Big Society, big deal?

Is the Big Society a big deal or is it in big trouble? ALASTAIR THOMSON looks at the challenges for adult educators working with one of the central strands of David Cameron’s political project.

Political leaders like to put forward guiding ideas or themes which pull their individual decisions into a broader narrative. For John Major it was Back to Basics, for Tony Blair it was the Third Way and for David Cameron it is the Big Society. While Mr Blair relied on Lord Giddens to add intellectual weight to his idea, Mr Cameron’s legacy idea is associated most closely with Steve Hilton, the low-profile Downing Street Director of Strategy and the man credited with de-toxifying the Tory brand.

His influence may well be a factor in explaining why the Big Society has been perceived this year among political and media hacks as heading for the rocks. Clearly, it was never going to get an easy ride from opponents of the government but there is evidence that it is still misunderstood and mistrusted in Conservative circles.

Easy target

 After last October’s spending review, the Big Society has provided an easy target for many on the left. The amorphous nature of the concept is easy to vilify as an attempt to put a cuddly gloss on a spending cuts agenda. This view has been amplified by some charities which, perhaps naively, started off believing that a Big Society would lead to big grants for existing and new work programmes before coming to a bruised realisation that the government’s commitment to reducing public expenditure meant that they too would face cuts.

Perhaps more interesting has been the reaction of some Conservative activists. The Independent (on March 4) reported that, in a straw poll of more than a thousand, only 37 per cent believed Mr Cameron was right to make the Big Society his flagship policy – with the rest remaining sceptical.

Among these are Conservatives who are unhappy, not only with Mr Hilton but also with Mr Cameron himself. These are Tories unreconciled to the coalition who believe their party would have won an overall majority had it been truer to the instincts of its core supporters. The perspective of these Conservatives was expressed in the Daily Telegraph a month before the general election when the columnist Gerald Warner spluttered that ‘David Cameron’s Big Society