Monday, December 20, 2010
Lenin + Ambridge (All power to the parishes!)
The architecture critic in last Sunday's Observer set out why the Government's localism bill is bound to lead to trouble. Eric Pickles, he says, "seems to have an idea of a 'community' as being a harmonious entity, sharing common aims and hopes, and civilised ways of resolving differences". The reality is far from this and there are bound to be feuds and bitterness as well as eccentric decisions when "communities" (ie. parishes and villages) are given the right to produce their own development plans and propose or veto housing developments within their boundaries. A nimby's charter by any other name. The correct term for this kind of policy is "atomisation" rather than "localism". Without the countervailing pressure of Government ensuring that views and interests beyond the parochial get some sort of look in, chaos will ensue. But then of course the Government has said that they see "chaos" as a positive product of the Big Society approach - a necessary by- product of their ideological desperation to destroy as much of "The State" as they can. It is bound to lead to a post code lottery where the rich areas prosper and the poorer areas sink.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Social Capital - Samuel Smiles "self-help" raised from the individual to the collective
A great lecture by Ben Fine from SOAS - one of the few courageous critics of the concept of "social capital". This is a concept that is designed to mystify and confuse us. As he says it is "definitionally chaotic" but actually serves to focus us away from looking at the real relations of power, privilege and inequality that we should be confronting. Social capital is nonsense - the rich have real capital (and don't need social capital) whilst the poor are condemned for not having enough "social" capital. Their networks are not elaborate enough, they don't know the right people or enough of them - in other words they are not part of the elite. But then that was true by definition in the first place.
Language is denuded of meaning and devalued with vague talk of "cohesion" rather than solidarity, of "fairness" rather then equality. Conflict, power, context (as well as race, gender, class and politics) all mysteriously disappear in this cheap conjuring trick that tries to convince us that we would solve all our problems if we only had more street festivals, royal weddings or other excuses to eat somosas together. God forbid that we might instead actually challenge or criticise anything real!
Language is denuded of meaning and devalued with vague talk of "cohesion" rather than solidarity, of "fairness" rather then equality. Conflict, power, context (as well as race, gender, class and politics) all mysteriously disappear in this cheap conjuring trick that tries to convince us that we would solve all our problems if we only had more street festivals, royal weddings or other excuses to eat somosas together. God forbid that we might instead actually challenge or criticise anything real!
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Big Society - the end of the Welfare State
The Big Society might seem at first sight to carry echoes of “the Great Society” - the massive attempt by President Johnson in the US in the 1960s to address urban poverty and racial discrimination. What is becoming rapidly clear is that it actually represents its exact opposite. The notion of the Big Society is best understood as being the death-knell of the Welfare State as we know it. In seeking to reduce the deficit over only 4 years by making massive cuts the Government is subjecting the UK to round two of the shock doctrine, otherwise known as Thatcher’s unfinished business. In the process it will seek to break up any remains of the solidarity that still resides in our political culture and substitute for it an impoverished and attenuated notion of “community”
The Big Society looks at first sight like a harmless, cuddly and rather vacuous concept. Far from it. On every index the idealism of the 1960s in the US or of the Welfare State in Britain in the late 1940s is set to be replaced by its opposite in the Big Society whether in terms of fairness, income distribution, gender and racial equality, investment in the arts and sciences, access to legal advice, spending on health and education and so on.
The Great Society was an ambitious and partly successful attempt to move the US out of a looming slump by seeking to address inequality and stimulate demand. Perhaps the only similarity between the Great and Big societies is that the US is currently embroiled in an unwinnable foreign conflict in Afghanistan just as it was in the 1960s in Vietnam (the UK was sensible enough to keep out of Vietnam whilst it is now haemorraging blood and treasure in fighting the Taliban as America’s junior partner). Sadly it was the increased expenditure on the Vietnam debacle that hobbled and then reversed much of the Great Society.
