It does exist after all. Apparently it has been broken for a while and now requires enlargement. In a speech at the Guardian, David Cameron stated that he wanted a “big society”, in place of Labour’s “big state”. He believes that the “growth of the state has promoted not social solidarity, but selfishness and individualism”. The alternative is to “help families, individuals, charities and communities come together to solve problems”.
Cameron’s calls for cuts in the scale of government are obviously pandering towards the fiscal conservative wing of his party. To some extent he continues the tradition of earlier conservatism, defined by Thatcher, in which the state was blamed for the moral degradation of society. The state fosters a dependency culture, discharges people from their responsibilities, and displaces families as the proper purveyor of moral values.
Cameron’s true volte face is in coming up with new victims for the state’s malice. Cameron blames government for worsening many of the themes that have traditionally been the concern of the left: the gap between the rich and the poor and material deprivation. The large size of the state, he claims, is “inhibiting, not advancing, the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general wellbeing”.
This appears to be a canny political move. Issues such as poverty and particularly inequality would traditionally be far from the conservative agenda. Cameron believes that by naming big government the culprit, he can mobilise conservative support even for traditionally lefty topics. He can move into Labour’s territory without losing his party’s base, as long as a smaller state is presented as the solution. So far his political gambit seems successful.
In Cameron’s view, society consists of individuals, families and communities. Government is external to society and engaged in a zero-sum game with it: The expansion of the state can only be to the detriment of society.
Third sector organizations and social enterprise are put forward as the vehicle for delivering on social goals. Cameron believes these institutions to be almost like an extension of communities, accountable to their will and able to engage them in “self-improvement, mutuality and responsibility”.
The premise that third sector organizations would be representative of community is often false. Many charities that have been tasked with delivering public services have grown so large they are as unresponsive to the needs of their clients as state departments but devoid of any formal accountability. With a large size they also acquire monopoly-like power over the services that they deliver, and can begin to work for an interest of their own. In that sense they have more in common with large corporations. The opening up of competitive markets in public services to third sector organisations has explicitly encouraged this development.
Conversely, the government providing things need not be opposed to citizens taking responsibility. Ideas of design such co-production can make sure that the clients have an active role in the delivery of services. The interface between government and civil society is what matters. Cameron forgets that the state is a part of society too, and that a good society requires strong public investment to maintain public goods and collective solutions. This philosophy makes no provision for preventative services, or long-term solutions of the kind that we now need. In spite of the rhetoric about outcomes, he has reverted with the Conservative obsession with the mode of delivery.
Cameron’s emphasis on decentralization and active citizenship is commendable. Who would not want people holding power and being actively engaged in shaping their lives? As means for delivering the changes in society the “progressive conservatives” are after – social mobility and reductions in poverty – they are blatantly insufficient.
To reduce inequality we must make a political topic of another forgotten part of society – the economy. All major parties today regard the economy as a sphere with its own natural laws and best left to its own devices. The role of government is merely to correct market failures and fix some of the resulting unjustness after the free reign of economic forces. The question all of the parties fail to ask is whether the economic system itself, with its gross inequalities and individualistic bent could be the root of the problem.
Labour’s measures such as the minimum wage and tax credits have obviously mitigated some of the growing disparities in the economy. The Tory promises to lift the threshold of the inheritance tax and cut unemployment benefits can only aggravate them and don’t fit well for Cameron’s newly found interest in the poor.
What is needed is a society of many parts: a fair economy, an effective state and a committed community – all of appropriate size.
(written with Eilis for nef blog)
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Premium summer journalism: marvelling at how hot it is. From Metro:
Brits to swelter as temperatures hit new high
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Baking Britain is set to hit record temperatures again as the country sweltered in the grip of heatwave conditions.
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The weather has prompted the Government to set up a heatwave advice page on its own Directgov website as NHS Direct received hundreds of calls from patients suffering symptoms related to the heat.
With the heatwave hitting areas around London hardest, legions of workers swapped their suit trousers for shorts and took extended lunch breaks to make the most of the weather.
Staff should be encouraged to wear shorts during the sweltering heat to make work more bearable and prevent them “collapsing” at their desks, the TUC urged.
But I get the feeling that something is not right when the following is news as well. From Metro yesterday:
» No comments.Hottest June for three years
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Soaring summer temperatures and a scorching end to the month have given Britain its hottest June for three years, according to figures out today.
With temperatures climbing to a sweltering 30C and above, the last month was the hottest, driest and sunniest since July 2006.
Measured against the average over the period of 1971 - 2000, sunshine hours in England and Wales, was 222 hours, which is 117% of the 1971-2000 average, according to figures from climatologist Philip Eden. The equivalent figures for Scotland were 227 hours, 129%, and for Northern Ireland 261 hours, 142%.
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The street is covered by varied types of arches, with gray bricks laid into delicate geometrical patterns. The apexes of the domes have a small circular opening, designed to facilitate a minimal change of air. They shoot narrow shafts of light that draw a line in the dusty air, like pillars of light supporting the vaults.
