If you’re not quite sure what the Prime Minister means when he talks about the big society, you’re not alone.
If you’re not quite sure what the Prime Minister means when he talks about the big society, you’re not alone. Before the election, a poll found that most people hadn’t heard of it and only very few who had knew what on earth it meant. Even some Tories deride it as ‘BS’, though Jesse Norman is not one of them.
A former banker and academic, Norman was elected MP for South Herefordshire this year. And, as the author of two serious texts on the future of conservatism, he’s well-placed to clarify what this tricky big society notion is all about.
The story begins at David Cameron’s Hugo Young lecture, delivered last year. This was an event, Norman argues, as seismic as Blair’s Clause 4 moment. Cameron said ‘there is such a thing as a society’, that economists’ peculiar ideas that humans always act rationally and in their own interest were flawed and that bureaucracy too often frustrates people who try to help their communities. To be effective, government has to be smarter and much more circumspect about the areas of our lives in which it interferes.
So, in the big society, the idea that the Treasury always knows best is out. Local councils are encouraged to run their own affairs. Mechanisms like ‘targets and incentives’ which were designed to improve policing and schooling centralise power and undermine professionals. In their place local, elected police chiefs and ‘free schools’ run by parents and communities must rise up. For all this to work, government must become more transparent. Jesse Norman has written before about the importance of what might be called ‘intermediary institutions’ — charities, trusts, mutual societies and co-operatives.
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