m more interested at this stage in the principles by which a decision is judged, than who provides the service.
I’m not convinced local government provides particularly good accountability; as a Glaswegian I’m familiar with what happens when a Labour council chooses to ride roughshod over the people. There was a story recently about Newham Council’s prolificacy as well. Which isn’t to say that accountability isn’t an important principle, just that as long as turnout is low in local elections there shouldn’t be an assumption that councils feel obliged to listen. Local politicians are just as capable as national ones of being self-serving, power-hungry and indifferent to anyone not of their tribe.
Although to Geoffrey’s post: I left Glasgow before STV came in. Perhaps that has made a difference. I’ll have to ask during my Christmas visits.
Other issues for me would be things like environmentalism and privacy. This is where private firms tend to fall down. I’d be concerned about private firms selling mailing lists after gathering information from people dependent on a public service, who did not go to that firm out of free choice. I’d worry about a national consortium lobbying for lower energy standards on the basis of short term profit margins. This is where the right wing’s desire for individual freedom tends to include freedom from responsibility (for the external impact of personal decisions).
Geoffrey
I agree that the accountability of Free Schools is an issue, but there is an even bigger issue about the accountability of academy chains. These are effectively replacement LEAs (old style) – they appoint teachers centrally, can move them from school to school, provide professional development, have common admissions etc. They are accountable to absolutely noone. They are not even subject to inspection. One of these organisations could run a string of underperforming schools without penalty for ever.
For me, the bigger issue with free schools is not just who provides local services, but who decides who the local provider should be? The Education White Paper makes it absolutely clear (and this has been confirmed by the DfE that when a new school is required (and there will be a lot of new primary schools over the next 5 to 10 years) there is an expectation that it will be a free school or an academy, even if the local community prefer a local authority maintained school.
My final concern with schools and localisation is the introduction in the Academies Act (which the Lib Dems supported) of the right for the Secretary of State to convert any school into an academy; even if the head, staff, governors, parents, students and local community are opposed.
I should point out Nigel that the Liberal Democrats voted against Free Schools and Academies at their autumn conference last year by a margin of 10-1.
It is a shame the MPs did not do likewise.
Many Lib Dem controlled councils have supported devolved neighbourhoods, eg the doomed Tower Hamlets BC in London, where racism took hold in one or two neighbourhoods and accusations of misuse of power over local markets also played a role. I would be interested to know whether neighbourhood activities played a part in the fall from grace of Islington BC under Lib Dem control? Walsall under labour control was widely said to have devolved to too many ultra local neighbourhoods to make good sense, and became nationally notorious.
South Somerset DC, on the other hand, has operated a well received devolved system for many years, and Lib Dems have now been in charge for donkeys’ years.
Devolution has to be thought through, and planned carefully, and tweaked if problems are discovered. There are down-sides as well as upsides. As has been said, democratic election is a key facet of devolution. Our party has sometimes thought that devolution is the answer to everything, and therefore, anything devolved must be good. As explained above, 25 years ago, we would never have gone into coalition with the Tories, because Thatcher was a relentless centraliser. These days, with weaker identifiable ideology in the Lib Dems, a coalition with a more decentralising style of Tory has been much more attractive to the party. Unfortunately, scratching the ideological surface reveals that the ideologies of the two parties are poles apart. At present, realities of power, and worry about what may happen if the link breaks, hold the two together….
In a truly Big Society no one would inherit billions, hundreds of millions, tens of millions, millions, etc. of pounds, while millions of other people never inherit any capital at all. In a truly Big Society people would start off more equally financially in each new generation, with a basic minimum inheritance of capital.
It is not inevitable that the inequalities resulting from the successful operation of market capitalism in one generation should result in vast inequalities of tax-free unearned ownership and opportunity in the next. There is no reason why we should stick with the conservative political ideology of unfettered Dynastic Capitalism. We should move towards the liberal political ideology of Popular Capitalism, with national Universal Inheritance schemes positively redistributing the inheritance of capital in an enabling State, so that all own some capital at least at one stage in their lives, upon which hopefully they can build.
Within such an enabling State there would still be a need for the ideas of the Big Society/Community Politics. But those ideas should not be used as a way of ignoring the fundamental inequalities of unrestricted Dynastic Capitalism. The constantly increasing inequality of ownership of capital is a danger to our democracy that must be reversed in each new generation. If our society erupts as a result of anger against inequality of unearned inherited wealth growing ever larger through the opportunities that wealth brings, reinforced by inequality of opportunity in education and health, it will become not the Big Society, but truly the broken society.
We must enable all young UK-born UK citizens by giving them a broadly self-financed Universal Inheritance of at least £10,000 (less than 10 per cent of average wealth of every adult and child in the country) at the age of 25, financed by a radical reform of Inheritance Tax. Those who go to university can use it to repay the necessary loans from banks against the certain receipt at 25. Those who do not go to university can use it for other purposes, including business start up and deposits for home ownership.
Without such a scheme, Liberal Democrats will forever suffer from their broken promises on tuition fees.
