ResPublica Fellow Jules Peck asks where the Big Society falls on the political compass
I suspect if you plotted Pol Pot onto
the Political Compass he would come somewhere near the top left hand corner. It's not really clear where Attila the Hun would fit. He was maybe just a fairly average type of blood-thirsty warrior King of his time. I guess in modern parlance though to be ‘like Attila' means you are aggressive and uncaring. Quite different to the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.
Cameron has been called all these things by his own party of late. David Davis said “The corollary of the Big Society is the small state...if you talk about the small state, people think you are Attila the Hun. If you talk about the Big Society they think you are Mother Teresa” and Norman Tebbit wondered if Cameron was “the party's Pol Pot, intent on purging even the memory of Thatcherism, before building a New Modern Compassionate Green Globally Aware party, somewhere on the left side of the middle ground?”
Going back to the above Compass, interestingly those at the top of the list for a photo opportunity for politicians of all colours, including Cameron, are most likely to be bottom left quadrant - Mandela and the Dalai Lama types. They would both be somewhere near the Caroline Lucas MPs' Greens on this second map.
If you look at this third map it shows that David Cameron took the party slightly down and left towards the Dalai Lama between 2005-2008 – the time I was working with Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer on
the Quality of Life Review.
Pundits now suggest the party has since shifted back to the right economically and towards a more authoritarian social slant. Perhaps the idea with this rightward shift was to get into power, but actually – though it appeased the right of the party – it lost some ground as it triangulated away from where most voters are, which is nearer the centre. But Cameron has been brave in rolling back out the electorally unpopular Big Society idea.
The question is, where is the Big Society going to sit on this political compass? In his heart, does Cameron sit in the socially liberal but fiscally neo-liberal, dogmatically small-state camp? “If you look at the difference between Gordon Brown and me, for example, it's about our values. I believe in trusting people and sharing responsibility: he believes in telling people what to do and taking responsibility away from people and giving it to the state.” Is this anti-state dogma going to override the clear need for the pragmatic use of intervention if only to undo the damage done by ‘the last lot'?
Or would one expect the Big Society to sit further down on the first map - below and left of where the party sits currently – perhaps where it sat in the bottom map in 2008 when Cameron was at his most ‘funky' (post-QOL report and with all his wellbeing speeches etc.)? The Red Tory worldview is perhaps much further left fiscally? Phillip Blond says of Compassionate Conservatism that it is ‘socially conservative but sceptical of neoliberal economics.' So far we have seen little from George Osborne and David Cameron to show they are in any way sceptical of neoliberal economics. Indeed they have been consistently in denial about the need for intervention despite that fact that its what has kept the economy above water for the last three years. So far more Hayek than Oakeshott.
Nick Hurd MP has spoken of the “traditional Conservative scepticism about the degree to which we should rely on central government to meet the challenges of the day”. But he goes on to ask:
“But how does this fit with arguably the biggest challenge – managing the risk of serious climate instability? For the Conservative Party, the climate change issue could be seen as raising some demanding questions: to what degree are we prepared to leave it to the market when the market fails to put a price on the damage we do to the natural capital on which we depend? The right policy response to the challenge of serious climate instability is rooted in principles and instincts that are distinctively Conservative: the central role of government is to set a clear and credible framework. Once the limits have been set, the government should leave us free to make our own choices and focus on making it as easy as possible for us to make the changes. Rather than preach and complicate, it should persuade and simplify. We cannot rely on politicians but have to develop a sense of social, shared responsibility. Rather than impose solutions from the centre, we should be looking to empower people to find out what is right for them. The market is the most cost effective way to drive behaviour change and raise standards – but markets can be imperfect and it falls to government to correct market failures. The priority now is to ensure that the market puts a fair value on carbon. Our freedom to choose needs to be based on proper prices.”
The challenge is that so far the party has only grasped this as it relates to things like carbon and not to the much bigger challenges of a consumer-debt based growth model which is rapidly pushing us out of any safe zone on so many other issues than just carbon. The challenge goes far beyond things like putting a price on carbon. As a cross-party group wrote last year to HM The Queen, climate chaos is a merely a symptom of a far deeper problem – that of the insatiable growth model we are locked into.
Cameron has been happy to say that Thatcher was wrong in her assumption of the rational-actor worldview that “Free individuals making choices in free markets aren't the enemy of responsible communities: they're the heart of them.” He has clearly repudiated this with his ‘there is such a thing as society'. But he has not been clear enough that he recognises the flaws in our current economics. Putting responsibility of citizens and communities ahead of individualism is great. But those citizens and communities are going to need a whole lot of help from Government intervention if the hang-over of neoliberalism is not going to drown them in debt and hyper-consumerist hedonic treadmillery. Nanny state no. But strategic state yes.
To be more than spin and to work effectively for the sake of citizens and overall flourishing, what is needed now is a far clearer vision of a new political economy fit for the challenges of our times.