The Big Society

The Big Society 

Presenting

The Big Society is now the nearest thing we have to a big idea in our politics.

 The Conservative manifesto section on

 ‘Change Society’

 is led by two telling comments that 

‘There is such a thing as society’ but  ‘It’s just not the same as the state’.

While understandably distancing themselves from her offending phrase, the Conservatives and all of us should look again at what she really meant. It should embrace those to the right and those to the left, including many of the social activists whose pioneering voluntary work is now rightly, if belatedly, being celebrated by the government.

David Cameron’s Big Society speech in July in Liverpool was eloquent in its choice of location, a church university called Liverpool Hope. He was speaking at the campus for the creative arts developed by Hope at Everton, in what had become a run-down part of the city, built in and around the old St Francis Xavier school and church.

His setting was pleasing to me because I knew the principal, called the rector and chief executive, of what was then Liverpool Hope University College, when he decided in 1997 to play his part in the regeneration of Liverpool by returning to his  roots.

Hope at Everton duly opened in 1999, complementing our existing campus in Childwall, beneath what The Beatles called in nearby Penny Lane ‘the blue suburban skies’ of Liverpool. 

Hope at Everton enabled us to recover the pioneering spirit 

Telling phrases used by the Prime Minister in his Liverpool speech include that top-down government ‘has turned lively communities into dull, soulless clones of one another’ but we need instead ‘to create communities with oomph’.

Cameron explained in his Liverpool speech last week that ‘my great passion is building the Big Society. You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.’ It’s about creating a society where people ‘don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face …but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities. It’s about people setting up great new schools...’

Forward-thinking, entrepreneurial, community-minded people and neighbourhoods in our country to come forward’. So it is time, once again, to counter indifference by being different, respecting differences and making a difference.

We believed that the building and community which seemed to have been rejected could become the cornerstone of renewal. 

THE BIG SOCIETY

Margaret Thatcher also said in that interview that ‘there is nothing like the miracle of life’ and that care of ‘these little innocents’ was ‘the fundamental great trust’. She raised our sights  It is those children you cannot teach... you just have to try to say they can only learn from school or we as their neighbour have to try in some way to compensate in the “Common Good”

This seems to me to be similar to the spirit of David Cameron’s Big Society and to ‘Choosing the Common Good’, the recent guidance offered to voter which asked, ‘Have we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the myth that social problems are for the government to deal with ?’ The Church place great store by ‘the offer of time, energy and possessions out of the spirit of good citizenship and genuine neighbourliness’ which is exactly what Margaret Thatcher meant and which is now meant by David Cameron and, I suspect, by politicians in other parties and by “all people of goodwill”.

In this spirit, the Big Society takes us back to our roots and is rooted in our radical tradition of pioneering the creation of a more level playing-field in society.

***

To the extent that the Big Society is designed to distance the contemporary Conservative party and the new coalition government from Margaret Thatcher, it rests on (but perpetuates) a common misunderstanding of her position.

There were two relevant passages in Margaret Thatcher's Woman’s Own interview in 1987which merit study. She said that too many people had been given to understand that government would deal with their problems : ‘So they are casting their problems on society. And who is society ? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first; it is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to look after our neighbour’.

You can almost hear her saying that. It was robust but it was not quite as harsh as it has been portrayed.

Moreover, in the same interview, Margaret Thatcher paid particular attention to badly treated children and explained why she supported the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children as her long-standing ‘foremost’ charity. She said that we should not be shying away from blaming the parents who have let children down and failing to do something ourselves to help by foisting responsibility on society as whole, because ‘There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and ... help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.’ For children who have been neglected or treated cruelly, she continued, it is difficult to say ‘you are responsible for your behaviour because they have just not had a chance and so I think that is one of the biggest problems and I think it is the greatest sin.’

Just berating her for the opening phrase of that section, taken out of context and without understanding her more touching sentiments, is unfair on Margaret Thatcher.

She explained in her memoirs that she meant in the interview that

 ‘society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, 

but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations’.

The Community Of that Big Society Oomph!

🌍🤝 Welcome to The Big Society

The Big Society is now the

 nearest thing we have to a big idea in our politics.

 The Conservative manifesto section on

 ‘Change Society’