Reclaiming the Big Society

Yvette Cooper says no to elected police commissioners. The Shadow Home Secretary gave her speech to the Labour conference this morning and, in addition to launching an independent review into policing (which has been welcomed by senior police officers), she defined her opposition to the government’s flagship police reform.  Britain can ill afford the £100 million pounds cost of elected commissioners and the reform threatens to politicise the police by concentrating power in a single person without sufficient checks and balances.

From the applause in the hall, you’d have thought that the whole party was behind her. But not every delegate agrees. At a fringe meeting on Monday night, Hazel Blears and Labour List co-editor Mark Ferguson agreed that Labour should back elected police commissioners because the party must, in Ferguson’s words, support “democracy in society at all times”.

Ferguson’s words were part of a common theme running through fringe meetings this year: there are many within the Labour movement who insist that the party must reclaim localism and the Big Society from the opportunistic Conservatives. Shadow Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell cut into Cameron’s premier agenda in her conference speech this morning, branding it a hollow “flop” (not a million miles from the truth). But she praised many of the impulses behind the Big Society at a Progress event on Sunday, saying that people were turning to community institutions and their families rather than state. Labour should recognise this, she said, and offer “community where possible [and] government where necessary”.

Shadow Europe Minister, Wayne David, also pitched camp in this area during a discussion about pension reform. He said there must be “an acceptance that older people can contribute more to the wellbeing of the society of which they are a part” and that pensioners should be encouraged to do more voluntary work in local public services. Earlier this morning, Tristram Hunt said that Labour should support the Big Society because it is part of “Labour tradition the co-operative, mutualist tradition”. His stance was echoed by union reps I spoke to yesterday, who described themselves as the “ultimate big society movement”. 

Hazel Blears, a former communities’ secretary who wrote a White Paper on these issues in 2008 that was suppressed by Gordon Brown, went furthest of all, directly criticising Ed Miliband’s approach to this issue. Speaking at a Total Politics event on Monday night, she said:

I believe that the principles of the Big Society have been appropriated by the Conservatives – and to a lesser extent the Lib Dems – because David Cameron and Steve Hilton recognise that these are very powerful ideas…people don’t want a monolithic state…My concern now is that the government is losing its nerve. The “Big Society” has ground to a halt…It’s had three of four re-launches and I don’t think it can recover. I could say that this is a success for my party, which has opposed the Big Society, but I fear that we may now lose these ideas permanently, and they are essential to the future of our democracy…There is a chance that we may reclaim this area…if we overcome the Fabian element within the party.’

PS: Jon Cruddas, a classical left-winger, has talked about these issues for years. But the once aspiring leader has kept a very low profile at this conference.