Big Society(2): What’s Blue and Yellow and Red all over?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital
If you still don’t know who you are going to vote for, you could do worse than read the manifestos of the three main political parties. I recently read the three tomes for the first time in my life and was impressed by their scope and level of detail.
With respect to yesterday’s blog on ‘The Big Society’, all three parties have policies relating to revitalising the civic sphere, but they differ in emphasis.
The Conservative Manifesto, subtitled: ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’, has a large section called ‘Change Society’ and relevant policy proposals include public service reform (changing the ‘civil service’ to a ‘civic service’- encouraging civic servants to walk the talk on social action; introducing a ‘big society day’- I guess it’s like a big picnic but more serious…; creating a National Citizen Service so that 16 year olds get inculcated into the spirit of volunteering and service. There is also the intent to use sport in general and the Olympics in particular to strengthen social bonds. The Conservatives also promise to redirect National Lottery funds back to their original purpose of community development.
At a more macro level, they see the family as the core unit of society, and they seek to support them accordingly, through tax credits and an extension of flexible working, as well as an interesting but underdeveloped promise to protect ‘childhood’, rather than just ‘children’.
The Labour Party seem to have decided to link communities to creativity, reflected in the section of their manifesto called: ‘Creative Britain: Active and Flourishing Communities’. Community activism is grounded in a commitment to arts, sports and culture….and the volunteering such activities engender. They also promise to protect post offices and pubs as community ‘hubs’. Likewise they promise £235 million for ‘play areas’ like adventure playgrounds. Labour hope to encourage a vibrant voluntary sector and to develop a National Youth Community Service in which youngsters complete at least 50 hours of community service before 19.
I am surprised I haven’t heard more of their emphasis on ‘The New Mutualism‘ i.e. people buying shares in local pubs, football clubs etc so that they become stakeholders in key aspects of community life. This strikes me as a conceptual counterweight to ‘The Big Society’, but the first time I came across the idea was the manifesto, so either I have been looking in the wrong places, or Labour decided they didn’t need/want to push the idea.
The Liberal Democrat Manifesto makes no big thematic claim on the big society other than to reiterate their longstanding commitment to localism, and to emphasise, as all parties do, that strong communities are important. They do have a section on communities that focuses on crime, housing and immigration, and they promise to put more police on the beat, make the immigration system more transparent, rail fares cheaper, homes affordable, keep post offices open, protect and restore natural environment, and scrap council tax and make it on the ability to pay. They also propose a community owned energy scheme, but I couldn’t trace the details.
So with respect to building the big society, the parties are all the same… except for the ways that they are different. The Conservatives are explicit about ‘using the state to remake society’, Labour’s manifesto suggests that communities flourish most tangibly through sports and art, and the Liberal Democrats want communities to be ’strong’ and more politically active, with a host of policy proposals to make them so.
Two main reflections come to mind:
1) Obliquity. If all parties agree that we need stronger communities, a more vibrant civic sphere, or even a ‘big society’, does it follow that we should seek these things out? John Kay argues quite forcefully that we rarely achieve social and personal goals by seeking them out directly because the world is just too complicated. Maybe the Big Society is something that has to emerge indirectly from a succession of small gains rather than something that can be created on a national level.
2) Associational Life: In this respect, while all of the parties mention sport, none of them seem to place much emphasis on other forms of informal social life, mother and toddler groups, book clubs, chess clubs, writing groups etc. All parties seem to support the strengthening of social bonds that arise through these less glamorous forms of associational life, but there seem to be few policies in place to support them. In this respect, such aims may be informed by research at ‘My Tribe’, a site run by Henry Hemming which is a Nationwide survey of Clubs, associations, societies and informal groups in Britain. This survey will inform a book to be published in 2011, when we may or may not explicitly be trying to build a big society.
Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, inequality
Bill Gates has scattered quite a few nuggets of remunerative star dust over the years, but one quotation should be more widely known:
“The first rule of any technology used… is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Wonferful!
But is it true?
Discerning readers may have guessed that the dot dot dot above replaced ‘in business’, but Gates’s point might apply to the labour market. How efficient are the mechanisms that connect labour supply to labour demand? If there are generally inefficient, will using technology merely compound matters, or are we missing important tricks that might radically increase Britain’s porductivity?
These thoughts amount to a quick cyber shout to anybody watching about tomorrow’s RSA Thursday Lunchtime event:
How can we use online markets more effectively to ensure we create value and opportunity for the low-paid and unemployed?
The Speakers are Wingham Rowan, project director at Slivers of Time Working; Jerry Fishenden, founder of the Centre for Technology Policy Research and there will be a “contribution” (presumably verbal) by Rt Hon James Purnell MP. The event will be chaired by Mathew Taylor.
The blurb from the RSA events team is below:
E-marketplaces have developed exponentially in the last 15 years, and financial institutions now turbo-trade billions worth of assets every day. But the benefits of these new marketplaces are primarily concentrated at the top levels of the economy, and have neglected the resources that people at the bottom of the economic pyramid could sell. A new generation of marketplace could utilise the time, potential and skills of the less well-off or unemployed – simultaneously creating value for the individuals concerned, and flooding the market with hitherto untapped products and services.
Creating ‘modern markets for all’ should now be a priority, but the private sector can’t work alone to create the marketplaces needed. Is it time for policymakers to make modern, inclusive marketplaces a priority across multiple sectors at the bottom of the economy?