I am walking down the main corridor in the bazaar of Isfahan, the former capital of Iran. The passage meanders for two kilometres, with densely packed shops, bartering customers and men pulling metal carts filled with carpets competing for space.
The typical bazaar shop simply consist of barren room, lined from floor to ceiling with goods, and a shopkeeper somewhere in between, traditionally with a listless and indifferent expression. A picture of a father or uncle, the person who originally set up the store peers from a picture on the wall, keeping an eye on his succession. The vendors make little effort to differentiate their stores from their neighbours with signs or labels, as passers-by are directly confronted with the colour and scent of what is on sale.
As I walk further into the bazaar I pass clusters of shops selling goods of the same type. People making their living selling plastic buckets take up one small corridor, as do the mandatory pushy carpet merchants, and the sellers of suspicious rubber bands for textiles with global brands written on them.
The area specialized on handicrafts is filled with sound of tinkering and banging, reverberating like an industrial hall with erratic machines. Men are sitting outside their shops hammering their bronze and brass plates or vases into shape and carefully adding new decorative patterns.
One of the craftsmen points my attention to the metalwork of a neighbouring shop. The shallow carvings, he claims, are a sign of industrial imports from India. Not even the exquisite walls of the bazaar offer protection from the outside economic forces.
(a column for nef’s Radical Economics magazine, the pictures are actually from Tehran and Yazd)
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I wanted to picture what goes on under the surface of Regent’s Canal, the heaps of shopping trolleys thrown from bridges, the stream of random packaging waste exhibiting Londoner’s patterns of consumption, mixed together with a crude ecosystem of algae and primitive fish. When trying to photograph this underwater life, I quickly realized my problem: What I was seeing was not just the things below water, but also the reflection of the world above, and it was the latter, to my unluck, that shone with more power in the pictures. This should all be glaringly obvious, but it was not my intuitive first feeling when peering below the surface. My mind fixated on the submerged thing, I ignored all other stimulus as unrelevant. With the image that was shown on my camera screen, having passed the lense and a serious of digital transformations, I could not perform the same trick of picking up only the object of my attention. The result looked more like a confused overlapping collage of unrelated images. It took a while of disordered walking and perplexed tilting of my head before I came to terms with how changes in my perspective affected simultaneously both my underwater target and the reflected mirror image of something else far away.
Photography is an abstracting medium. It records a trace of an object, and in doing so, inevitably simplifies it, reduces it to some of its visual ualities. This simplification is in many cases key to what makes a photo beautiful. It can start from an everyday object, and bring out and emphasize something about what it looks like: The staircase becomes a spiral of amazing regularity, the flower a perfect geometric construct, and so forth. (This is for a large part what makes black and white photography distinctively beautiful. The marked reduction of colors strengthen the impression that you are no longer looking at the object nor its pure representation. It distances us from the thing and elevates the picture to a visual object in its own right.) Or in my case, the surface of a canal becomes an abstract mishmash of jumping colours.
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I went for a nature walk in the centre of Europe’s largest metropolis. The Barbican is running a nice exhibition with the title Radical Nature. Though I found the land art described inside mostly quite trivial, some of the installations are quite intriguing. Well worth a visit. The best part of it was however Secret Nature, a guided walk to explore wild plant life within London, to see the uninvited green things within the concrete structures of the Barbican and the surrounding City of London.
Our guide was a very sympathetic fellow from the Royal Horticulturalist Society, with a bristly gray beard and thick glasses. A striped collared shirt was tucked into trousers that were raised well above his waist. He spoke delicate sentences with long pauses, as if to make sure no word was misplaced. He gave the impression of a man with a passion for categorization and order.
I was genuinely surprized of the variety of wild plant life that was there, in the cracks of asphalt, struggling for space in the kept green spaces, in the small holes of walls barely able to keep the necessary moisture. They were not just blunt weeds and hay, but also colourful flowers. Some of them had apparently escaped from inhabitants’ flower pots and were making a run in their newly found freedom. Such wild urban flora had previously completely escaped my attention. It was indeed like a secret, one that no-one cared to hear.
The guide had some delightful stories about the origins and journeys of the plants. They spread via birds and the lunch boxes of city workers, or were earlier carried in the bowels of horses pulling the beer into the local pubs from the country. Some had come from as far as China and Indonesia. The most fascinating case was a small yellow flower that looked rather commonplace but in fact originated from Mount Edna. It had been introduced to the Oxford Botanic Gardens sometime in the 17th century and had soon began spreading along the walls of colleges. When the railroad arrived, the cunning plant advanced along the rails propelled by trains. (I find these stories amusing when they are told as if the flora acted with full intention - I suppose it is particularly justified in the case with the uncultivated plants that make their moves regardless of people.) It had now made its way into the square mile. The City is obviously one of the main hubs of the globalized world, drawing in people from everywhere and directing the flow of the world’s funds. Some of its guests from far away lands go mostly unnoticed.
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