Big Society in The New York Times

In her Guardian article (Saturday 21 May), reproduced in this blog earlier today, Polly Toynbee refers to a piece by David Brooks, author of The Social animal, about David Cameron's "Big Society" published in The New York Times. Here is that article (from the edition of Thursday 19 May).

It's intersting to consider how people from outside the UK see what's happening here, isn't it? There's considerable cross-fertilisation between the kinds of social, political and economic reform we're seeing in the UK and in the US. Normally it's seen that we're seen as the one lagging behind; is that what this article says?

The Big Society

By David Brooks

Fifty years ago, Jane Jacobs published a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book was not only an indictment of contemporary urban development; it offered a vision for a healthy community. Jacobs described a streetscape as an organic ballet, as the comings and goings of shop owners, office workers, cops and parents. She described the complex interplay of many different types of people on one city block.

Here in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s government is trying to foster that sort of society. Until Cameron, Britain — like the U.S. — had one party that spoke on behalf of the market (the Conservatives) and one party that spoke on behalf of the state (Labour). But Cameron is initiating a series of policies, under the rubric “Big Society,” that seek to nurture community bonds, civic activism and social capital.

The Big Society started in part as a political gadget, as a way to distinguish the current Conservatives from the more individualistic ethos of the Thatcher years. It has turned out to be something of a damp squib politically. Most voters have no idea what the phrase “Big Society” means. But, substantively, the legislative package has been a success. The British government is undergoing a fundamental transformation.

Cameron inherited one of the largest governments in the affluent world (under Gordon Brown, the public spending reached 51 percent of G.D.P.). It was also one of the most centralized. The national government accounts for 70 percent of total government spending in Britain, compared with 55 percent in the U.S., 35 percent in Japan and 20 percent in Germany.

Cameron has unveiled a series of measures to decentralize power to local governments, to increase government transparency and to disburse welfare provisions to a variety of delivery mechanisms.

His government has boosted the number of charter schools. There’s been a welfare reform bill to encourage work and to get rid of the perverse incentives that induced people to remain on the dole. The police forces are going to have to start answering to the public. Twelve more big cities will have now elected mayors. Local communities have more control of federal money and run things themselves. There’s been a raft of provisions trying to use the insights from behavioral economics.

Cameron’s trying to get the British people to change their social norms. Many British governments have effectively said: If you pay your taxes you can sit back and we experts will take care of your problems. The Thatcher government said: Get off your couch and start a business. Cameron says: Get off the couch and take responsibility for your community. Cameron is trying to spark active citizenship.

The measures are not without critics. From the left, Polly Toynbee, a columnist for The Guardian, argues that the current centralized system ensures uniformity and fairness. But with localism and decentralization, she continues, the richer areas will outperform the poorer areas. Inequality and corruption will replace fairness and uniformity.

Others see the Big Society as the gentle mask to cover savage spending cuts. Still others see it as upper-middle-class noblesse oblige. Working-class families who have two jobs and who come home exhausted at 10 in the evening don’t need to be lectured by the government on why they should volunteer at the blood bank.

There’s some truth to those critiques. But the Big Society programs still have the potential to produce enormous benefits for Britain.

The people who thrive in a globalized information economy have the ability to process complex waves of information. They have the ability to navigate incredibly diverse social environments.

Where do people learn these skills? They learn them when they grow up in and are nurtured by rich social networks. They learn them when they live within vibrant institutions that pass down practices and habits. They learn them when they live in areas of high social trust, where people are able to reach out and work together.

By decentralizing power, and inciting local energies, Cameron’s reforms are fostering the sorts of environments where human capital grows.

Cameron still has to fight for these programs, especially against the bureaucracy’s bias for uniformity and control. And the big shortcoming is that the Big Society skirts commercial life. If centralized government weakens community networks, then concentrated corporate power weakens the networks of entrepreneurs and tradesmen.

As the scholars at the think tank ResPublica have pointed out, big corporations use the complex tax code, dense regulations and state contracting rules to stifle small-business competition. Jane Jacob’s vibrant sidewalks didn’t only benefit from flourishing community groups, they benefitted from skilled workers linking together to share capital and work. The Big Society needs to connect with economic aspirations and broadly shared prosperity.

But, even so, Cameron is doing something interesting. No other government is trying so hard to tie public policy to the latest research into how we learn and grow.

Read this article on the website of The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/opinion/20brooks.html?_r=1&ref=columnists

Big society isn't new, but the Tories are purging the past

From today's Guardian:

Big society isn't new, but the Tories are purging the past

David Cameron thinks he has nothing to learn from Labour. The hard-won experience of creating community is being lost

by Polly Toynbee

On Monday, David Cameron will again try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his "big society". It took another near-death blow from this week's report by the Commission on Big Society, which found 78% of voters say they have no idea what it means. What began as a clever replacement of Margaret Thatcher's notorious "no such thing as society" has eluded both popular imagination and real-life substance. Lord Wei, its standard bearer, has retreated somewhat. His inability to define it flummoxed officials, as he issued nothing but stirring anecdotes of good citizens – of whom, thankfully, there have always been many. The Third Sector Research Centre says a steady 25% of people volunteer at least once a month, with twice as many in prosperous areas.

