Monday, 09 August 2010

The Ragwort Risk

I'm not making this up. Agriculture Minister Jim Paice suggests that the way in which, as a society, we deal with the problem of ragwort - a problem which I know is not trivial - exemplifies big society.

This is immensely reassuring, I can't tell you how relieved I am. In the past, we might naively have just worked together to deal with stuff like this. Now we have a label for it, how cool is that?

From now on, whenever you do anything collectively, with friends, family, neighbours or colleagues or associates or complete strangers, be sure to register it as 'Big Society' action, won't you, there's a good citizen.

9 Aug 2010 21:25:54

1 Comment

This sort of branding is everywhere, even in minister statements on videos in the lobby of DCLG's offices. Galling, and the cheek of it.

Posted by: Chris Gittins, Streets Alive | Wednesday, 11 August 2010 at 10:22

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Big Society: foretelling the end of confrontational governing? I’m modestly pleased at the recent succession of posts which do not refer to Big Society. But I guess my thinking just went underground for a bit. This is the first of two or three posts in which, belatedly, I’ll start to offer a critique from the community development perspective. I find it helps seeing Big Society in the context of traditional attitudes towards governance, which are characterised by dichotomous ‘I/You’ confrontational thinking. This kind of thought does not overlap readily with collective or co-operative (or ‘We’) thinking, but in Big Society they seem to have been teamed up together. What will happen? ‘I/You’ thinking is associated with explicit command relationships, given to careful control of information (secrecy) and minimising empowerment. It is associated with a masculine style of management (widely practised by women as well as men, of course) – largely humourless, limiting negotiation, ever-ready to celebrate what it calls ‘strong leadership’. It says, ‘I am in charge and telling you what to do. By all means do your little bit of collective thinking amongst yourselves, but that won’t change the circumstances of who is in charge’. It is characterised by the stifling of growth, certainty of decision-making, and a refusal to admit mistakes or weaknesses. The public and community sectors are saddled with a lot of people like this, many of them currently relishing the chance to show how ‘strong’ they are at a time when cutbacks are necessary. Hierarchical organisation was invented for these people, they have evolved to exploit it and dominate. Confrontational thinkers are often very clever people given to doing stupid things in very assured ways. They remind me of a remark attributed I believe to Lord Melbourne, who said of somebody, a historian I think it was, ‘I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything’. That’s not a very nice thing to say about someone, which is why it’s so appropriate to apply to these people. ‘We’ thinking, by contrast, tries to acknowledge rather than deny the mess and asks, ‘how can we sort this together?’ It doesn’t always do this very well, is easily side-tracked or hijacked and subject to interference, depends on mutual support, openness, inclusion, uncertainty, discovery, shared learning, making mistakes, and growth in a sympathetic ecology. No wonder it’s never successfully run much for very long. I think what happened when the Big Society idea was concocted was that Conservative thinkers realised that overt ‘I/You’ thinking is running out of steam, historically. Something called the network society is coming over the hill which is gradually bringing an end to hierarchical systems. The emphasis is going to be on governance not government; on co-operation and openness not command and control. What should we do? Let’s occupy some ‘We’ thinkers’ terrain, and control that. Just bring some of this collective mentality into the foreground a little, not too much. The rhetoric of empowerment, that’ll do nicely. So here we are at an intermediate stage. Our leaders...
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Cuts begin to bite: Big Society nowhere to be seen Here's how it starts. Back in May the Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws said, according to BBC News, that 'every new spending commitment and pilot project signed off by Labour ministers since the turn of the year would be individually reviewed in a bid to find savings.' Last week I learned of one painful casualty of this clawing back, a community development project in Watford. Watford's Council for Voluntary Service had developed the proposal, including for a community assembly, partly with a view to making the Local Strategic Partnership accountable and representative. The stated objective was: 'to ensure that everyone in Watford has access to a community group to represent their needs and interests, and that these groups have a way of influencing local decisions.' An enthusiastic community development worker was in place whose role included promoting community engagement and volunteering, and supporting new community groups. Eleven weeks into building the necessary relationships, the claws reached him. The news somewhat overshadowed a meeting of the Watford community development network yesterday. It happens that the agenda for the meeting included discussion of Big Society, a well-known government initiative promoting principles of localism and co-production, with much-publicised intentions of generating precisely the sort of effects and outcomes that the community assembly was designed and funded to bring. Polly Toynbee pointed out last week that 'as services shrivel and die it will be easier than usual to summon up indignation.' And the authors of the Big Society idea helpfully directed our attention to Alinsky-style acitivism at the outset. I'm not so confident of any kind of uprising of protest just yet, but give it time.

Kevin Harris

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