Predictors of Beaconicity – A load of old wonk?
I know the LGA’s list of banned council jargon has been about for a few days, but this is a story that deserves to run and run.
You know you’re in trouble when you can recognise every single word on there, and you believe it makes perfect sense. I and my colleagues have become fluent talkers of policy wonk, and it’s rather like joining a cult. You start to suspend your reservations and inhibitions, your judgement begins to become distorted, things that two years ago seemed outrageous, perverse even, start to seem utterly normal.
Take these, all used in anger in documents I have recently written:
- innovative capacity
- potentialities
- situational
- transparency
- synergies
The LGA have helpfully provided an alternative where an alternative exists. Much of the time, they’ve merely commented ‘Why use at all?’. They attach this to most things to do with networks and innovation, I note with interest.
And that’s surely got to be the acid test – if you had to explain a phrase to someone in words of one syllable, could you do it? And if not, what the hell are you doing saying it? Most of the words I have a sort of tacit understanding of, but I struggle to explain them convincingly.
There is a point to some of this jargon, to be fair. Words do matter, precision counts, especially when it comes to doing research that will shape public policy. Some of the banned words are actually hugely important to social scientists and really do mean a very particular thing which doesn’t have any other name – indicators aren’t just measurements as the list suggests, they’ve got a much more complicated hinterland than that. But whether that word should ever be on a leaflet that comes through your front door is another matter.
Surely part of any policy person’s work is to make what they do as accessible to as many people as possible, without making it simplistic? It’s lovely to create a little clique who share a secret language, but the job of these people is to serve the public interest at the end of the day. This is really the thrust of that list – you lose people’s attention and trust pretty quickly if you use words that, frankly, sound like they’re from David Brent’s inbox. That, and the matter of personal pride that one shouldn’t be caught talking bollocks in a public place.
Who needs mortgages anyway?
I'm English, so where's my damn castle?!
All this brouhaha about getting banks loaning to homebuyers, especially the banks like Northern Rock that have been bailed out by the government… Let’s step back and ask ourselves if owning your own home is really all that it’s cracked up to be. I’m coming to think that it’s not.
I’m not talking about the micro- or macro-economics of this. I’m not an economist and I invite my economist friends to tell me the financial pros and cons of renting all your life. But from a social point of view, from a community point of view, it’s interesting to look at which makes for more resilient, cohesive societies – renting or owning.
Napoleon got it only half-right. A nation of shopkeepers we may be, but we are perhaps first and foremost a nation of homeowners. We’re collectively obsessed with property. But it was not ever thus. Until 1953 only 32% of us owned the houses we lived in. That rose steadily throughout the 2oth Century until it hit a peak of 75% in 1981, the dawn of the Thatcher era. The absolute number has been in gradual decline for the last few years.
I’m too young to remember it of course 
but the Right To Buy was a large plank of the Thatcher project. Asides the financial benefits of owning a long-term investment like a house there were supposed to be all sorts of social benefits, everything from more stable family lives, to greater educational attainment, to more civic pride in our neighbourhoods.
But does owning your own home really make you a better citizen? Perhaps unsurprisingly the American interest group Homeownership Alliance reckons that the evidence is overwhelming. Homeowners in the US, they say, are more likely to vote or be active in civil society and to be more satisfied with their lives overall than non-owners, even after controlling for socioeconomic status.
But hold on. If home ownership is all its cracked up to be, and we’re most of us home owners, then why are we so worried about declining social capital in the UK during precisely this golden era of mortgage lending? And are we really saying that countries with much lower ownership rates such as France (54%), Germany (43%) and Denmark (53%) are blighted with communities in terminal decline by comparison?
When you sit down and think about it, it’s unrealistic that all of us can own our own homes, and it becomes even more unrealistic as this world of ours becomes more crowded and polluted. Nor do simple correllations between home ownership and desirable social traits mean that owning a house makes us all great neighbours – when it comes to policy, you’ve always got to ask “so what?”. What are the processes behind that data? Maybe family stability, high educational attainment and so on are conducive to home ownership, regardless of background, rather than the other way round?
Housing Associations and housing cooperatives have been proved to be great banks of social capital and economic development in our communities. The Darnhill Estate in Manchester is one example of this. When this estate was transferred to the Guinness Trust in 1999 it had to find a way of engaging local people in managing and regenerating the area. The residents had “consultation fatigue” – they’d all been interviewed bazillions of times by the council, the trust or a third party.
In the end, local people were recruited to carry out the social audit in a method piloted in Africa in which they were involved in creating the research tools. The legacy of this was considerable; many gained NVQs through this, some stood for elected positions and marginalised people formed connections with others on the estate. Other forms of ownership are not necessarily inferior to owner-occupation. In fact, they can provide platforms for communities to think about themselves and their futures.
I lived in huge Scottish tenements for years and I found it impossible to get away from my neighbours. Our shared close provided us with endless little shared projects (all of them involving junkies in the bike shed and broken front doors). I don’t think that had anything to do with whether we owned our own homes, but came from a variety of factors including the design of the close and a culture of living on top of one another.
Being an engaged, active citizen is about so much more than owning your own bricks and mortar and many of the things its supposed to provide – stability, civic engagement and so-on – are about how we live together. From a social point of view at least, maybe it’s time we moved on from this collective obsession with home ownership.
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.