Everyday revolution and the big society

For most people the idea of the Big Society remains rather vague. For many it means absolutely nothing, for others it is an internet/marketing derived buzzword that has somehow been adopted into the language of government.

We want to give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want. We want society – the families, networks, neighbourhoods and communities that form the fabric of so much of our everyday lives – to be bigger and stronger than ever before. Only when people and communities are given more power and take more responsibility can we achieve fairness and opportunity for all.

Building the Big Society, Cabinet Office, 2010 

This is all very nice and aspirational, but in the context of the cuts to public spending it is meaningless. In this instance the use of the term Big is not better, it fails to describe and represent the dark and the light of an idea that on the one hand is simply the ideological cloak for ‘big cuts’ and 'smash the state' and on the other has the potential to genuinely transform the nature of social relations in the UK. But regardless of what it might be, the cuts are happening and into the vacuum that is being created, we are presented with the inevitable progress of the large business service corporations, because the progressive and the left quite understandably view the whole agenda with suspicion and more. And because the objective, of giving power back to the people and their communities, that lies at the centre of the ‘Big Society’, is often viewed by the progressively inclined as libertarian and individualistic; seen as a classic attempt on the part of the Right to distance itself from its responsibilities toward the socially excluded.

But that charge is based upon the premise that the existence of the state is somehow in the interests of the dis empowered and excluded. That somehow the very existence of a government department, with policies and officials is sufficient to bring about social justice and equality. This juxtaposition of the concept of the state with the ideals of progressive politics has led us to believe that the well being of the oppressed can actually only be defended by the traditions and organisations of the left; principally the labour and union movement. Whilst the labour movement has gone a long way to defend the rights of the working class, the articulation of the institutionalised left/ public sector/ and the apparatus of the state can and should no longer be viewed as the resistance of the oppressed. It is the resistance of the employed and the organised, and whilst it may well in many instances be progressive it is at most the resistance of the middle, rather than that of the dispossessed. 

The record and experience of the New Labour government provides us with some indication of the difficulty that New Labour had in achieving it’s progressive ambitions through the organisations and institutions of the state. For example despite its acknowledged commitment to the eradication of child poverty, in 2008/09 after over 10 years of progressive government, and before the onset of the recession, 2.8 million children were still living in relative poverty. Whilst this represented an improvement of 600,000 over the all time high of 1998/99 it still fell far short of what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown aspired to when they came into office. All of this despite the significant amounts of funding that had gone into a broad range of initiatives, from Sure Start and the Children’s Centres to Tax Credits and Every Child Matters. The inference must inevitably be that, child poverty and social inequality cannot be tackled by policy and money alone and that in the end, the power of the state is limited in its ability to reach out to the communities that it most needs to serve. The lesson of the New Labour decade may well be that communities cannot be governed into opportunity and that the power to bring about change will not always fall within the remit of the state and its infrastructure.

In arguing that the ultimate failure of New Labour to redress social inequality lies in the limitations of state authority, I am not suggesting that the retrenchment of the state associated with the advent of the Big Society is not indicative of a reactionary agenda, or that if left to the Tories and the big corporations things won't get much worse. Because politically, the meanings that we attribute to the idea of the Big Society would indeed seem to draw on a range of conservative ideals, from the neo-liberalism of the citizen as consumer to the moral and social values of the responsible citizen. Nevertheless, the paradox that underpins the idea of the Big Society is that when the power of the state is withdrawn the citizen consumer might actually be a citizen activist, or even a pragmatic revolutionary drawing on communitarian ideas of the empowered and emancipated stakeholder, and whilst the concept of the Big Society could well be framed in the language of the Right, the lived reality could also be participatory, emancipatory and inclusive. But that will only happen if progressive politics recognises that the public sector is not the only vehicle through which the interests of the poor and oppressed may be advanced. 

The paradox for Cameron is that the emancipatory potential and ultimate success of the Big Society, will not lie in its ideological coherence or in letting George Osborne and Eric Pickles run riot, but rather in what happens once the genie really is out of the bottle. If progressive politics gets its act together, the political outcomes of the Big Society will be determined by the creativity, resistance and emancipatory ambition of ordinary people in the context of their everyday lives and rather than becoming another play ground for global capital, may actually become a battle ground for the people.