The Big Society, Localism and the Labour Party.

Listening and Acting.

Ed Miliband writes, “I stood to become Leader of the Labour Party because I recognise Labour lost touch with the ordinary hard-working families we are in politics to serve.” He wants the party to change. Looking for “fresh ideas” Labour figures have travelled the country to events where people are asked, “what do you want?” On the 2^nd of March Harriet Harman came to Ipswich. She was at a meeting of a selection of the public to “listen”. Around tables groups of guests wrote down ideas about “what action we should be taking right now”.

The French Socialist Party (PS) has gone one stage further in “listening”. This October they will organise “primaries” open to any elector with “left values.” On payment of at least a Euro they will vote on who will be the PS presidential candidate for 2012.

Suffolk County Council is presently undergoing its own ‘ask the public’ exercise. A ‘consultation’ about its plans to ‘divest’ (hive off and cut) its public services is underway. Chief Executive, Andrea Hill has been on a £12,000 course. It included a session on “listening.” Her Press Office, not liking what it heard about this in the Ipswich Evening Star decided to stop talking to its political reporter, Paul Geater. Although they quickly withdrew the ban, this illustrates that paying attention to what the public says still leaves it up to the listener to decide on what to do about it.

The Big Society: Listening to the Local.

David Cameron plans more than this. The ‘big State’ is to be replaced by a society in which everyone can take over running public services. Business, social enterprises, charities and communities will be in charge. Localism means that we will have different bodies taking over. People will stand tall, proudly in control of their own lives and their own institutions.

Many of these ideas were sketched in Ferdinand Mount’s Mind the Gap (2005). Mount criticised New Labour. He noted that it had dropped attempts to redistribute wealth and the interests of the remaining working class and the excluded (the ‘Downers’). Instead a “huge army of officials” enforced distorted “cultural enlightenment”. So, “the Downers must be coaxed and chivvied, bullied and bribed to behave better.” (Page 263) Mind the Gap offered an alternative. That is a “property owning democracy”, with land shared-out (not given away but sold). Local associations would play the role Cameron imagines.

In this way Baronet Mount imagined the end of the rule of the ‘managerial classes.” The working class might rediscover its Victorian self-help heritage. Traditions like mutualism would reduce the class “gap”. Society could become more organically bound, “Perhaps churches and other ‘faith communities’ might be allotted out of public funds the equivalent of Victorian tithes to expand their schools and other existing activities in our inner-city areas.” (Page 303)

The Labour Party and the left have had a hard time opposing these ideas. Most are trapped in a common, unreflective, hostility to all centralism. But Mount’s utopia of little platoons attached to their immediate institutions, is shrouded with symbolic, and highly reactionary capital. It is designed to give a certain “allegiance” to members of society – by analogy to religion. * This is to come near to the world of Edmund Burke, where universal human rights and its “ethics of vanity” dissolve before the “great primeval contract of eternal society” and its corporations. Perhaps it is not surprising that a left that wishes the break-up of Britain into older nationalities, or flatters multiculturalism and ‘sublime’ religious identities, is unable to confront this. Labour’s own flirtation with watered-down communitarian philosophy, from Amitai Etzioni to Michael Sandal, encouraged a belief in social obligations built from associations, not from class or universalism. Much of the left therefore finds it hard to oppose this agenda.

But there is much to be against. The localism on offer has, as John Stuart Mill described the Victorian world Cameron draws on, an element of “unreasoning prejudice”. This was a country, “where jealousy of government interference was a blind feeling preventing or resisting even the most beneficial exertion of legislative authority to correct the abuses of what pretends to be local self-government, but is, too often selfish mismanagement of local interests, by a jobbing and borné local oligarchy. “(Page 163. Autobiography. 1983/1963.)

The Big Society is a project that aims to hand over democratic power to local bodies without electoral responsibility. There are many such organisations where ‘oligarchy’ is a well-established trend. From Housing Associations to well-meaning voluntary groups, they are not subject to the same accountability as publicly elected institutions and paid employees under their scrutiny. Free Schools run for their promoters’ wishes are just an extreme example of this movement backwards: they are wide open to ideological and financial abuse. Others, such as the charities to be charged not with supplementary but with primary responsibility for welfare, risk not just mismanagement but creating a pattern of dependence on the good-will of the philanthropic.

For Equality of Power: Radical Democracy.

The Big Society is not just a vacuous catch-word and a cover for cutting public spending. It is a serious challenge to democracy. David Miliband notes, rightly, that the European centre-left lacks a credible programme on a range of issues, from the economy to welfare. One gap, which it shares with a more radical left, is an inability to offer an alternative to the ‘market state’. That is the long-term withdrawal of public responsibility for welfare and redistribution, and concentrating on promoting the interests of private enterprise. It has brought commercial companies into the delivery of services. In this way a powerful lobby in favour of using the public purse to fund their enterprises has been created.

The Big Society involves greater transfers to this sector, often under cover of empowering local communities. Reports from Suffolk indicate that a great deal of cold-shouldering, veiled threats, and outright bullying are used to force its birth. Problems will grow. It does not take much imagination to see that when voluntary help reaches its limits, private companies will rush into the breach. These organisations will play an increasing role in determining state policy, as they already do in the ‘unemployment business’. The interests of the “jobbers” will influence municipal politics. Democratic responsibility will be splintered; politics will wilt, or rather be replaced by battles of cliques and contract-seekers.

Radical democracy should begin from one principle: the transfer of power to all, not a wider “property-owning” democracy. Binding people in obligations and responsibilities to private firms, political oligarchies, and unaccountable local associations thwarts equality. The clearest case is in work where people are under the rule not of Mount’s social-worker ‘managerial classes’, but of Boards and managers full stop. Public enterprise, owned by the people, and run by their representatives with those who work there and their unions, is another part of democracy.

If we were serious about local control than a good place to begin would be to give it to employees and their unions in greater and greater tranches of enterprise. But in some cases on universal standards are appropriate. Running welfare and social provision requires general equality. This should be expanded outside the national carapace to establish provision on a par across the rest of Europe, not fragmented into locally different standards and handed over to the caprices of different authorities. The knowledge that these benefits are rights would give people a sense of self-worth far more valuable than the feeling of gratitude towards charitable help.

The problem with the Ipswich meeting was that there was nothing clear to discuss. There were no questions and answers either. If Labour want to listen then it could look into organised and structured debates around issues like the democratic ones just outlined. They indicate an area of common ground on the left and reach out to a much wider public. It should forget localism and adopt democratic universal values. But, as Andrea Hill shows, sometimes people only listen to what they want to hear.

* See the importance of this to Mount in: Full Circle. How the Classical World Came Back to Us. Ferdinand Mount. 2010.