Protecting the union
by Duncan O'Leary
While Labour has been slow to work through its response to the Big Society, the Conservative Party has yet to apply its logic to the economy. Big Society enthusiasts have championed voluntary groups, open government and public service reform, but have had less to say about what the idea means for our lives as consumers, workers or shareholders. In a Demos pamphlet published today, Robert Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow, begins to fill in the blanks. In Stop the Union Bashing, he puts forward case for his party building bridges with unions.
Halfon’s argument is that unions are bastions of capitalism – a viewpoint that may win him some surprising allies. Many of those on the Left of the movement itself have always understood their task as to civilise capitalism, rather than replace it. The pamphlet takes the argument a stage further, noting that unions ought to be recognised as the quintessential Big Society organisations. They are, after all, just the kind of independent, intermediate institutions that Conservatives have valued since Edmund Burke and before. Their members, he points out, are eight times more likely to involve themselves in social action and community-led services.
Halfon is right that the union tradition shares a key Big Society insight – that legislation can only take you so far. Better jobs, with improved working conditions, also need conversations between employees and employers in workplaces across the country. At their best unions play a vital mediating role in this, giving people a voice to speak for themselves in their workplace. This more than anything, should clinch the argument for unions as potential allies, not enemies, of the Big Society idea.
Duncan
Reality,
My reading of the Big Society is that it is about intermediate institutions in society. The argument being that institutions, not just laws, shape our interactions with one another.
Families, for example, are one institution that encourages people to feed, cloth and house one another. Likewise, community groups provide people with ways to campaign or cooperate together. The monarchy, or the England football team, inspire different forms of patriotism. Conservatives have always believed in these things and seen them as valuable.
But the gap lies in the economic sphere. What are the institutions that encourage people to behave decently towards one another in the marketplace, so that we do not just revert to the law but also communicate and compromise with one another? The trade union has always been one such institution. Your union rep can help you explain and address problems at work that health and safety law may never be able to. This is the argument that Robert Halfon is making in his pamphlet.
Best,
Duncan
Will Davies
This is a provocative argument. I agree that unions can defend certain conservative community values. But claiming that a 150-year-old, multi-million-person movement is an example of something Steve Hilton dreamt up in the bath seems to be getting things slightly topsyturvy. There have been regular attempts to re-connect trade unions with communitarian politics and civic organisation - see for example Richard Freeman's argument about "open source unionism" http://www.iww.org/en/about/solidarityunionism/explained/opensource - and while they have never been entirely clear about what this model of unionism should look like in practice, they've probably got closer to a concrete agenda than the Big Society.
His argument about 'bastions of capitalism' is presumably designed to provoke, but seems a little daft. 'Capitalism' surely refers to a political and economic model, in which the interests of capital are asserted over the interests of other socio-economic groups, including those of labour. The fact that capitalism benefits from being kept in check (by regulation, unions, social norms) is widely understood, but that doesn't mean these limiting powers are 'bastions of capitalism', any more than than the police are 'bastions of crime'.
Reality
Sorry Duncan
Trade Unionists doing a Tory governments job for them I don't see it. Most trade union leaders despise the Tories. Nor I would guess do trade unionists think the so called Big Society is anything more than PR gobble-de-gook.
You say "What are the institutions that encourage people to behave decently towards one another in the marketplace, so that we do not just revert to the law but also communicate and compromise with one another? Seriously what are you talking about? You'd like trade unions to seek a compromise between say the parents of a disabled child who has had his/her benefits cuts and a local authority who has no money? You'd like trade unions to take on the task of say seeking compromise from a bank not paying decent interest on a persons savings?. I am sorry but you are talking utter nonsense. You think trade unions will want to act as patsies in an economic system that pays bankers £15 million a year and an equally necessary waste disposal operative £250 a week?. What are you imbibing?
Nobody but a tory is fooled by the Big Society claptrap and I doubt if too many tories are fooled by the vacousness of the concept. Libraries are cut. Our young are being denied a university education (15% down already). Our NHS is being destroyed by the imposition of personal greed rather than care. Our police forces are being cut. And you talk about the Big Society. Truly gob-smacking.
