It’s always bad news when politicians stumble on a really good idea. Politics thinks in seasons; terms, if you are lucky. Politicians, like journalists and electorates, are easily distracted. Events disrupt plans. Recessions obliterate them.
Ideas, by contrast, move like deep ocean currents and good ideas are good ideas precisely because they will still be good ideas twenty years hence. And twenty years is at least four political horizons away.
The Big Society is a good idea. Or, more accurately, the idea behind the Big Society is a good idea. It was a good idea when Beveridge wrote that “there is need for political invention to find new ways of fruitful co-operation between public authorities and voluntary agencies” in his 1948 Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance. It will be a good idea when the post-war welfare consensus is a known only to historians. And it is a good idea today.
The “Big Society”, by contrast, has rapidly become tarnished through its association with a party suffering some particularly depressing mid-term blues. As if we didn’t already know this (remember Rowan Williams’ guest editorial of the New Statesman?) Sir Stephen Bubb, Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executive Organisations, has written to the Prime Minister claiming that although the Big Society is “a strong concept” (“even if Whitehall has struggled to communicate it or implement it consistently”), the phrase itself is now “effectively dead”.
Bubb is not crying wolf. He is generally positive about the idea, not only in theory but in (some) practical details, calling the establishment of Big Society Capital, for example, “a historic milestone”. But he is far more critical about its longer-term prospects, complaining that reform of social care funding has been “glacially slow”, and that charities are now facing “crippling spending cuts”, with those who raise their own money (charities raising their own money – whatever next?) suffering equally severe budgetary constraints. Altogether, he claims, “a Government once sincerely full of ambition, vision and urgency has lost its way, and now lacks a clear narrative on the role of charities in the economy and society.”
Bubb’s letter serves as a salutary lesson for those keen to mix religion and politics. Specifically, it presents a practical challenge that is rather more serious than the bien-pensants’ liturgical chant that religion and politics don’t mix. Whether or not you think Jesus founded the Big Society, Christianity more or less invented the idea of civil society in Western Europe, and in Britain the churches held the majority share in voluntary and social activity until the Attlee settlement. Loving your neighbour as yourself and creating the Big Society may not be coterminous but they share ground.
That recognised, any Christian who ties their agenda too firmly to this particular policy mast will see it soon turn ragged and then junked as governments, leaders and agendas change. The idea behind the idea will return (Lord Glasman and Jon Cruddas on opposition benches are currently thinking similar thoughts, for example) but the label won’t. The temptation to place theological eggs in political baskets is great, but one only has to look at the sense of disaffection among US evangelicals after eight years of Bush to see where it leads.
None of this is a reason to remove religious conviction from political activity. Rather, it constitutes a counsel of caution: engaging in politics from a confessional position demands being alert to its provisionality. It means recognising how once-dominant terms rapidly pass into obscurity and disrepute, even if the ideas behind them do not. It means sitting loose to the vocabulary of the moment and understanding the inadequacy of almost all policy initiatives. It means, paradoxically, being a bad party member, or a ‘critical friend’ as we prefer to call it. Ultimately, it means renouncing the opportunity of dictating today’s agenda, so you can be around when people are debating tomorrow’s.
