David Cameron, Citizenship and the Big Society: a New Social Model?
citoyenneté thatchérisme Big Society société civile bénévolat. citizenship Thatcherism civil society volunteering
Espiet-Kilty
David Cameron’s Big Society Programme was his flagship programme for the 2010 general election. Its main objective was to help the Conservative Party distance itself from Thatcherism, notably by bringing about change for Britain’s society. The government was to help society regenerate itself by giving British citizens the means to look after their communities. Was the Big Society the sign that the Conservative Party had managed to break away from Thatcherism? Was it the programme of a whole party or just the Prime Minister’s “toy”? Did the programme find an echo amongst British citizens?
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Introduction

4For Margaret Thatcher, civil society did not exist any more than society for there were only self-reliant and responsible individuals whose moral, and therefore private, duty it was to look after themselves and their families first and then after their neighbours. However, her praise of the Victorian Age as the “charitable age” reveals that, even for her brand of Conservatism, there existed a privileged medium through which individuals could reach to others. In many ways therefore, this absence of civil society shares common features with David Cameron’s very real one which is also formed of citizens who are characterised by their obligations to others and who are supported in their actions by civil society. The difference however, is that its role should be enhanced to make it more efficient in delivering social services. This is where the Big Society programme comes in play. In Big Society rhetoric, civil society becomes the third sector formed of a modernised and more competitive voluntary sector – one that has a more market-based approach to delivering services – associated with the newly created social enterprises, which are private companies whose business is to deliver a social service. The brunt of David Cameron’s social programme was born of this dedication to creating a “more efficient” third sector.

Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron: Two different visions of inequality?

Conflicting trends within the Coalition Government

12David Cameron’s compassionate Conservatism can be perceived as an instrument that enabled the leader of the Conservative Party to rid himself of the image of heir to Thatcher. To do so, the Big Society borrowed from both New Labour (the Third Way) and David Blunkett’s 2003 Civil Renewal Programme, and from Philip Blond’s Red Tory. However, it did not match the New Labour Government’s financial support of its social programme, nor did it borrow the solutions Blond prescribes to remedy the problem. There are three possible reasons why David Cameron failed to carry through his social agenda.

14The second is that David Cameron was isolated in a party that fundamentally remained Thatcherite in the image of both its Chancellor of the Exchequer and its Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. In addition, one could add that Cameron’s social approach was not coherent. The Big Society programme was flawed from the outset, being a mere patchwork of ideas rather than the result of a consistent vision, ideas that conflicted with the Government’s economic policies. This would tend to reinforce the notion that David Cameron’s compassionate Conservatism was hesitant at best.

15The third is that the electorate, in spite of being apparently critical of the Thatcher legacy, had absorbed most of its precepts and remained too individualistic to form a Big Society.

Conclusion

22However, the combined effect of British society’s negative attitude to the poorer part of society and the economic crisis, which has contributed to deteriorated working conditions and loss of income, has adversely affected the third sector. The worst hit regions are those in which unemployment and poverty were the highest – unsurprisingly so, for volunteering is still a class activity.

24The impression is that the transplant from Marshall’s liberal citizen to the neo-liberal active citizen has taken. However, what has occurred, as a result, is not a revival of civil society with active citizens taking over the role of the welfare state but a privatization of citizenship for some and exclusion for others.

25Raphaële Espiet-Kilty is a lecturer in British Studies in the English department at the Université Blaise Pascal Clermont II. She is a specialist in Contemporary Political History. Her research is on the place of citizens in the social policy of Conservative governments since 1979. She edited the 17th issue of L’Observatoire de la société britannique, « The Thatcher Legacy », published in November 2015.