The response of the left towards the Big Society remains incoherent, disjointed and uncoordinated. From one angle, the left portrays the Big Society as a ‘cover’ for the effect of cuts and as, in effect, a rhetorical sleight of hand. Take Polly’s polemic in today’s Guardian as an example of that approach. From a second angle, Ed Miliband keeps tentatively poking his toe into the big society water, with the help of Maurice Glassman, only to retreat to his comfort zone of bland platitudes. The third angle is the most interesting one. It is represented by the likes of Jon Cruddas, who understands the importance of the Big Society and seems frustrated at the inability of the left to embrace its opportunities. ‘Progress’ has also been making pro Big Society noises of late as well.
Cruddas and others see that the Big Society should be an opportunity for Labour because it moves the narrative of politics away from a simplistic market/ individual versus state narrative. It shifts the debate away from one of big state and big market towards one that identifies the community and the intermediate institutions as fundamental and important actors.
Given that the Labour Party was formed out of the intermediate institutions and based on ideas of mutualism, cooperatives, reciprocity and community empowerment, it seems surprising that the left seems happy to see the right use traditional language of the left, such as society and community, and traditional tools of the left, such as mutualism and cooperatives. This only illustrates the shift of the British left from the communities that gave birth to the Labour movement towards a managerialist big state – the big state of Douglas Jay (who famously said that “the man in Whitehall knows best”) and Gordon Brown, rather than the big community of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan.
Jon Cruddas understands this, when he says that;
“Through the rhetoric of the “big society”, as well as their desire to redistribute power from the overweening state to the citizen, the Conservatives had seized Labour’s language and history by “stressing mutual responsibility, commitment to place and neighbours and the centrality of relationships to a meaningful life, and by laying claim to the mutuals, co-operatives and local societies that built the labour movements”. This is language that Keir Hardie himself would have understood.”
The concern for the British left is that, Cruddas aside, most of its leaders seem more concerned about playing politics than about seriously considering re-empowering communities and re-engaging civic society. The modern left remains devoted to managerialism and cut off from those communities that allowed it to become, as Wilson famously said, “a moral crusade.”
By failing to engage seriously in the Big Society agenda, the left is effectively disowning its own heritage. It is trying to suggest that the only relationship that matters is between the individual and the state. The left seems to have forgotten that the local communities working together are so much more powerful than atomised individuals or an overpowering state.
Without developing a coherent response to the Big Society, and without considering how communities can be pulled together to work for their mutual benefit, the left is opting out of one of the great philosophical issues of the day. It is failing to engage in a debate which the traditions and heritage of the British left has done so much to shape. By saying that the “man in Whitehall knows best”, the Labour Party continues to belittle the communities that gave birth to it.
Related posts:
Pingback: Tweets that mention Platform 10 » Blog Archive » The British Left Is Ignoring Its Own Heritage By Not Engaging With The Big Society -- Topsy.com
I take great exception to this. Perish the thought anyone would consider me a tory! I reckon a vast number of the people involved in the debate about the big society in some sort of constructive way (the ‘critical friends’ if you will) are on the left. I bet the majority of people involved in the community empowerment world are definitely not Tories, but we recognise the potential of the idea of the big society. what we should be doing is engaging and challenging the Labour Party to think about empowerment in new ways as well.
New ways of empowering people and revitalising communities should be cross-party goals. The understanding and development of community and the encouraging of social responsibility should be key tenets of all political parties worth their salt. Times are tight and money is scarce and it is because of this that Big Society principles become all the more important and the Labour Party should not bail in their criticism of Government cuts, which may well be justified, with cynicism for the Big Society’s ambitions.
Why would the left be interested in the Big Society? The left (including, indeed especially, the Lib Dems) are far more interested in levelling everyone down to a drab authoritarian lowest common denomintaor…..and then telling us that this is “social justice” and “fairness”. It certainly has nothing to do with empowerment. Whenever the uber-patrician Clegg says that he is doing something because its “fair”, you know that he’s simply removing another couple of rungs in the ladder.