The Big Society debate must move on
The Times front page splash is ‘Big Society in crisis as economy weakens’. The article is a bit of a dog’s dinner conflating a number of different stories to suggest a build-up of pressure on David Cameron and his Government. But from what I can see running on Twitter (including among ‘the friends of the Big Society’), it feels like unless Number Ten moves quickly this might be a turning point against the credibility of the whole project.
I have posted on what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of the Big Society so far. One of the vulnerabilities of such a broad strategy is that all of us who have expressed support have our own idea of what matters most. The Times piece contains many quotes from Phillip Blond, head of the think tank ResPublica (whether he undertook the briefing on behalf of elements in Number Ten is an intriguing question). While my biggest worry about the Big Society is the lack of realism about capacity in disadvantaged areas, Phillip sees the promotion of mutualism as the key issue. From ailing football clubs to the Port of Dover, he has been disappointed by the failure of the Government to get behind opportunities to expand the mutual sector.
The ideas of the Big Society can’t change the world overnight, and anyone with any sense recognises the challenges of taking the idea forward in a time of public sector austerity. But as long as the Big Society continues to be everything, it is in danger of becoming nothing. Economists sometimes criticise a theory saying it is ‘not good enough to be wrong’. By this they mean the idea lacks even the explanatory power even to be disproven, let alone to be validated. Whilst it may not be possible to save the credibility of the Big Society by a new policy or spending announcement, it could be given some new life by a clearer intellectual exposition.
Even among its more eloquent advocates – like Lord Wei (one of the targets of the Times briefing) – accounts of the Big Society rely too much on assertion and anecdote and too little on testable hypotheses on the one hand, and a clear headed recognition of dilemmas and trade-offs on the other.
Here’s an example of the latter: I was chatting the other day to a community activist who had up until then been giving me a largely positive account of meetings in her area to promote the idea of a neighbourhood plan, an idea which could potentially be a very exciting route into greater local engagement. But now it appears, even at this early stage, that factions are emerging. This throws open the question of who is going to be the facilitator and honest broker of neighbourhood planning. The obvious candidate is the local authority but as neighbourhood plans may often be developed explicitly to counter local authority planning policy this is a bit like asking a turkey to organise Christmas lunch.
A couple of years ago we might have looked to CLG civil servants or maybe an organisation like CABE to develop thinking and support practice in neighbourhood planning, but it is unclear where the capacity now lies. Which leaves the impression that the Government simply thinks communities will somehow work it out by themselves. But, this is such a vague and groundless expectation it doesn’t even provide something to debate.
If the Big Society debate doesn’t get more substantive and granular quickly, it will feel like the only credible thing to do is knock the whole idea.
The Big Society and the RSA – a good match
I spent this morning at an event on the Big Society hosted by David Halpern’s Institute for Government. Some observations:
The audience was full of people who have spent years trying to get Labour to devolve power, take risks, engage citizens etc. The mood was one of support for the BS with an eagerness to explain why it has proven so difficult to get ministers and civil servants to understand and act on the principles.
Lord Wei (who heads the civil society programme) gave a very coherent and comprehensive presentation. His mistake, I think, was not to be more open about the dilemmas and challenges; inviting the audience to help resolve these problems. I wondered whether the BS policy development might benefit from something like the Policy Action Teams that were put in place by Labour’s Social Exclusion taskforce. The PATs were far from perfect but they did create a buzz of intellectual excitement and fostered collaboration, as well as developing some important ideas
David Prout from Communities and Local Government made an interesting speech but, perhaps, unfairly, the thing that people most noticed was the rather over the top praise he gave for Eric Pickles, and the speech starting with the opening – apocalyptic – paragraphs of Phillip Blond’s book, Red Tory. Blond’s book has many virtues but the exaggerated and inaccurate first paragraphs are not among them. It seems the English civil service has moved from a position of chastity (we don’t get into bed with politicians) to serial monogamy (we enthusiastically get into bed with whoever is in Government). (And, yes I’m sure that probably is New Labour’s fault.)
