The Big Society isn’t an idea, it’s a bunch of thoughts lumped together under one woolly label. It’s supposed to be simple and easy to ‘get’, but it’s just confusing. And it’s the kind of mistake strategists and consultants make all the time.
When David Cameron first announced his vision of a Big Society in 2009, no one had the foggiest what it was. It fitted with the feeling many voters had at the time: Cameron was all presentation with no real policies to back up what he was going to do.
Now Cameron’s in a coalition government that’s making cuts and fast tracking policy changes, commentators are convinced they know what the Big Society is about. Have a look at how Ed Milliband and David Cameron describe the Big Society in the Sunday papers.
Milliband says it’s an ideological excuse to cull the state as quickly as it can, ‘The way it is doing it – so far, so fast – speaks to its [the Conservative party's] ideological heart’. But it’s the double whammy of asking people to volunteer at the same time as cuts that prompts the most criticism from him and other Big Society sceptics, ‘No one can volunteer at a library or a Sure Start centre if it’s being closed down.’
Cameron, on the other hand, says it’s not about one thing, but three:
1. ‘Devolving power to the lowest level so neighbourhoods take control of their destiny’
2. ‘Opening up our public services, putting trust in professionals and power in the hands of the people they serve’
3: ‘Encouraging volunteering and social action so people contribute more to their community’.
Oh, ok, that’s cleared things up. See, like the label Big Society, part of the problem (again) is the language and how it’s expressed. It’s not just that the words are a bit civil servant-y (‘devolving power’) but that they’re so broad. By now we’ve all got the gist of the Big Society and that it’d be super if ‘neighbourhoods take control of their destiny’, but it’s hard to know how that’ll work.
To Cameron’s credit he does give examples, but because there seem to be so many ways to make his Big Society happen, from staff-owned mutuals in Dover docks to schemes set up by residents in Balsall Heath, it’s unclear what’s part of the Big Society (presumably things that work) and what isn’t (things that don’t).
The more cynical readers among you might think this was Cameron’s plan all along. Dream up a fuzzy sounding idea and use it as a smokescreen to push through a series of unpopular policies while no-one’s looking. I seriously doubt it. I suspect that they couldn’t – and still can’t – sharpen up what the Big Society is and isn’t.
Even if it is part of a grander masterplan of spin, it’s not working that well. In a ComRes opinion poll for the Independent on Sunday (13 February), half of the people surveyed thought that the Big Society is a ‘gimmick’. Its abstract definition makes it easy prey for critics to get their opposing view across, and it’s working. 41% of people in the same survey see it as ‘merely a cover for spending cuts’.
So the Government is now having to bat back these criticisms. Francis Maude, the cabinet minister in charge of delivering much of the Big Society agenda said it’s ‘absolutely not just about volunteering’. Meanwhile officials have been stressing volunteering is the least critical ‘pillar’ of the Big Society.
We’ve worked on enough strategy projects (including one with a ‘brand parthenon’) to know that as soon as people start talking about ‘pillars’ your idea is already on shaky foundations.
Frankly, we’re fed up with loose ideas held together by sloppy labels. We come across it all the time in branding, and here, on a big scale, you can see what happens. If it’s too abstract we try to fill in the gaps with what we think it means. In the case of the Big Society, if you’re pro-Conservative everything’s fine, and if you’re pro-anything else you think it’s doomed to failure.
So, please, next time someone has a big idea tell us how it’s going to work from the start and do away with the woolly labels. Otherwise the only society we’re going to create is a big muddled one.
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