But 5 May 2010 was Year Zero to Cameron's government. Nothing good ever happened before, with nothing to learn from the last decade. Soviet-style, the past is eradicated. The very names of policies that worked well have been airbrushed from the record. For there is nothing new about the big society. Labour embraced communitarian ideas, influenced by Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone call for social capital in an atomised society, and with Richard Sennett's call for mutual respect in poor communities. Neighbourhood renewal schemes were a hallmark of Labour policy, but you would think Labour's "V" initiative for young volunteering or Volunteering England never existed.

Instead, here come the National Citizens Service and a new bank holiday for volunteering – though the commission's report found 80% unlikely to use their day for community activity. Around 2,500 community organisers are to be trained – but the contract was carefully not given to Citizens UK because it is too good at this, and in danger of organising against the cuts. Meanwhile, Timebank, mobiliser of 300,000 volunteers, has been axed by civil society minister Nick Hurd – a great surprise. I chaired its 10th anniversary debate where Hurd praised it to the skies and tweeted a congratulation for "countering the cynicism of the big society". But even it fell in the purge.

Next week I'm summoned to give evidence to the public administration select committee's hearings on the big society. Of course, I'll start by saying it's A Good Thing: whose heart isn't warmed by volunteers improving their own and others' lives? But Cameron's big society words are hollow when he strips the voluntary sector bare. Peter Kyle, acting head of Acevo, the charity CEOs association, says £1.4bn government funding has been cut from charities this year, rising to £3.1bn by 2013 – replaced with a paltry £100m "transition fund". Thousands of applications rushed in and each charity had to prove it had suffered at least a 30% government cut.

In search of big society ideas, I will urge the committee to look at the New Deal for Communities, the boldest initiative ever tried. This week I visited Aston Pride, the NDC that topped the 39 schemes Labour created in the nation's worst areas. Each was given about £50m to spend as local people chose over 10 years. That committed funding drew together communities weary of half-hearted previous attempts, always abandoned when money ran out. The 17,000 inhabitants of this multi-ethnic, high-unemployment patch of Birmingham had 17 often fractious mosques and six diverse churches, but slowly and with difficulty they came together and transformed the place.

A shabby, underused park was renewed, now with beautiful sports grounds; a local museum refreshed; a new health centre reaching people the NHS had neglected; schools springing to life through bringing headteachers together, funding equipment and giving a hot breakfast to every child. The main emphasis was on training and job-finding, with money skilfully levering in funds from other partners. The results were spectacular, with lower crime than the city average, school results and youth employment that rose faster, while antisocial behaviour fell. Small businesses were supported and hundreds of volunteers took qualifications.

Perfect? No. But the change is remarkable. When Aston Pride ended this March, local people were mortified at receiving no recognition, not even a junior official from Eric Pickles's Department for Communities to visit, or a letter of praise for being the top NDC after all those years of giving so much and overcoming such obstacles. Simon Topman, a local manufacturer who took over the chair of Aston Pride after it ran into early trouble, expresses his disappointment, afraid that with all support gone, the area may start to slide back again.

But above all, he is indignant that the government does not want to learn how it was done. This really is the big society, creating new local champions, bringing people together in the hardest places, levering in outside help. Cameron would not like to know the truth: it only happened with money so local people could employ their own chosen professional support – and those things are not free. In Witney, people have time and money – but in places like Aston, with no resources, nothing happens. This is not a little light volunteering in the library – this is heavy-duty hard grind, often quarrelsome, and the people who made it work really are local heroes, whose own lives were changed. But that's all erased from the record. All that hard-won experience in creating community is lost.

However, the big society can still sound great. David Brooks, the currently fashionable US guru, author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement returned from a London visit to eulogise the big society in the New York Times on Friday. Though a journalist by trade, he seemed to have swallowed Cameron's press handout whole, without inquiring into the truth of any of it. Just about every word of this short article is misleading (including views he attributes to me). He says: "The [big society] legislative package has been a success." There is no such thing as yet. He praises Cameron for decentralising, for giving local communities money to "run things themselves" (what money?) and says "Cameron's reforms are fostering the sorts of environments where human capital grows". Where has he been to see that? He concludes, "No other government is trying so hard to tie public policy to the latest research into how we learn and grow." Or, sadly, how we deliberately forget and shrink. Let's hope New York Times readers are not so easily deceived by travellers' fairytales – so far British public cynicism is rather better grounded.

Read this article (along with reader comments - and the opporotunity to make your own) on the Guardian website:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/21/big-society-tories-david-cameron?INTCMP=SRCH