Expenditure on schools and other public projects was a key feature of the early welfare state as well as of the US in the 1960s but contrast this with the current demise of capital spending on school buildings by the ConDem government and their refusal to support industrial employers such as Sheffield Forgemasters. The Welfare State and particularly the NHS was introduced at a time when the country had a huge national debt. In the US, Medicare and Medicaid, whilst not perfect, were at least launched as a safety net for the old and the poor. By contrast the coalition government is now smashing up the National Health Service despite its pre election promise that there would be no more major upheavals in the health area. Access to the Law for all was a pivotal part of the Welfare State. Similarly, the first attempts to fund legal services for the poor as part of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” were launched in the US. Currently in the UK we see the final death-throes of Civil Legal Aid, as well as cuts to Housing and Welfare Benefits on a scale that could be described as defining a new “War on the Poor”. Even the US 1960s investment in the Humanities and the Arts contrasts with huge planned cuts by the ConDems to Museums, Libraries and Arts organisations. The demise of Regional Development Agencies as a way of stimulating employment and economic growth as well as the destruction of regulatory bodies like the Audit Commission will make any serious attempts to share the pain across the regions and between localities impossible.
Affirmative Action in the US in the 1960s resulted in a more than halving of the numbers of African Americans defined as living in poverty. This was mirrored in the UK in the 1960s by the Race Relations Act and real advances in a climate of multiculturalism. By contrast the Big Society has taken no firm steps to ensure that massive public sector cuts won’t systematically damage both women and ethnic minority employment and hard pressed black and minority ethnic communities. The prospects for social cohesion in this new “Big Society” are really dire. The localism agenda that might look attractive at first sight will on current indications merely magnify the differences between those neighbour-hoods that are doing very well thank you and those poorer localities that are already far behind in terms of resources (whether in social or actual capital).Spouting on about empowerment without a real redistribution of resources is a lame joke rather than a viable policy.
Its cheerleaders see the Big Society initiative as being “a progressive, innovative strategy …. based upon the principles of empowering communities, redistributing power and fostering a culture of volunteerism..... (sharing) the government’s vision of a society where volunteering and community spirit become second nature”. The Big Society Network describes its attitude as: We feel anger and frustration at the recent behaviour of both the City and Westminster and relatively powerless to change them. We are often anonymous tax-payers without a real sense of how our money gets spent. Most of us try to be reasonably good citizens but our influence seems very small. This is of course the same anger and inchoate anti-state rhetoric used by the Tea Party movement in the US
The Big Society actually represents an atomisation of our society and could easily descend further into an anomic and chaotic locality-based version of the devil take the hindmost. The state and localities need to be kept in some sort of balance. Whilst it is true that many aspects of the UK state were too centralised under New Labour, the pendulum is about to swing so far to the opposite extreme that there will remain no effective mechanisms to allow for equitable distribution or redistribution between rich and poor families, communities and regions.
The Tories and their Liberal Democrat quislings have successfully managed to deploy an impoverished notion of “community” so as to mount a direct attack on both the state and society. The notion of community they seek to impose and which they see as the locus for involvement and voluntary activism is a notion of community that may make sense in Witney or even parts of Notting Hill. But in Hackney or Tower Hamlets, Worthington or Wigan it is likely to be seen as a largely middle class joke – cutting local services on which poor people rely (both as recipients and producers, clients and workers) whilst encouraging local people to compensate by getting together to volunteer to provide them. It amounts to little more than a kind of glorified neighbourhood watch scheme and is being used as a smoke screen to hide the withdrawal of resources and public service from the hardest pressed neighbourhoods. Of course the one sort of cohesion that they clearly don’t want to stimulate is the kind of collective action which people in their localities and work places are likely to take when they realise what a con-trick this Big Society nonsense actually is.
The Big Society looks at first sight like a harmless, cuddly and rather vacuous concept. Far from it. On every index the idealism of the 1960s in the US or of the Welfare State in Britain in the late 1940s is set to be replaced by its opposite in the Big Society whether in terms of fairness, income distribution, gender and racial equality, investment in the arts and sciences, access to legal advice, spending on health and education and so on.
