Happy-clappy community engagement and the politics of disadvantage

Two years and five months ago I attended the (opposition) Conservative Party launch of an idea called the big society. I must admit it took me a few days to appreciate what it meant.

Since then I’ve heard people whose views I might once have respected, express enthusiasm for – even regret for the apparent passing of – this devious and snide attempt to theorise the demolition of the public, the suffocation of community action (manifestly not its liberation) and the justification for disempowering gestures of philanthropy.

Today - thank you Patrick Butler - we have a bitter-sweet example of just what big society amounts to. Patrick reports on how Children North East, a long-established organisation with a sound reputation for serving disadvantaged young people against the odds, found that the erosion of public funding for what they do stopped, abruptly, at the pockets of the charity’s staff:

They put their hands in their pocket and paid for the children's lunches themselves. The staff set up what in effect was a mini-food bank scheme. They bought ‘a little extra’ in their weekly family shopping trip, and used it to stock up the charity's new ‘pantry’.

The article quotes tellingly from the blog of the charity's chief exec, Jeremy Cripps:

So here we have a Government without the humanity to care for very vulnerable people until they are deported by giving them even a minimal amount of money to feed their children; a local authority providing shelter for those families but forced to cut back on its spending by the Government; passing that cut on to a charity which too has to economise; the buck passes to the charity's staff who cannot stand by and do nothing while in daily contact with children in basic need of food; so they take it upon themselves to make sure children do not go hungry.

The problem I have is not that this could be any kind of surprise to anybody who has been paying attention.

What bothers me is that the emergence of circumstances like these has been accompanied by a degree of encouragement among people in the new community engagement industry, who have been happy to promote a form of community development that ignores the politics of disadvantage: lots of jolly emphasis on happy-clappy ‘community’ but no recognition of the manifest and rampant social injustices that try to make philanthropy (and by extension, depoliticised community involvement) an acceptable substitute for social responsibilities.

I have suggested before that the assimilation of selective-value community development into public policy could effectively neuter the movement and marginalise the voices of anyone who protests against political injustices that cause great need. Further, it seems to me that collusion in such policies amounts to subscribing to the demonisation of the poor. That is inexcusable.

 

Comments

[Ian Bertram]

There is nothing wrong, per se with charities funded by personal donations, although I would hope that it went wider than the employees. What makes me angry is the calculated hypocrisy of the so-called 'big society' initiative which masked deliberate destruction of ventures like Children North East under the pretence of reducing the scale of government but in reality to maintain the structures of corporate and political corruption that sustain politics in this country.

[Kevin Harris]

Thanks Ian. I'm not sure whether the pressure put on Children N East could be said to be directly deliberate by either national or local government; but the deconstruction of much of the public realm (eg libraries, social care) certainly was and continues to be. As we know (this is unambiguous) that withdrawal means more poverty, less support for vulnerable people, more children in care and so on.

Social policy that places such heavy emphasis on philanthropy is morally bankrupt, not least because it is (a) unpredictable and unstrategic, (b) inconsistent geographically and over time, and (c) reinforces existing power relationships (much as you suggest).

It seems to me that makes it inexcusable for people who profess to be community practitioners to endorse big society. I can see that for some people, big society might be good for business. This might help explain why relatively few people seem to be angry while so much damage is being done to ordinary people's quality of life. Support agencies - child care, homelessness advice, women's refuges, all sorts - are closing down all around us because of the same lack of funding channelled through local government that Patrick's article describes. And who knows for example what terrifying domestic violence ordeals are suffered when a women's centre is closed. But if community practitioners don't stand up and protest against what is happening in front of their eyes, we can't necessarily expect others more detached to do so.

To remain silent is bad enough: to actively endorse it seems like wilful collusion.

[Ian Bertram]

I don't suppose Children NE were specifically targeted, but it has always seemed to me that while at the national level there is empty rhetoric like the 'big society', at the local level there is often very strong opposition to anything that erodes the local power base of members and senior officials in local government. I've seen this in operation, sometimes to the point of actively working against successful local community groups simply because they had their own ideas. I've worked in the NE, although not for some years now and this was a strong factor at play, but I've seen it elsewhere too.

I don't know the answer, but at times like this the combination of national austerity and local antagonism can be a lethal mixture.