A critique of the ‘The Big Society’ and where Cameron and Clegg want to take us.

‘The Big Society’, three seemingly warm and fluffy words. They conjure up images that we all recognise of a decent, civic society and interweave them with ideas about public policy. A neighbour noticing that you haven’t taken the milk in and popping round to make sure that you are ok. A driver stopping to allow the parent with a child in their arms and one at their side to cross the road safely. A place where we are doing more for each other, doing more for ourselves ourselves and expecting the state to do less.
If this were truly about a more cooperative model of service provision there could be something in it. After all the Labour and Cooperative movements have in many ways a shared history. Look at today’s PLP and see the growing number of members representing both parties. Our vision as socialists and social democrats has always championed personal responsibility and social responsibility. But Labour has shown throughout its history how the state can pool the resources of many to achieve truly remarkable things. The NHS is perhaps the best example of this and its future is now in very serious doubt.
This is emphatically not a vision shared by the new government. I am glad that David Miliband has recognised that the ‘Big Society’ concept is one we must take seriously and ignore at our peril. Too many on the left have dismissed it as meaningless verbiage. But it is so much more than that. I believe the vaguery is quite deliberate. The scope and intent of this ‘philosophy’ will be woven into the actions of this government retrospectively.
It might be hard to nail a jelly to the fence. It doesn’t mean the jelly isn’t there.
As the days of the coalition government have turned first into weeks and now into months, a picture is emerging of the direction of travel that public policy will be taking.
It is depressing, familiar and shows in the starkest terms that as painfully and slowly we start to emerge from a global recession caused by the chronic failures of the financial markets, in the private sector. This government plans to extend the scope of private sector involvement ever further into our public services.
We are not blameless in this. Our inability to act, or even to begin to articulate on the international stage the need for greater regulation and control of the banking sector, was a much more significant failure than we have yet acknowledged.
However, and this is important. It was a Labour government that intervened, using public money, through the state, to rescue the private banking sector in this country when it was on the verge of collapse. Only the state had the capacity and scope to act to ensure that the life savings of thousands upon thousands of British citizens were secured.
We have yet to find a compelling narrative that communicates this best example that the private sector is naturally more successful and better run that the public sector is a complete fallacy. We must.
Yet in the face of this, old ideologies with a new language returns. Laissez faire, which I have always thought of as Laissez unfair is very much back in business.
In these early days, both in the NHS and education, the government is showing that the ‘Big Society’ has nothing to do with local, social responsibility and all to do with the primacy of the market. Their slavish addiction to the markets could not be contained for a moment once the governance of this country was once more in their hands. It is an attempt to change the political weather to replace the idea of public services with public commodities. It is an argument that we cannot afford to lose.
In this analysis there is very little need to draw different conclusions as to the motives of the two coalition partners. Because with the exception of a small number of Lib Dem MPs on the social democratic wing of the party, the coalition appears to be of one mind on this.
I myself have always been wary of the choice agenda. As a service user I have never felt that the choice between a good service and a mediocre one is a real choice. I just want good treatment at my local hospital and a good education at my local school.
I cannot help but think that to have real choice in public services, and for everyone to benefit from that choice, you would need to have a degree of spare capacity. This is where market principles in public services falls down. Ultimately, spare capacity in public services is waste. It simply doesn’t work.
So again, with the best of motives our own attempts at reform have given some licence and cover to this government’s new approach. It is no coincidence that Michael Gove refers to Blair in virtually every education speech he makes.
Yet there is a clear difference between the public sector buying and making use of private sector services, which of course happens all the time and the private sector taking over the vast majority of the provision of public services, which I believe is the coalition’s true ambition.
It does not take a vast leap of faith to see that the pupil premium of all things is a forerunner to the introduction of a competitive market system in our schools. Schools which if Michael Gove has his way will soon be owned by anyone who can put up the cash and afford to hire to appropriate ‘education consultants’ to successfully bid for one.
The principle of a specific monetary value being placed and ring fenced on an individual child and which follows that child from school to school is clearly but a first step. Running this scheme parallel to the ‘free schools’ deregulation of our education system, how long before education spending is fully deconstructed and each child receives a voucher for the value of their schooling? Now let’s be clear, with the addition of individuals being able to ‘top up’ that funding this would be a middleclass passport out of state education as we know it and a working class trap in an ever deteriorating system. Such kites were flown under the last Tory government. Well they are back.
Thus far Michael Gove has not responded to Ed Balls on the question of whether there is anything to stop existing private schools becoming ‘free schools’ if one accepts the argument above, it is not hard to see why.
In health the threat is more explicit. It is clear the proposed reforms are not about abolishing the administrative functions of the NHS but breaking them up and putting them out to private tender. An example of where this has occurred already is with hospital cleaning services. The privatisation of which under the Tories and not properly addressed by us, has seen infection rates soar and the growth of MRSA illustrates this perfectly.
18 years out of power left us frightened of making the case for the state often being the better provider of good quality public services and 13 years out of power have done nothing to encourage the Tories to reassess their view that private is always best.
The cost of reorganising the NHS, some £1.7bn, is not even mentioned in their manifesto. The NHS will lose economies of scale and see the creation of a thousand small, badly trained privatised bureaucracies. However this is considered a price worth paying by this administration in pursuit of an ideological goal.
There has been much talk about empowering the service provider here and little mention of and no obvious consultation with the service users, us, the patients.
In short we need to take the ‘Big Society’ seriously, not because it is a compelling ideology, but because it exploits the good things that are happening already, on housing estates and in villages across the country already. Whether it’s volunteers cleaning up their local parks or beaches or people giving up their time to be school governors and magistrates. It takes a worthy concept and uses it as cover for their long held ambition. First the fragmentation and marketisation of our public services, establishing the notion of commodity, followed no doubt by its eventual privatisation.
In a tweet the other day I posed the rhetorical question. ‘Who really wants to see the NHS replaced by the Federation of Privatised State Subsidised Health Care Providers?’ the FPSSHCP if you like. Day by day it becomes clear that is exactly what this government wants.