Cameron’s “Big Society” the next Big Lie

Now lets get this right. It is not the Big State that has made inequality worse (as David Cameron suggests in his creepy Guardian article today). Actually it was New Labour’s refusal to use the state to make any serious redistribution of wealth away from the rich to the less well off that effectively stymied equality and social mobility during its term of office. Any attempt by the Tories to try and cut the role of the State even further than New Labour managed will hugely increase inequalities. Selfishness and individualism did not start in 1997 (as Cameron seems to claim), rather it continued under New Labour after Thatcherism had comprehensively and deliberately blown most elements of social solidarity apart. In this sense Blairism was Thatcherism by other means - with no serious attempts to undermine status, privilege and ever growing income differentials. Sadly the few good things that they did do (minimum wage, tax credits etc.) they seemed almost embarrassed about.
Cameron’s suggestion that it is the overweening state that has promoted selfishness and individualism is simply laughable. The real culprit lies in the realm of the market not the State. For Cameron to cite “the Spirit Level” (which suggests that the fairest societies are the happiest) is either breathtaking cynicism or complete naivety.
Sadly, Labour’s time in office was also characterised by outrageous attacks on “the undeserving poor” - asylum seekers, migrants, welfare benefits claimants and council tenants. At times this looked more like a war on the poor rather than a war on poverty. It is Labour’s catastrophic failure in this respect that has allowed Cameron to make his audacious attack on them from the left. As the Guardian’s leader says, Cameron is putting forward “a bold argument with dangerous consequences”.
An incoming Cameron Government will be able to use the fashionable rhetoric of community to undermine the state (and society) even more than New Labour has managed. As Michael White observes, whilst this is not Thatcherism in full cry it is “a more emollient formula for promoting local and individual responsibility, private and voluntary sector activity and shrinking big government”
There is a desperate need for leaders in the voluntary sector to start a discussion about whether we want to carry on colluding with this process under an incoming Tory regime. Do we want to be merely a mechanism for further undermining the State? Do we want to be used as a smokescreen disguising huge cuts to public services with a thin veneer of voluntarism, community and philanthropy? Do we want to bid for every contract going – charities running prisons and asylum detention centres, voluntary groups forcing people with disabilities off benefits etc.? Are we really prepared to so easily forego our critical and campaigning missions to rush headlong into the market?
If we continue to collude in this process then what will happen to the people (“the communities”) we were actually set up to serve? As Kate Green of Child Poverty Action Group quite rightly says: “all of society has a responsibility to end child poverty and charities have a role to play in alleviating the pain of poverty, but only governments can redistribute to the poorest”