It would be unfair to call Cameron’s Big Society a “total bollocks”, as one senior Conservative did during the election campaign because it was too vague to mean anything.   Cameron himself would have us believe it is a project, to be launched in November, to harness the power of online social networking via a new Your Square Mile website to turn sceptical citizens into enthusiastic community organisers.   After the Thatcher decade lionised individuals and rolled back the State, the Big Society provides the positive counterfoil of joining individuals together to take community action.   Or does it? What will it actually do?   The only concrete answers to emerge so far are that it will include the practical like a babysitting network or helping a neighbour struggling with groceries, and the administrative like providing cheap insurance (but who pays?) or streamlined criminal record checks for local events!   Shades of John Major’s Cones Hotline.

Of course it’s easy to see the Big Society as a farcical figleaf to cover up the gaps left by huge spending cuts.   But the concept is more insidious than that.   It is fundamentally a shift away from the whole idea of collective action and shared responsibility that underpins social democracy.    Recruiting goodwill among small oases of civil society wherever they happens to spring up (however estimable within those localities) is no antidote to the rampant poverty and powerlessness thrown up by a market economy with a highly centralised power structure.

There’s also the small matter of expertise, aptitude and time.   People on low wages (say less than £18,000 a year) often have long hours and physically draining activities at work to contend with, and particularly if they have large family responsibilities don’t have either the inclination or the time for social networking.

There can be no doubt – as Eric Pickles admitted “this is about getting more services for less money” – that this is partly about replacing paid labour by unpaid labour.   But there is no way that the fundamental conditions of a fair and opportunity-for-all social democratic society – housing support, sports and recreation, child care, out-of-work income support, high-quality healthcare, and free and potential-unlocking education – can be guaranteed by voluntary local networks.   At best they can offer a marginal supplement to the foundation of good public services.

The ‘Big Society’ idea may sometimes provide a useful helping hand in some local communities where it takes root, where it should be welcomed rather than scorned, but the idea that it offers a new ideology or dominant social template to deal with the deep social and economic problems of an extremely unequal market economy is risible.   Not only will it scarcely brush the surface of  healing the social injustices and profound inequalities of modern society, it will actually exacerbate them.   For if the State is pruned back so drastically that it is not big enough or strong enough to deal with people’s basic needs,  it will produce an attenuated society, not a bigger one.

Arguably the most telling characteristic of any society is the degree of inequality.   In Britain’s case it has not only grown in the last two decades to previously unheard-of dimensions, it has even spawned a new social class system and deconstructed the whole concept of aspiration and social mobility.   It has made the facile division of Britain into working class/middle class or Middle England versus the rest wholly otiose.   That does not begin to reflect the ugly social reality of UK 2010.

The distinctive features of the social landscape are no longer the gradual assimilation of an upwardly mobile working class into a broad-tent middle class, but rather the distinctive polarisation at either end of the spectrum into extremes of alienation.   Richard Lambert, president of the CBI no less, has recently referred to the gargantuan greed and bonuses of the hyper-wealthy, perhaps 1-2% of the population, as marking them out as aliens.  

At the other end, little recognised and discarded on the scrap heap by all the political parties, is a large growing bitter rejectionist surly under-class numbering as much as 15% of the British nation today. The don’t participate, they don’t compete, they don’t vote, they don’t care.   They are possessed of low self-esteem, disdain of others, a demi-monde of delinquent survival, a sub-culture of hopelessness.

The figures are shameful.   Those living in extreme poverty – below 40% of the median income – are now 0.7 million more than a decade and a half ago, and the average real incomes of the poorest tenth have actually fallen by 2% in the decade before 2008, even before the recession will have pushed the total to a million or more.   The super-rich at the same time have hit a bonanza beyond the dreams of Croesus.   In the last year alone the wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals has soared by a staggering £77 billions, by no less than 30%, to a total of £335 billions today.

To talk now of being a one-nation Tory (as Cameron has done) or even a one-nation New Labourite is just for the birds.   Britain is now a more unequal society even than under Mrs. Thatcher.   If equality is the lodestone of a civilised society, we are now further away from the foundations of decency and civilisation than for a hundred years.   Yet it speaks volumes about the election campaign now ending that poverty, inequality and stratospheric wealth have been scarcely even mentioned.    If the new Parliament is to inaugurate renewal, a mass movement like the Levellers, the Chartists and the suffragettes will be needed afresh to reverse the current obscenities of greed and power.

