A warning to David Cameron: The Big Society has let us down before, and it could do so again

The Labour movement column

By Anthony Painter

I have a deep affection for the writing of Jonathan Coe. It wasn’t until I was given his The Rotters Club as a gift that I came across his writing. It left me feeling uneasy when reading it as I hadn’t appreciated that we were from the same town. I recognised the places, the people, the culture, the atmosphere, and the politics. And this weekend, he wrote about Bromsgrove – where I grew up a decade and a half after Coe – in the context of social change and the election.

When reading Coe’s books based in Longbridge – the site of the former Rover factory – Kings Heath, Northfield, Rednal or Lickey, I always feel slightly uneasy as it’s so personal. If I had his talent I may have written a sentence such as is in his Guardian piece:

“It may be almost three decades since I left, but I have been coming back ever since, and that sense of ambivalent belonging never goes away. Not for me, at any rate.”

Sitting waiting for the Conservative parliamentary candidate to join him in the Golf Centre (where I would embarrass myself at least twice weekly in my teenage years) he reflects on a Bromsgrove that has changed. And hence the feeling of ‘ambivalent belonging’ – that I share. For Bromsgrove is not the town that I left a decade and a half ago. At that time it was a small market town beginning to struggle in the face of competition with big retail parks – mainly Merry Hill – and lying very much in the shadow of Birmingham. And what has happened since is a cautionary tale for David Cameron’s ‘big society’ and messianic localism.

In the early 1980s a bypass was built around Bromsgrove town centre. What has become clear is that this was to be an onionskin around the town. The land all around the bypass has been filled in almost exclusively with housing. Not communities – housing. So from the pleasant market town – elements of which most definitely remain but are more often hidden – that Jonathan Coe left and I grew up in, it has become a dormitory for Birmingham, Redditch, and Worcester.

The real tragedy is the town centre. It feels deserted nowadays (other than on a Friday night.) New housing estates – where people lead private lives with little community life or activities beyond the local school – don’t make for good business in a town centre like Bromsgrove’s. There must be 10,000 more people living in the town than when I left in 1994 (at a guess) and yet the town centre is struggling – even the McDonald’s is no longer open.

And whatever David Cameron may say about the virtues of little platoons, community action, and local initiative, Bromsgrove is a warning of what happens when unimaginative local administration confronts the big market. Rather than the renaissance of community, you end up snapping human relations. What has sapped the energy of the town is not the intrusive state. It’s the absent state. When the state retreats completely, all that’s left is individuals and families – and the market. In many ways, Bromsgrove epitomises Thatcher’s vision. It has its fair share of welfare dependency. And of course manufacturing employment and output have been in decline. The unleashed market was left to do its worst. And the Conservative local authority was happy to stand back and watch the show.

The notion that we must seek more associational, reciprocal and active ways of doing politics if we are to maintain and rekindle the bonds of community is right. But the dangers in the Cameron approach are enormous. He has little to say about how to grapple with the negative impacts of the market – inequality is a prime example. And he has no sense of how he might intervene when localism goes wrong.

Localism does not only go wrong through surrender to the market as happened in Bromsgrove’s case. Nimbyism can be just as bad. Nimbyism leads to a malignant stagnation where the incentive is for young people with skills and talent to move away sapping the life from a community. It empowers those with assets and wealth over those, such as first-time buyers or those who rent, who are without – especially low earners as social housing is the least profitable to build and so will always be under-supplied in a purely localist environment. So you end up with polarised communities corroded with inequality and unease.

Labour, for all its early shortcomings in housing policy, actually sought to create ‘sustainable communities’ in partnership – combining jobs, infrastructure, a range of housing to meet a range of family and financial needs, open spaces, community facilities, while managing the impact on the environment of new development. It found this difficult to achieve as the planning system is still very skewed in favour of vocal and well-organised vested interests. Often, Labour found local and vocal constituencies of self-interest overpowering the interests of the majority. Let’s call this latter group, hmmm let’s see, how about the ‘great ignored’?

None of this is to say that localism can’t work. It can. For every failure, we can point to successes in the great industrial age cities – Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and Newcastle – where localism has not been without success. In London, boroughs such as Hackney have seen tremendously positive change over the last decade through strong local leadership – supported by regional (yes, that’s important) and central government. David Cameron is right to seek to unleash the ‘big society’ and engender inspirational and ambitious local leadership. There is, however, a very real risk that in pursuit of a good slogan – vote for Cameron, elect ourselves – he is breathtakingly naïve.

The case of Bromsgrove – and its Thatcherite legacy – and the opposite risk of stagnating nimbyism are warnings of what localism without pragmatism can mean. Another of Jonathan Coe’s novels, What a carve up!, details how change is often manipulated to enrich and empower the already privileged. Stagnation can have a similar effect. Localism can work and should be given every chance to work but sometimes smart state intervention is needed as a counter-weight to guarantee the public interest.

The ‘Big Society’ is a great theme and an even better slogan. In the hands of previous generations of Conservatives at national and local level, all too often it has let down the very people it was meant to empower. The risk is that it could do so again.