The Guardian view on the Tories and civil society: a pattern of denial
Conservatives often seem unsure whether to present budget cuts as painful but necessary or painless and desirable. Tory ideologues see state spending as inimical to enterprise and corrosive of personal freedom, but pragmatists recognise that public service users do not feel austerity as a kind of liberation.
To reconcile the two positions, David Cameron invented the “big society” – the idea that voluntary work could fill gaps in government provision of services. But piecemeal good work done under the “big society” banner could never soften blows from the chancellor’s axe.
Still, the Conservatives have not abandoned the idea that voluntarism can repair the social fabric. On Thursday, the government launches its civil society strategy, presented as a reform to harness the resources of public, private and charitable sectors alike to the goal of “building a fairer society for all”. It is strikingly reminiscent of the big society, although the culture department overlooks the comparison when declaring its new programme to be the first exercise of its kind in 15 years.
Modest sums of money are involved – £165m divided between various projects. To put that in perspective, Northamptonshire county council alone faces a deficit of £70m this year. The combined shortfall in funding for English county councils is around £6bn. To stave off bankruptcy, local authorities face limiting themselves to the provision of skeleton services.
That presages a hollowing out of local communities on a scale that the government’s new strategy cannot begin to address. Even the new spending is illusory. The bulk of it comes from “dormant bank and building society accounts”, which is a Whitehall euphemism for money to be found down the back of a sofa. (Past beneficiaries from this accounting wheeze include Big Society Capital, the fund set up to support Mr Cameron’s pet project.)
The ambition of nurturing civil society is laudable and the argument that charities and community groups often know better how to meet local needs than central state bodies is also valid. But for such a mechanism to be effective there must be partnership and balance between state and non-state providers. That is hard to achieve when the main thrust of national policy is to withdraw resources from local government.
In some areas, notably the NHS, ministers grasp that cuts have reached the limit of what is politically sustainable. Tory MPs and councillors are increasingly raising the alarm over what is happening at local level. The penny has dropped: services suffer when starved of money; people suffer when services waste away and those people express their anger and frustration in the polling booth.
That insight does not yet appear to have spread very far through the upper echelons of the party. There is something sad and ridiculous in the launch of a “civil society strategy” imagining new institutions to support local communities, when the existing political structures, the democratically mandated authorities that have always fulfilled that purpose, are collapsing in a fiscal famine imposed with ideological motive by central government.