Cameron’s “Big Society” the next Big Lie

Now lets get this right. It is not the Big State that has made inequality worse (as David Cameron suggests in his creepy Guardian article today). Actually it was New Labour’s refusal to use the state to make any serious redistribution of wealth away from the rich to the less well off that effectively stymied equality and social mobility during its term of office. Any attempt by the Tories to try and cut the role of the State even further than New Labour managed will hugely increase inequalities. Selfishness and individualism did not start in 1997 (as Cameron seems to claim), rather it continued under New Labour after Thatcherism had comprehensively and deliberately blown most elements of social solidarity apart. In this sense Blairism was Thatcherism by other means - with no serious attempts to undermine status, privilege and ever growing income differentials. Sadly the few good things that they did do (minimum wage, tax credits etc.) they seemed almost embarrassed about.
Cameron’s suggestion that it is the overweening state that has promoted selfishness and individualism is simply laughable. The real culprit lies in the realm of the market not the State. For Cameron to cite “the Spirit Level” (which suggests that the fairest societies are the happiest) is either breathtaking cynicism or complete naivety.
Sadly, Labour’s time in office was also characterised by outrageous attacks on “the undeserving poor” - asylum seekers, migrants, welfare benefits claimants and council tenants. At times this looked more like a war on the poor rather than a war on poverty. It is Labour’s catastrophic failure in this respect that has allowed Cameron to make his audacious attack on them from the left. As the Guardian’s leader says, Cameron is putting forward “a bold argument with dangerous consequences”.
An incoming Cameron Government will be able to use the fashionable rhetoric of community to undermine the state (and society) even more than New Labour has managed. As Michael White observes, whilst this is not Thatcherism in full cry it is “a more emollient formula for promoting local and individual responsibility, private and voluntary sector activity and shrinking big government”
There is a desperate need for leaders in the voluntary sector to start a discussion about whether we want to carry on colluding with this process under an incoming Tory regime. Do we want to be merely a mechanism for further undermining the State? Do we want to be used as a smokescreen disguising huge cuts to public services with a thin veneer of voluntarism, community and philanthropy? Do we want to bid for every contract going – charities running prisons and asylum detention centres, voluntary groups forcing people with disabilities off benefits etc.? Are we really prepared to so easily forego our critical and campaigning missions to rush headlong into the market?
If we continue to collude in this process then what will happen to the people (“the communities”) we were actually set up to serve? As Kate Green of Child Poverty Action Group quite rightly says: “all of society has a responsibility to end child poverty and charities have a role to play in alleviating the pain of poverty, but only governments can redistribute to the poorest”

"certain communities" to be targeted for surveillance

The recent speech by Nu Labour insider Kim Howells was truly worrying. Using the term "certain communities" (we know who you are and where you live!), Howells was able to get away with a deeply racist and dangerous suggestion that "the Muslim Community" should be targeted for a far more intrusive level of surveillance at the same time as we should pull troops out of Afghanistan. Rather than being clear that he meant to target Muslims he was able to use the term "community" to disguise any such suggestion. In doing so he has taken the (ab)use of the term community to new ideological depths. The term community is dangerous because it can so easily be used - as here - to mean much more (or conversely, sometimes much less) than it might seem at first sight. As Rizwaan Sabir says in the Guardian: 'at a certain point, turning "certain communities" into terror suspects becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy'

Polly Toynbee sums up the danger of community nostalgia

Near the beginning of her book "Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain" (published in 2003), Polly Toynbee describes the "Estate" that she lived on whilst writing the book:
"The only place to be was inside the safe familiar, private space of your own flat. That's how it felt; safe up here looking out, but with a desert down below to cross to get to the streets and the bus stops of the outside world. Estates are curious places, locking the poor out of sight, their housing not arranged in streets like everyone else's. These were once architects' little utopias, designer fantasies of the good comunity life, fatally turned inwards upon themselves instead of outwards to join the bustling world beyond, little Alcatrazes remote from the swirling urban streets outside".
There are few better descriptions of the many disasters of post War local authority planning than that these estates started off as "little utopias, designer fantasies of the good community life".
Here again, the way in which the concept of community has been used can be positively dangerous - whether in architecture, town planning, youth and social services, race relations or social policy.
Later on in the book she also has a go at social capital/community cohesion approaches to regeneration:
"This target for community involvement struck me as an impertinence. 75% of the people must feel involved in this community? How and Why? It is strange that it is always the people with fewest resources, struggling hardest against the odds who are the ones who are expected to galvanise themselves into heroic acts of citizenship .... there is a curiously Victorian notion that 'community' activity is a good of its own or at least that it is good for the poor on council estates".
As I have said elsewhere, noone is likely to accuse Tony or Cherie Blair in Millionaires Row in Mayfair of having "low social capital" because they haven't been round to borrow sugar from their neighbours.

