Big Society

I was talking to a friend recently who moved to San Francisco. He was mentioning that he's not only missed the new Chris Morris film, but also had missed the Election. I was forced to admit that, in retrospect, he hadn't missed much.

At the time, I was caught in something of a mad Tory frenzy - I was out campaigning for candidates, writing daily electorally themed facebook statuses, posting comments on blogs, reading article after article - I had never been so politically involved or enthused in my life.

But, after lots of hot air and speculation and excitement, it was pretty much the result you could have predicted from the minute Alistair Darling admitted we were economy-fucked and then Labour tried to destroy him over telling the turth - i.e. a divided Labour party running a campaign largely rooted in smears & fantasy, which would make them lose the election.

Note, I say Labour lost the election, not that the Tories won it. It's clear that despite the inequities of the current electoral system, which favours Labour to an unpleasant degree, that the overall result of the poll was a solid rejection of Labour, but no embrace of the Tories. Why?

Well, lots of my Tory friends - the tweed wearing, hunting, shooting types - tell me "it was down to that Big Society nonsense - didn't play well on the doorstep - by the way, Pass the Brandy old boy..." Really? This mantra is taking hold in the Tory Blogosphere and most of the left has held the policy in contempt since it was announced, characterising it as an attempt to hide cuts behind a charitable mask.

Even the parliamentary party has come out against the big society, with Health Secretary Andrew Lansley attacking the man who should be the poster boy for the Big Society, Jamie Oliver.

In my opinion, this is a bloody stupid thing to do - and not just because triple-chinned, sallow-skinned goon Lansley looks like he could use a few days on an all salad diet himself.



Above:Goon

Oliver's entrepreneurial spirit and drive in trying to help the community was what Big Society was all about. Oliver was successful at exposing the failures of the monolithic state sector - in proving that a philanthropic individual could make a difference.

If you analyse "Jamie's School Dinners" as a project, it successfully delivered the goal of low-cost, highly nutritious meals - and it engaged teams of local, hard-working ambassadors to make it happen, rather than a top-down, government driven bureaucratic system. It harnessed methods of persuasion seemingly alien to politicians in this day and age - humour, cunning & genuine interaction with the public. Surely this is the sort of thing we as Tories should be promoting, not rejecting and ridiculing?

The aftermath of the project is that the schools involved have found their children performed better academically after eating nutritious meals. The overall numbers of children taking school dinners has gone up. Of course, one TV show is never going to change the world, but Oliver did a bloody good job and should serve as a model for future projects on that basis.

The article I linked to give you an idea of how the left sees big society - Johann Hari's superb polemic "Welcome to Cameronland" - was probably the best article to be produced in the general election. It hurt us, badly. I must have spoken to 40 or 50 people who told me it persuaded them at the last minute to vote Labour and not Tory.

In my social group, it put even the hardened Tories on the back foot. Was this what we meant to do? Were we really campaigning for pregnant women to sleep on dirty mattresses under bridges and children's playing fields to be turned into Polo fields? Most simply denied the truth of the article.

Is it untrue? Certainly, it's a Polemic. My girlfriend lives next door to the playing fields in question, and they were only closed off for Polo for two weeks -in return for a vast investment in the area by the hurlingham club - both facts the article would find it inconvenient to mention. Also, the football pitches and children's playgrounds weren't fenced off - another inconvenient truth.

But, having volunteered with homeless charities for years, the story of the pregnant woman forced to sleep rough resonated with me. It's almost certainly true. But I could find you an equivalent of that woman in practically any urban borough in the country.

The truth is, that story represents the state's abject failure to tackle or even attempt to understand the problems of the homeless. I can promise you that if state run shelters had been available, it would have been a miracle if the woman had been allowed in. They are not well run, and they are frequently trapped in a kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare.

I can give you an equally horrific story from my own experience - while volunteering for the Big Issue in Bristol, I saw a council chief luring homeless people off the streets with a promise of free booze on the night of a rough sleepers audit.Councils, regardless of political affiliation care about things like targets. For the record, the last London rough sleepers audit counted 67 rough sleepers in London.

I would guess based on the fact that I usually see 3-4 different people sleeping rough in St.James Park every morning on my way to work, that the figure is about 10-20 times too low. No Londoner can hear that figure with a straight face. The state -not Downing street, but Local councils - has an interest in concealing the true number. Incidentally, what is the state response to the rough sleepers in St.James?

Every morning, a team of four policemen combs the park for rough sleepers and moves them on. Caring, and hardly an efficient use of resources.

Also, it's worth reading what a Labour MP and Lib Dem council did to homeless people in Cambridge a while ago; and the spectacularly evil Lib Dem council in Inverness - who shut down a homeless shelter claiming it cost too much to run, then announced an increase to the budget for New Year's fireworks to the same amount it cost to keep the shelter over for a year.

Homeless people not a big vote winner (like fireworks). They are not taxpayers. They do not vote. But, if we create a culture which says "the state should deal with it", we simultaneously screw the homeless and create an environment where no-one feels the need to act. And it is the same with many other social problems.

We need to enable voluntary organisations to tackle these social problems. Time and time again, we can see that charities and social businesses just do the job better than the state. The Big Issue doesn't have to worry about re-election, about the competing pressure of the Rubbish collection budget, about nimby-ism - that is why it achieves a success rate something in the order of 20 times higher than government programmes to reduce homelessness.

Of course, Big Society is not the answer to everything - the state needs to step in some times, needs to provide a safety net. But The essence of Big Society is that government, the state, is just not very good at solving social problems. David Cameron was right to include it at the heart of the election campaign - it's an idea we have to prove to the public if we want to be taken seriously as a party in these socially aware times.