Austerity draped in Bunting: The legacy of the Big Society
The 2010 Tory plan for galvanising Britons into voluntarism was just a fig leaf for the destruction of the public sector.
Remember the Big Society? We're living in it. And it was a HUGE success... If the goal was to decimate the public sector, transfer the responsibility to individuals, and use voluntarism as a fig leaf for austerity and the resultant social atrophy. Big Society was just Small State - it was austerity draped in bunting.
Privatisation was one goal - but there was another problem beyond financial models. Voluntarism is also a form of privatisation because, in many models, it relies on individual choice. By giving over the act of basic caring, survival, human decency, and standards of living to voluntarism - a step back of at least a century, and to a form which is more transactional and industrial then ever before - the Big Society (BS) took away the things that voluntarism is best at. Kindness. Generosity. Sharing. Community. Compassion. Being human. Making life worth living.
BS turned the voluntary sector into cut-price providers of public sector services - with less time and resource than ever for what we’re good at. I remember there was some genuine excitement among some charities. And of course, in the provate sector, who imagined they would rake it in. The Big Society feeding frenzy was a vile spectacle which led to fast extinction of the range of 'social businesses' that sprang up to feed on it.
But for the VCS, the launch of the BS was the time when I remember seeing everything with the chance to delight, to make lives better, to give people HOPE, start to disappear. I saw it go up in flames when our music tech laptops went up during the riots at the youth organisation I was CEO at. I saw it when we knew that every programme we delivered to build confidence and creativity was now to get young people into terrible jobs that didn’t even exist. I saw it later when bingo and gardening became impossible to fund, and older people’s services were, as one local authority commissioner told me, ‘About making sure they’re washed/ dressed and fed.’ We could hardly say no. But it changed our culture.
So, much as the drive to voluntarism was naively welcomed by a few in the VCS at the time, we got used as a fig leaf for the dissolution of the very idea of sharing, kindness and generosity in our society. Most of us carried on doing it somehow. But it took many of us away from what we care about, and are good at, as Paul Streets has noted.
As I recently saw 'National Service' being proposed again, I was not surprised to see that it was some odd confection of compulsory voluntarism. And that betrays the contradiction at the heart of all this. The basics of a decent society can't be left solely to voluntarism. Decency and sufficiency are different from the flourishing of community, generosity and compassion that the VCS excels at. 'Community' alone can't fix society. In partnership, however - there's so much we can do.