continuing community conundrums

In an otherwise excellent letter in today's Guardian, Veronica Ward comments on Deborah Orr's argument that inequalities of income complicate the picture of diversity. She uses the word "community" three times in the letter and each time it would make much more sense if she hadn't. Sadly the letter is a great example of how the self-important (and yet ultimately empty) term leads us astray and makes us think we are saying something much more meaningful than we actually are. The letter is worth quoting at length as it rightly sets out how appalling everyday representations of the working class have become:
"what is shocking is the lengths some communities will go to ensure they are cut off from communities not comfortably like theirs. In education, particularly, they ensure that their children do not meet their counterparts on lower incomes. This avoidance and stereotyping of large sections of our community .... is insidious and shocking". This is absolutely right - but why has she felt the need to use the c word not once but three times here? What does it add? It would have been just as clear if she had used the term "people" instead of the first two uses of the term "communities". This would at least make it clear that this self-segregation is both potentially an individual as well as a collective choice.
Had she used the term"society" rather than "community" it would have been clear that this is actually a societal problem rather than one "within sections of a community" (whatever that means)

The language of community has gone on holiday

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein notes that "Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday". Our frequent (ab)use of the term "community" seems to me to be a case of language being on permanent vacation or even a kind of "gardening leave". We become bewitched by our own misuse of the language of community in ways that I have tried to describe in this blogspot. At one and the same time it is both "cosy" and unquestioned as well as actually being "distancing" and discriminatory. It sounds as though it is an uncomplicated concept that points to a real set of social relations when in fact it is the intellectual equivalent of blancmange. It conveys a special, even "unified and holy" state of affairs even when it is actually only being used to describe the people who live in a particular area or who share a common and often arbitrary characteristic (such as ethnic background, type of profession - "the business community", hobby - "the golfing community" or disability - the"deaf community"). It is often used where it literally doesn't exist "a gated community", a "virtual community", "the Islington community" etc. In these instances almost any other term is less mystificatory - why can't we just say "business people", "golfers", "deaf people", "Islington people" etc.?

Not surprisingly any attempt to construct a sensible social policy based on this woolly nonsense(especially around "cohesion" or "regeneration") is doomed to both failure and incoherence.

"Community" is neither cohesive or coherent. There is a sense in which the concept is highly "adhesive" - it sticks around and cannot be got rid of . Like a bad penny it keeps turning up. It has a sort of cloying desperation when it is used by politicians. It gets stuck in almost any inappropriate situation so that it ends up becoming oxymoronic or tautologous. It is abit like getting chewing gum in your hair - the more you try and get rid of it the more tangled it gets - best to chop it off!

Confucius was once asked how he would deal with a particular problem for the administration of his government and instead of replying at the level of social policy he called instead for a "rectification of names" - a clarification of the langauge used to describe the situation: "If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone. If this remains undone, morals and art (ie society) will deteriorate. If justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above all." (Analects 13.3).

Well Amen to that!

Lets try and avoid this dangerous and ideologically loaded concept of community where we can, rather than bring it into every possible conversation as if to bless and sanctify the proceedings. Otherwise we are going to keep spinning around like Alice:

"Then you should say what you mean" the March Hare went on.
"I do!", Alice hastily replied "at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing you know"
"Not the same a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why you might as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'Ieat what I see'!" (Lewis Carroll)

Mobility and community

In an excellent article (http://progressonline.org.uk/Magazine/article.asp?a=4777) about the difference between a conservative and a social democratic concept of social mobility, Karen Buck MP says the following in her first paragraph:

"Beware of concepts that seem, superficially, to have politicial endorsement from across the politicial spectrum. There will be something about that concept that is slippery and hard to pin down. A few years ago the cry went up for "community". The word became the subject of endless seminars and thinktank reports, was talked about with great erudition by Amitai Etzioni and Robert Puttnam, was deemed to be the holy grail for society, and specifically as an object behind various regeneration schemes ('New Deal for Communities') and then - vanished! Where today , is the rigorous new thinking, the big money and the government programmes geared towards community building? Nowhere, and primarily because, the closer we got, the less we could define a common meaning, still less a shared approach to achieving it. Did we want communities of people 'like us', familiar with a shared culture and history? Did we mean something that bound together those very different cultures, values and lifestyles? Did we want more mobility? Or less? Did we not, perhaps, want women the traditional nurturers of family and neighbourhood, back in the home to carry on that now neglected task?"

This is absolutely right and is music to my ears! In particular she points to a growing feminist critique of the notion of community which hides a deeply reactionary view of women's role in society. She also hints at the fact that community can be used as a concept that inhibits mobility and the breaking down of inequalities. Because of course talk of community heads us off from talking about economic inequalities (class) and makes us think we are describing a static structure rather than a dynamic process that is open to change. Right on the money!

Charity and punishment

It is extraordinary and deeply troubling that some charities are so desperate to enter the market that they are prepared to run prisons. (Charity and Punishment, Guardian 4/9/09). I fail to see how punishment and incarceration could ever be a viable charitable object – as Libby Brooks says this is “a troubling step too far”. Such a move distorts any sensible meaning of the term charity.
I have other concerns too. If there is no part of the public or private sector that charities might not consider operating in, then in effect their claim to special treatment as charities starts to disappear. Some of the advantages that charities have hitherto rightly enjoyed in terms of tax and gift aid then start to look like unfair distortions of the market. Why should some types of agency competing in this open market have such unfair advantages if actually they are following the money like everyone else? The whole rationale for such advantages start to disappear when charities are so keen to sacrifice their mission for the market. This starts to endanger the whole notion of charity status itself. This is why the Charity Commission must take a stand on this issue and I urge them to rule that incarceration and punishment that are core aspects of any bid to run prisons should not be subsidised by an organisation’s charitable status.