The Great Society was an ambitious and partly successful attempt to move the US out of a looming slump by seeking to address inequality and stimulate demand. Perhaps the only similarity between the Great and Big societies is that the US is currently embroiled in an unwinnable foreign conflict in Afghanistan just as it was in the 1960s in Vietnam (the UK was sensible enough to keep out of Vietnam whilst it is now haemorraging blood and treasure in fighting the Taliban as America’s junior partner). Sadly it was the increased expenditure on the Vietnam debacle that hobbled and then reversed much of the Great Society.
Expenditure on schools and other public projects was a key feature of the early welfare state as well as of the US in the 1960s but contrast this with the current demise of capital spending on school buildings by the ConDem government and their refusal to support industrial employers such as Sheffield Forgemasters. The Welfare State and particularly the NHS was introduced at a time when the country had a huge national debt. In the US, Medicare and Medicaid, whilst not perfect, were at least launched as a safety net for the old and the poor. By contrast the coalition government is now smashing up the National Health Service despite its pre election promise that there would be no more major upheavals in the health area. Access to the Law for all was a pivotal part of the Welfare State. Similarly, the first attempts to fund legal services for the poor as part of President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” were launched in the US. Currently in the UK we see the final death-throes of Civil Legal Aid, as well as cuts to Housing and Welfare Benefits on a scale that could be described as defining a new “War on the Poor”. Even the US 1960s investment in the Humanities and the Arts contrasts with huge planned cuts by the ConDems to Museums, Libraries and Arts organisations. The demise of Regional Development Agencies as a way of stimulating employment and economic growth as well as the destruction of regulatory bodies like the Audit Commission will make any serious attempts to share the pain across the regions and between localities impossible.
Affirmative Action in the US in the 1960s resulted in a more than halving of the numbers of African Americans defined as living in poverty. This was mirrored in the UK in the 1960s by the Race Relations Act and real advances in a climate of multiculturalism. By contrast the Big Society has taken no firm steps to ensure that massive public sector cuts won’t systematically damage both women and ethnic minority employment and hard pressed black and minority ethnic communities. The prospects for social cohesion in this new “Big Society” are really dire. The localism agenda that might look attractive at first sight will on current indications merely magnify the differences between those neighbour-hoods that are doing very well thank you and those poorer localities that are already far behind in terms of resources (whether in social or actual capital).Spouting on about empowerment without a real redistribution of resources is a lame joke rather than a viable policy.
Its cheerleaders see the Big Society initiative as being “a progressive, innovative strategy …. based upon the principles of empowering communities, redistributing power and fostering a culture of volunteerism..... (sharing) the government’s vision of a society where volunteering and community spirit become second nature”. The Big Society Network describes its attitude as: We feel anger and frustration at the recent behaviour of both the City and Westminster and relatively powerless to change them. We are often anonymous tax-payers without a real sense of how our money gets spent. Most of us try to be reasonably good citizens but our influence seems very small. This is of course the same anger and inchoate anti-state rhetoric used by the Tea Party movement in the US
The Big Society actually represents an atomisation of our society and could easily descend further into an anomic and chaotic locality-based version of the devil take the hindmost. The state and localities need to be kept in some sort of balance. Whilst it is true that many aspects of the UK state were too centralised under New Labour, the pendulum is about to swing so far to the opposite extreme that there will remain no effective mechanisms to allow for equitable distribution or redistribution between rich and poor families, communities and regions.