There are too many conflicting messages, on one hand you have the handing down powers, on the other hand you have Mr Bumble telling councils to share CEO’s and back office staff, which will inevitably encourage large providers to run council services nationally.
My thoughts on this post are here. Conclusion: “my worry is that this agenda of decentralisation, public service unbundling and third sector growth will be pushed without sufficient attention to the kinds of mechanisms that would provide the democratic checks-and-balances that a healthy democratic society needs.”
Geoffrey Payne
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that members supported free schools. I meant supported (as in voted for) in parliament.
Community politics, I think, was generally viewed as cost-neutral, a means of improving services and public participation in deciding priorities by engaging extra involvement from the community. The “big society” comes hand in hand with a drive to cut costs, and this is bound to mean a fundamental difference.
“Chaos” in the supply of services, as advocated by New Toryliberal, will mean that the well organised and capable middle class will find ways to get what they want. The poor won’t. Then Cameron will take the funds away and tell the poor that they are the victims of their own inability to get off their backsides and join in the big society.
Geoffrey Payne points out that working through local government provides a measure of public accountability. The fact that this is not perfect does not invalidate the concept. At least there is some constraint on what a council can get away with. It is poorer when there is single party rule, but even then, it is possible to challenge a council which is clearly not acting in the interests of all its residents. A free school or other non-public organisation has no responsibility to the community as a whole and can afford to dismiss any such challenge.
Local authorities also have the advantages of permanence and a certain minimum necessary level of professionalism. In my area, the “big society” approach enthusiastically raised the funds and got a skatepark built ten years ago, which is great, but when all the kids involved outgrew it, who had to pick up the pieces on maintenance and vandalism etc? Why, the council, of course.
To many (most) Tories it’s about one thing and one alone: getting for-profite private companies to run things.
Who is going to manage the new GP consortia – GPs with limited accountacy skills and even more limited time? Of course not. It’ll be american health companies, used to the same in the USA.
Who is going to manage Free Schools? Parents? Local interest groups? Maybe. But more likely large corporations, with the scale (and manpower) to be able to do it.
Which leaves you with this question: how is providing public services via multi-national corporations, many based overseas, going to increase accountability??
This Conservative-led government is ideological to the core. For them Big Society is a means to an end. You are dilluding yourselves if you think otherwise.
And, incidentally, their health care reforms are a disgrace:
http://etonmess.blogspot.com/2010/12/first-government-scraps-maximum-waiting.html
@Jon Walls: A very perceptive comment: councils can often fall short in accountability, even if they are usually more accountable than central government simply because they are more vulnerable to local pressure. However, the collapse of many local newspapers does leave a worrying void in terms of who is able to hold councillors to account between elections. Perhaps a useful Big Society idea would be for people to start local co-operative newspapers where the current ones have gone out of business?
I think part of the reason Lib Dem Conference was so dead set against free schools (apart from a severe lack of time to air pro-free school opinions on that particular debate) is that most conference reps are councillors, and these councillors are disproportionately likely to represent areas where the Lib Dems are either running the council or are a strong opposition (perhaps having run the council previously). This overrepresentation of “powerful” councillors is a natural effect of the stronger organisation and larger membership of local parties in these areas.
I think Lib Dem councillors in places like Cambridge or Liverpool will generally regard their council as a force for good, because they are on it and have influence. Lib Dems in areas where the council is a one-party state (Newham and Fenland spring to mind) are likely to have a more jaundiced view – in fact, one of the signatories of my pro-free schools amendment* (which did not get selected for debate due to time constraints) is from Fenland and told me she supported free schools precisely because the local Tories (Cambridgeshire CC being Conservative as well, though with a larger Lib Dem opposition than Fenland DC) couldn’t care less about local schools as they all sent their children to good schools in Norfolk. Opening the local authority schools to competition would keep them (more) honest.
*That version is a draft. The version submitted to the FCC had the first bold section and numbered list removed, so began: “Conference re-asserts…”.
How naive.
Sorry but do you really think this big society guff has any substance? The Conservatives want to drastically reduce the size of the state. In doing this they are using a number of rhetorical devices to cover up what is going on. If some good stuff results at a local level that is fine by them, and they will be first to take the credit. If it all turns to chaos they will be nowhere near it and will blame the local authorities running that area who are most likely to be Lib Dem or Labour.
I understand your criticism of centralisation but there are often good reasons for it. At a local level the battle for resources can lead to competition between social groups in a particular area and accusations that one lot or another are somehow cheating. I for one get worried when different groups of “community leaders” get involved in this business. They are not elected, councillors are. Centralisation can be useful in helping to ensure equality.
Also when “anyone” can be allowed to provide social services, and there is money for it, “anyone” will and some of these will be crooks. There are an awful lot of people out there prepared to say and do anything in order to make money and hang the consequences for those who the service is provided for.
And as is outlined above al this is taking place against the extreme economic inequality built into our economic system. You might believe in free markets but the majority of large corporations dominating our system certainly do not. Their guiding star is maximising profits whatever the consequences may be and in countries like ours only central government is powerful enough to resist them.