Of course Tories love the monarchy and patriotism. They love snobbery, property and their own (they think) aggrandisment. They are scared witless that the mob as they would call them they do not hold such reverence and are sometimes a whisker away from rising up (as per last years riots). It has ever been thus. What is new now is that this Big Society nonsense is driven by the religious. As their pews empty, as education and the internet advances less and less believe in the Con-Trick that was/is Christianity. O dear our income and forms of social control are weakening (Read them on ConservativeHome besides themselves on subjects such as gay marriage). Lets think up some new wheeze we can con the masses anew with. What about something called the Big Society. We can control them with this specious nonsense. You underestimate your fellow man. And certainly the average trade unionist. They know the game. They are not so gullible. You are living on another planet Are you a Christian? Suggest you read Tolstoy's The Last Gospel. Then you might understand, just might, why the Christianity game is up and dying. Fortunately
PS
PS Lest you think I am nuts (which may be!!!!!) the guy behind this Big Society intellectually vacuous nonsense of communitarian conservatism is Philip Blond a former lecturer in Christian theology at the University of Cumbria and University of Essex (says it all really!) (see his history and blog www.respublica.org.uk) and of course well known to the Demos crowd
Malcolm Rasala
Firstly "The national office of Unite the Union for the community and non-profit sector, suggested that "The ‘Big Society’ is smoke and mirrors for an avalanche of privatisation under the Tories". And Dave Prentis, General Secretary of UNISON suggests that "The Government is simply washing its hands of providing decent public services and using volunteers as a cut-price alternative [...] Public services must be based on the certainty that they are there when you need them, not when a volunteer can be found to help you"
Secondly, the Conservatives should tread very warily with all this Big Society economic philosophy. A little investigation of some of its advocates should be undertaken. Take Philip Blond. Read his Prospect article 'Rise of the Red Tories' very very carefully. Influenced by the Distributism economic thinking in the 20th century of two quasi fascists GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc (an open admirer of Mussolini and fascism) it proposes many fascist type policies. I quote Philip Blond "a radical communitarian civic conservatism ...requires a considered rejection of social mobility, meritocracy and the statist and neoliberal language of opportunity, education and choice". I quote Philip Blond again " The final piece of the puzzle is for Conservatives to break with big business....The Tories must take on the unrecognised private sector...taken together such policies will help conservatives....build a new economic and capital base that decentralises power ....makes a final break with the logic of monopoly and debt financed capitalism". Study fascism: 'the common aim of all fascist movements was the elimination of the autonomy (or in some cases the existence of large scale capitalism'. (read Mr Blond's diatribe against Tesco and mobile phone companies) Quite how this Big Society quest to return us to a 'proudly medieval past' (read the Big Society wish list on Wikipedia) will equip us to take on China, Germany and America in the 21st century is unanswered. The concept of localism battling it out against the likes of Apple, Google, Sony, the major Japanese and French and BRIC countries is to put mildly laughable. How will Chesterton's '3 acres and a cow' that Blond and the Big Society advocates seem to crave build a computer or a body scanner or the mass required products of the 21st century. If this is the intellectual thinking of the current Conservative Party no wonder we have already fallen from 4th to 7th place in the economic league tables. If the well meaning Mr Cameron pursues the above Big Society quasi fascist nonsense we might be off the tables altogether even before he leaves office.
Red Tory
From Philip Blond's 'Rise of The Red Tories' manifesto "The idea of a Tory distributist state......would bypass the trade unions as institutions permanently wedded to welfare serfdom, and wed ownership to the earning of wages". Wonder what has changed? Could it be that the Burkean platoons to carry forward the supposed Big Society are in reality a figment of the imagination today as they were in Edmund Burke's day. Nor should we forget that the medieval past Philip and his like so worship are called 'The Dark Ages'. Wonder how many people want a return to another Dark Age?
Also, just heard that Cameron is funding money to SME's through the big banks. Great. So much for the 'monopoly' theory ignorance of another Big Society nostrum
Duncan
Reality and Malcolm, you might be interested in reading Lord Glasman’s piece in this Demos publication
http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/opendialogue
He sets out the case for intermediate institutions in the economy better than I could. Malcolm, he addresses your point on liberty/autonomy, arguing for an open society ‘with an equal stress on both words’.
Will, hi. Glad you were suitably provoked. I’m not sure it’s fair to disqualify anything pre-dating the Big Society from being part of it though. Families, churches and voluntary groups and have been around longer than Steve Hilton too, but I’m not sure what that tells you. The point is that conservatism in general, and the big society in particular, has a strong role for intermediate institutions – and trade unions ought to be part of that.
On the ‘bastions of capitalism’ argument, I take your point on the distinction between capitalism (a structure of ownership) and markets (a form of exchange). And also that labour and capital have separate interests – this is the main rationale for unions after all. I think the point is that the (small ‘l’) labour movement has a tradition of working within the free market system, with the aim of civilising it, as opposed to various socialist/social democratic traditions which have sought to replace market exchange altogether. Maybe ‘bastions of good capitalism’ would be better.
Joanna W
Now we know what the Big Society means to David Cameron and his friends. Big tax reductions to his multi-millionaire friends. Big donations to the Conservative Party. The former funding the latter.
Big tax increases to 1.4 million being brought into the 40% tax bracket.
Big rises in unemployment. Big reductions in our growth potential. Big Society = Big Red Tory Fool.
Reality
What is the Big Society? Does anybody know? It appears to be a set of PR platitudes with no meaning, no substance.
How can politicians who cut welfare including aid to disabled children, cut the national library service,, cut police forces, cut spending on our schools, cut and undermine the fabric of the National Health Service, cut aid to charities, reduce the numbers of our young applying for a university education, portray themselves as seeking a Big Society? Its upside down inside out thinking. Everything they do points to their traditional Small Society agenda. And you think trade unionists are fooled by this Con trick? Dream on.