So class now returns to the political agenda – 30 years after Thatcher sharply widened class divisions, fatened the rich and trebled child poverty, and a decade after New Labour promised to halve child poverty but actually widened inequality still further and only reduced child poverty by a fifth. The depressing truth is that both parties have pursued a neoliberal economy of unfettered market forces, privatisation and deregulation, all of which sharply drive up inequality and both parties reject redistribution beyond minimalist tinkering. The inevitable result is that child poverty in Britain is now the fourth highest in the EU, the rich are now richer compared with the rest of the population than they have ever been since Edwardian times, 17 million people (more than a quarter of all households) remain on benefit, while chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies are now paid on average about 155 times more than the average paid worker. So class matters, yes, it matters dreadfully, it always has. And Harriet Harman is right to say today: “class overarches discrimination from gender race or disability”.

What is so ironic about this election is that the main political parties, both of which have sharply aggravated class divisions, are now focusing on social aspiration and social mobility, which their economic policies have blocked, as a main electoral theme. Both are falling over themselves to assure voters how much they will do to alleviate poverty and generate meritocracy, though noticeably not by redistribution which is certainly a necessary condition (even if not a sufficient one) for any fundamental change in social outcomes. New Labour has for a decade put the emphasis instead on reducing ‘social exclusion’ as though money was not a central part of it, whilst Cameron on behalf of the Tories has declared a week ago that what matters is not “the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting”. How hugely convenient! We need strong and secure families (perhaps a married persons tax break to make it happen?), and we needn’t worry in this country about one of the biggest rich-poor divides in the Western world.
This febrile election campaign has so far been overblown with soft rhetoric. Time now for some hard doses of reality if is to get to grips with the real deep problems that afflict Britain today.

If John Bercow discovered sex and New Labour at the same time, as some Tory wags wouold have it, New Labour is now discovering class and elections at the same time, though it’s almost certainly too late. But Alan Milburn’s thesis on reversing Britain’s declining social mobility, published today, is still interesting in highlighting one of this country’s major problems, namely the widening abyss in aspiration and performance between the classes. Pity is however that New Labour, with its emphasis on unbridled markets and ballooning inequality, has played a large part in creating the problem in the first place, and is not exactly best placed to resolve the problem now. Even so, Milburn’s strictures deserve attention: would they create a more open and fairer channel for talent from whatever provenance it comes?

He suggests that universities, particularly the top 13, should give more preference to bright pupils from lower-income homes, not on the basis of positive discrimination which he rejects, but taking account of the context of a school student’s educational performance, i.e. s/he will probably have had to work harder than a competitor from a better-off home. Fair point, but in practice very subjective, and if applied widely and robustly it could well lead to challenges in court from better-off parents. He proposes no-fee degrees for students who stay at home, though that perversely may divert bright but poor students from travelling to better universities. He calls for a child education credit (voucher) so that poorer students in under-performing schools can attend more popular schools, but that would be at the expense of less-performing schools being stripped of whatever talent they have. He inveighs against unpaid internships as the new exclusive step pushing the well-off up the career ladder, and proposes instead a benchmark (Kitemark) obtained either paid (wages) or unpaid (by grants).
All these are are useful, at a price, but they really don’t get to the heart of the matter. The British class system will not be fundamentally changed by mechanistic tweakings here and there, valuable in some cases though they might be. Milburn’s report is called ‘Unleashing Aspirations’, but the central problem is that while most middle-class families instinctively do have aspirations for their children to get to university and beyond, far too many working-class families still regard the educational system as a barrier to be traversed rather than as an opportunity to be grasped. Yes, they have aspirations for their children, but of a very different kind. Milburn admits “there are some people who don’t even aspire to a professional job”, as though that were a revelation. It’s been a fact of life ever since the modern educational system was established, even after the great reforming 1944 Education Act.
So how is this tackled more fundamentally than Milburn envisages? It means changing the perceptions, attitudes and ambitions of a large proportion of families, particularly in poorer neighbourhoods. One way to do this would be to make it part of a teacher’s job to make contact at their own homes with the parents of all the children for whom they are responsible (or at least those who never attend school evenings) and to talk with them about their child’s experience and performance at school, why it is important, and what opportunities it opens up. This may come as a revelation to many parents, but their cooperation (which may not come easily and may require difficult and sensitive handling) may well be more crucial to ‘unleashing aspirations’ than anything the school can do by itself. Class stereotypes learnt at home, as Denis Marsden found in his ground-breaking book in 1962 about working-class children at grammar schools, are often the biggest inhibitor of engagement and commitment without which aspirations will never take root.
The other central problem, which New Labour and the Tories may well find it impossible to overcome, is that a profoundly unequal society will never offer equal opportunity to those at the bottom of the pile. Scandinavia offers the most equal countries in Europe and achieves most social mobility. The US is the most unequal of all and has least mobility, despite the absurd fantasy that anybody can get to the top. The UK is, tragically, getting closer to the US pattern, and until that changes drastically any talk of unleashing aspirations is just rhetoric.