So much for the Big Society

‘Little by little, and like a virus, the Big Society idea has lodged itself insidiously in my mind; so that now, everywhere I go, I start to see small things that actually could be done closer to the ground, by and for the people who know about them and need them’.

So wrote Matthew Parris in the Spectator last August, a passage approvingly quoted by Jesse Norman, the Big Society philosopher-in-chief in his book of the same name.

Parris’s summary tells us that the concept has gained a grip – and not only on the Right. Some Liberal Democrats are also talking about it as if it were a Liberal agenda. And Labour is attacking it as a smokescreen for cuts.

At first sight, as described by Parris, it is indeed a Liberal philosophy: close enough to devolution and community politics as to be part of our daily business.

But is there any more to it? Norman’s book is a discursive romp through the limitations of  economics (he condemns the fact that reality is seen ‘through the spectacles of formal economic models’), laced with ferocious attacks on Labour’s legacy, as well as some alarming non-sequiturs:

‘It may seem fanciful to connect such things as the recent rise in drug abuse and knife crime with the social acceptance of a standard economic worldview,’ Norman declares. Yes: it is fanciful, but thank you for admitting it.

He also critiques Layard’s ‘Happiness’ and, while at first seeming to be a Thatcherite apologist (she ‘reduced the pervasiveness of the state’) he ends by condemning her use of North Sea Oil revenues to prop up Government revenue spending.

Plato, meanwhile, is unsound compared with Aristotle, who recognised man as a social animal (thus neatly retiring Thatcher’s claim that there is no such thing as society).

The core is what Norman terms ‘I-C-E’: Institutions, Competition, Entrepreneurship.

The Big Society needs independent institutions, encompassing rules, customs or traditions as well as concrete ideas like ‘fish markets and car boot sales’.

Competition has its normal meaning, although he recognises the need for market regulation in some cases (eg mortgages where people can mistake what is in their best interest).

The definition of entrepreneurship is so wide that it might ‘seem meaningless’. It includes not only an inventor or an importer but also the ‘house-husband (nice touch) who stretches a limited budget’. Linked to this is praise of mutualism and co-operatives.

So what is the Big Society? There are elements of volunteering, mutualism, localism and letting people get on with it.

My street runs a street party every year and sings carols on Christmas Eve. The necessary arrangements just happen - without council or government intervention.

But the comfortable conventions of self-confident middle class households cannot be seen as a template for what may be needed in run down estates.

The good news is that the Big Society is not Thatcherism.

The bad news is that it is probably not very much at all.