The Tories and their Liberal Democrat quislings have successfully managed to deploy an impoverished notion of “community” so as to mount a direct attack on both the state and society. The notion of community they seek to impose and which they see as the locus for involvement and voluntary activism is a notion of community that may make sense in Witney or even parts of Notting Hill. But in Hackney or Tower Hamlets, Worthington or Wigan it is likely to be seen as a largely middle class joke – cutting local services on which poor people rely (both as recipients and producers, clients and workers) whilst encouraging local people to compensate by getting together to volunteer to provide them. It amounts to little more than a kind of glorified neighbourhood watch scheme and is being used as a smoke screen to hide the withdrawal of resources and public service from the hardest pressed neighbourhoods. Of course the one sort of cohesion that they clearly don’t want to stimulate is the kind of collective action which people in their localities and work places are likely to take when they realise what a con-trick this Big Society nonsense actually is.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Broken society nonsense
The Tories insist that "Britain is Broken" and that everything used to be better before the permissive society and the welfare state interfered. This of course is absolute rubbish as a recent Economist article (6/2/10) points out: "the broken-Britain myth is worse than scaremongering - it glosses over those who need help most……..Nevertheless it is an idea that resonates. Every week serves up a new tragedy or outrage to be added to the pile of evidence” A few months after this article was written a man went on a rampage with a couple of guns through Cumbria shooting family members, acquaintances and total strangers alike. Interestingly this was one occurrence when the usual rubbish about a broken society was not trundled out again. Why? Because this carnage did not happen in an inner city area amongst the “feral youngsters” and “welfare scroungers” who are the usual denizens of this mythical Tory dystopia. Instead another myth, of a “quiet rural community” where “nothing like this had ever happened before”, came into play. Virtually every single observer was said to be shocked that this “could happen around here” in such a “quiet and close-knit community”. Actually, if one looks at the last major shooting spree occurrences in mainland Britain – Dunblane (1987), Monkseaton (1989), Hungerford (1996), and now Whitehaven – it is precisely these rural villages or suburban small town “tight-knit communities” where such dreadful outrages do seem to occur. Of course this may be partly because there are relatively few controls on rural gun ownership as opposed to urban gun crime. But I suspect it is not just this. The sense of a tightly bound and restrictive community where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where the pressures of status and respectability are far more extreme than those in Britain’s cities, seem to me to be precisely the kind of place where men will sometimes lose their bearings and lash out in this crazy way. Certainly we should stop being so surprised that it is in these picturesque and quiet “communities” that occasional eruptions of such dreadful anger and madness sometimes occur.
The Big Lunch is just a small Tea Party
In a fascinating piece in yesterdays Guardian ("A legend in its lunchtime" 17/7) Joe Moran threw cold water over the Big Lunch idea that street parties and sharing samosas will actually help us "rebuild communities" and somehow overcome the fragmentation caused by free market globalisation. On the contrary, David Cameron's Big Society (of which the Big Lunch notion is just a small course) is actually a cover for unleashing yet further privatisations and free market fragmentation.
Big Society is the Tories way of using "the community" (including voluntary and community organisations) to dismantle the welfare state. It achieves this directly by getting Third Sector organisations to join the private sector feeding frenzy as the NHS and public services are forced to sell themselves off to the lowest bidder. Almost as bad as this is how we in the third sector are simultaneously being used as a smoke screen to make it look like this is a cuddly and humane process rather than a selfish and destructive pillaging of the real social capital that we stand to lose - our welfare state.
The Big Society is nothing more than a rather polite (very English) version of the Tea Party that is sweeping the US. It starts from exactly the same basis Private = Good, Public = Bad. It believes that we can only be free if we are in competition with each other in a free market and therefore all regulation is inherently bad ("socialism"). Far from being a Big Society this is a recipe for an eventual war of all against all. A dreadful Hobbesian dystopia - and they would prefer it without even gun control. This kind of Big Lunch is so poisoned we should steer well clear of it in case its seductive nostalgia leads us ever closer to complete madness.
As for all those street parties and Big Lunches, the notion that a society in the middle of being blown apart by huge market forces can be put back together by "a bit of shared quiche and a few games of pavement Twister" is just a silly conjuring trick to amuse (bemuse) the revellers even further. Bread and circuses for the 21st Century.
