Titter ye might. The Big Society? In 1997? If the idea was of, erm, limited electoral
worth in our last general election, then it was certainly of little use when Tony Blair hurtled into power all those years ago. Yet there is was, mostly speaking, in the “Civic
Conservatism” espoused chiefly by David Willetts. Danny Finkelstein, writing for the pre-paywall incarnation of Comment Central, has already alluded to the intellectual debt that Steve Hilton et al owe to Willetts’ thinking
back in the 1990s. Fraser did likewise in an interview with Willetts from four-and-a-half years ago.
I mention this now for two conjoined reasons. First, the source texts of Civic Conservatism – including Willetts’ original pamphlet for the Social Market Foundation in 1994 – are a little difficult to come by. Second, I came across one of them recently when flicking through the book that Willetts wrote in anticipation of the 1997 election, called Why Vote Conservative? (which is worth picking up secondhand on Amazon, as are its red and yellow tinged counterparts). I’ve pasted Chapter 3 of that book below, because it’s one of the neatest – and, it has to be said, most persuasive – accounts of the Big Society that I’ve yet come across, and because I thought CoffeeHousers might care to read it.
Oh, and in terms of other cross-linkages between the Tories then and now, the emphasis that Willetts places on rising health spending, below, is also quite striking. Over to him:
Chapter 3: Is There Such a Thing as Society?
Yes.
You may think Margaret Thatcher gave the game away with that famous remark of hers but let’s look at in full.
I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and them, also, to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.
That shows a strong sense of duty to others, but doubt about the state as the vehicle for discharging such obligations. The critics who dominate the Labour Party and the drawing-rooms of Islington claim it is not the state but the free market that destroys social cohesion. Tony Blair waxes eloquent on the subject.
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed one become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.
Actually that was Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 but New Labour argues in much the same way.
We Conservatives may think of ourselves as ice-breakers but the critics claim we are a demolition squad. When faced with this challenge, the Conservative response over the past twenty years has been to say that a free-market economy generates the resources to pay for the welfare state so we can only ‘care’ if we are first efficient. (It is, for example, one of the iron laws of post-war government that spending on the National Health Service always rises as a proportion of national income under the Conservatives and falls under Labour. John Major has personally pledged that real spending on the NHS will rise, year on year, throughout our fifth term.) Expenditure on the welfare state is more secure under the Conservatives because under Labour Governments it lurches from unsustainable spending sprees to financial crises and emergency cuts.
We must not concede too much ground to our opponents, however. It is wrong to assume that any sort of ‘solidarity’ with our fellow citizens must be expressed through state activity. In fact big government contributes to the atrophy of a far richer and more satisfying network of non-state activities. That is why Conservatives have always valued the active citizen, civil society, neighbourhood, what the sociologists call the ‘mediating structures’, and Burke called the ‘little platoons’. James Baker, when he was US Secretary of State, visited Romania shortly after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. They explained to him what a serious problem they had looking after their orphans. He said that perhaps volunteers and charities could help. His Romanian interpreter did not understand the concept and eventually asked, ‘Do you mean nuns?’ That story tells us something important about the difference between free-market Texas and socialist Romania.
The pernicious error, upheld by many of our bien pensants and pundits, is to regard the market as the threat to the rich life of a civil society and the state as somehow embodying or protecting those values. Throughout the post-war period public debate in this country has been preoccupied with the supposed threat to traditional British values from brash market forces while the real threat was coming from the intrusive state. It is as if, like the guns of Singapore, we are armed against the wrong enemy, ready to repel an assault from the forces of vulgar American capitalism, while our society has really been under threat from the enormous powers of our own state. The real tragedy of twentieth-century Britain has been the way in which the state has taken over and then drained the lifeblood from the series of institutions which stood between the individual and the government. Gradually we have lost sight of the virtues of those institutions which thicken our social structure and give it a richness which is lost if it is just individuals facing a Fabian, centralized welfare state. Britain has been, if you like, ‘deconstructed’.
We have seen great and proud institutions such as our voluntary hospitals and ancient grammar schools brought under state control. Other institutions like our universities have become so dependent on public funds that they have fallen prey to the disease of believing that the best way to embarrass politicians into giving them more taxpayers’ money is to say how terrible things are. The behaviour of too many public-sector bodies and their associated pressure groups reminds one of those nature programmes showing fledglings in a nest with beaks permanently open to attract the harassed parent. And as resources are inevitable finite, the battle is really to attract attention away from their rival siblings – a stark truth which is ignored in polite society. Once an institution has descended to this level, it has indeed come to resemble a dependent infant and should not be surprised if it loses authority and respect.