As usual, Barry Quirk, CEO of the Borough of Lewisham provided an engaging reality check to all this talk of community engagement. He repeated his mantra about distinguishing between social goods (things that one section of the community wants to own or have access to) and public goods – which are genuinely a resource for the whole community. As Barry said, a big task for local authorities is trying to ensure that places like community centres feel like public as well as social goods.
The whole event underlined for me how so much of our work here at the RSA hits the Big Society button. Many of our lectures touch on these issues of civic engagement, innovation and human agency. Our research focusses on citizenship, public service co-production., social networks, place shaping. And, as a Society, our biggest project is modernising the ethos of Fellowship so that it is all about social responsibility and civic innovation. There was much talk this morning of the importance of institutions in fostering a Big Society. This is a difficult journey along which we have travelled further than many other long standing organisations.
The RSA should be right at the heart of the public debate, not just nationally but globally and locally. Of course we make mistakes, and get things wrong but I hope everyone associated with the Society sees what a huge opportunity we now have.
Can humans respond to crisis? More or less …
The economic crisis is an opportunity to think afresh about the good society. To learn from this disaster and to avoid the next crisis means not just deciding what we think but understanding how we think.
Phillip Blond has every right to call himself very influential. Writing just a few days ago in Prospect, the self styled ‘red Tory’ advocated turning the Post office into a people’s bank – which Peter Mandelson has now apparently agreed - and the break up of massive private sector corporations, which is in keeping with George Osborne’s suggestion yesterday that wholly or part privatised banks be dismantled when they are fit to return to the private sector.
But the part of Phillip’s engaging article that caught my attention was this line:
‘The current political consensus is left-liberal in culture and right–liberal in economics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be’
Until recently I was fond of describing the last three political decades in the West through the following aphorism (although I never could find the source):
‘The right won the economic argument, the left won the social argument and the centre won the electoral argument’
Blond turns this on its head. Whatever the substantive view of his argument, there are three broad categories of response: first, he is wrong; second, he is right; third, he is right (or wrong) but only in relation to how things are now.
It is the third of these possibilities I find most interesting, the implication being dialectical: three decades ago we may have needed to liberalise social attitudes and to free up markets but now we need to reassert common values, hierarchal authority and the need for business to serve the interests of society.
At our joint seminar with the neuroscience folks at UCL on Friday we had a presentation from Professor Nick Chater. His research supports the thesis that the human brain has a very limited capacity to organise immediate perceptions in relation to an objective index. Instead, he argues, when we are asked to compare perceptions along an axis (such as brightness or loudness) we have only five categories: basically, much less, a little less, the same, a little more and much more. This may help to explain some of the idiosyncrasies in the ways human beings value things, for example the way comparison (over time and between people) seems more important to us than absolute measures.
Is this true also of human affairs? Instead of human societies reaching higher levels of wisdom as we learn from past mistakes, we simply move from wanting more of one view of the world until it becomes excessive, at which point we want less of it and more of something else. The human race does advance but only through a succession of failures, which can sometimes turn into disasters.
There is nothing new about this kind of gloomy dialecticism, indeed this world view is neatly captured in common parlance (for example, ‘plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose’). But in cultural theory, psychology and neuroscience we may find a richer insight into how we might find less painful and dangerous forms of learning.
Cultural theory is one of a family of theories arguing that human decision making is neither, on the one hand, explicable on the basis of a single logic (as in the model of homo economus) or, on the other, impossibly complex and indeterminate. Instead social problem solving derives from a limited array (in most theories between three and six) of basic responses, each of which is largely defined in terms of its antagonism to the others.
The social dialectic (which may underlie Phillip Blond’s call for a reversal of the conventional wisdoms of the last three decades) could be partly rooted in the collective expression of our cognitive predisposition to a limited array of comparative responses to the social world: ‘What we used to want more of, we then had too much of, and now we want less of.’
The point here is not to succumb to some kind of historical, much less neurological, determinism. Instead it is to argue that our capacity to learn from the past and plan realistically for the future is (in this year of Darwin) enhanced by better understanding of the predispositions and limitations of our species.
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