The last word to Joe Moran:
"It is heartening to observe at close quarters all this feverish and largely thankless activity, most of it done by women, to hire ice-dream vans or hang homemade decorations from lampposts. And then on Sunday evening it will all have to be cleared away - leaving, perhaps a more convivial neighbourhood, but with no guarantees or firm evidence. There is something touching about so much time and effort being spent in search of the ephemeral and the intangible; a moment of togetherness which, like an incantation, hopes to become true by announcing itself"
Big Society is the Tories way of using "the community" (including voluntary and community organisations) to dismantle the welfare state. It achieves this directly by getting Third Sector organisations to join the private sector feeding frenzy as the NHS and public services are forced to sell themselves off to the lowest bidder. Almost as bad as this is how we in the third sector are simultaneously being used as a smoke screen to make it look like this is a cuddly and humane process rather than a selfish and destructive pillaging of the real social capital that we stand to lose - our welfare state.
The Big Society is nothing more than a rather polite (very English) version of the Tea Party that is sweeping the US. It starts from exactly the same basis Private = Good, Public = Bad. It believes that we can only be free if we are in competition with each other in a free market and therefore all regulation is inherently bad ("socialism"). Far from being a Big Society this is a recipe for an eventual war of all against all. A dreadful Hobbesian dystopia - and they would prefer it without even gun control. This kind of Big Lunch is so poisoned we should steer well clear of it in case its seductive nostalgia leads us ever closer to complete madness.
As for all those street parties and Big Lunches, the notion that a society in the middle of being blown apart by huge market forces can be put back together by "a bit of shared quiche and a few games of pavement Twister" is just a silly conjuring trick to amuse (bemuse) the revellers even further. Bread and circuses for the 21st Century.
The last word to Joe Moran:
"It is heartening to observe at close quarters all this feverish and largely thankless activity, most of it done by women, to hire ice-dream vans or hang homemade decorations from lampposts. And then on Sunday evening it will all have to be cleared away - leaving, perhaps a more convivial neighbourhood, but with no guarantees or firm evidence. There is something touching about so much time and effort being spent in search of the ephemeral and the intangible; a moment of togetherness which, like an incantation, hopes to become true by announcing itself"
Thursday, July 15, 2010
From the horses mouth!
Stephen Bubb in his inimitable blog admits quite rightly that communities are not always the places where people are empowered and that they are sometimes the sites of people's exclusion rather than inclusion. He goes on to argue that if the Big Society is just a front for cuts to the voluntary sector as well as other public services then it will not just fail but be highly damaging on its way down. What he fails to see is that the central purpose of the Big Society idea is just this kind of assault on the welfare state. He is far too quick to agree with the Tories plans to "refashion public services" and fails to see that this drive comes from a deeply ideological hatred of the "Big State" rather than a sensible approach to partnerships between the public, private and voluntary sectors to improve the lives of users of services.
Monday, May 3, 2010
The War on the Poor
Tony Judt in his excellent new book "Ill Fares the Land" shows how perverse and amoral our language has become when we talk about how "proud" we are to be taking the "tough choices" involved in imposing welfare cuts on the poorest in society (whilst doing nothing about tax dodgers, non-doms and bonuses for bankers). Just how hard are these choices? As Judt says:
"the poor vote in much smaller numbers than anyone else. So there is little political risk in penalising them. These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others. If an older usage were still in force, whereby being tough consisted of enduring pain rather than imposing it on others, we should perhaps think twice before so callously valuing efficiency over compassion"
So there is nothing hard about proposed Tory cuts to benfits or tax credits. Hard-hearted yes - principled and moral - no.
"the poor vote in much smaller numbers than anyone else. So there is little political risk in penalising them. These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others. If an older usage were still in force, whereby being tough consisted of enduring pain rather than imposing it on others, we should perhaps think twice before so callously valuing efficiency over compassion"
So there is nothing hard about proposed Tory cuts to benfits or tax credits. Hard-hearted yes - principled and moral - no.
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