The critics accuse us of being the centralizers and claim somehow grant-maintained schools and self-governing hospitals are examples of this. But they are actually attempts to give greater power to local institutions within the constraints of public finance. There is a problem of centralization in this country, but it is caused by the intense pressure for equality in the financing and delivery of public services, which brings in the national exchequer as the agent for redistributing resources between different parts of the country. De Tocqueville put the point very neatly:
The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.
Civic Conservatism
Those fears about the destructive forces unloosed by free markets seem absurd and hysterical as soon as one considers people’s everyday lives. The experience of working in a large firm whose ultimate objective is to maximize profits is not one of being on your own, in ruthless pursuit of the profit motive. You are working in a team. Sophisticated capitalism is a highly cooperative experience. We have been so preoccupied with looking at competition between different firms that we have largely overlooked the experience of cooperation within the firm.
The British suburb is not a place of rootless, miserable apathy either. People, admittedly, do pursue their material aspirations – to own their house, to be able to afford a good holiday – but these are not immoral or shameful. And at the same time the suburbs comprise rich networks of voluntary associations, from the Rotary Club to the British Legion, from the rota for driving the children to school to the firm’s social club. Even that urge to home ownership, satisfied more successfully in the 1980s than in any other decade, has given people new and stronger ties to their neighbourhood. Ownership and belonging go together. Our civic culture is under greatest strain not in the suburbs but in the inner cities from where so many businesses have fled. It is the absence of a modern capitalist economy which brings the real problems, not its success.
The nineteenth century saw economic and social change just as profound as today. We thrived as a market economy and at the same time as a rich civil society, as Macaulay teasingly observed:
This is the age of societies. There is scarcely one Englishman in ten who has not belonged to some association for distributing books, or for prosecuting them; for sending invalids to the hospital, or beggars to the treadmill, for giving plate to the rich, or blankets to the poor.
Government was limited, but at the same time the Victorians were extraordinarily successful at ‘remoralizing’ the poor. Rates of crime, drunkenness and illegitimacy, all declined. It is this century which has seen big government elbowing aside working-class self-help and private provision and weakened the institutions which shape our characters.
These arguments are not just matters of political theory. They are paralleled in the popular clichés attacking Conservatism: ‘They don’t care… They would privatize everything if they could… It’s just me, here and now… It’s every man for himself… Conservatives are only interested in what makes a profit, what pays.’ And then the Conservatives are told increasingly that we are also bossy, using central government to control us with evermore detailed regulation. This unattractive mixture of rampant individualism and intrusive government is what the hostile commentators wrongly think of as modern Conservatism.
A Conservative understands that, in Quentin Hogg’s neat expression, economic liberalism is ‘very nearly true’. It is right about the economy, but on its own will not do as a complete political philosophy. Economic liberals have fought an admirable and successful battle for our interests as consumers to be given priority over our interests as producers as we saw in the previous chapter. But that then leaves the question of who these consumers are; what constrains their immediate appetites; what they are loyal to; what duties they believe they have. The market system is constrained and limited by other values: that is why you cannot sell your children or your vote. Understanding our position in historic communities is essential to answer these deeper questions. The Conservative understands the importance of the instincts and institutions which sustain and shape capitalism.
The truth is that the Conservative stands between the two errors of socialist collectivism and libertarian individualism and, indeed, recognizes that they are mutually dependent. Big government undermines community and leaves us just as atomized individuals expecting the welfare state to do everything. Rampant individualism without ties of duty, loyalty and affiliation is only checked by powerful and intrusive government.
The starting-point for any authentically Conservative approach has to be that Britain is not a lumpy enough country. The progressive agenda for the public sector throughout most of this century has been to eliminate diversity, which was always seen as indefensible discrepancy. Reformers have seen themselves as energetic pastry cooks, wielding a rolling-pin to smooth out the lumps in the dough. They have ended up producing a state which is smoother, more fine ground, than any other in the advanced Western world. Labour still believe in a planning and control model for the public sector. A central part of the Conservative agenda for the fifth term is to push forward that process of shifting power and responsibility back to hospitals, schools, GP practices – local institutions that matter to people.
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