The UK Gov wants to build on the volunteerism that emerged during COVID. Is this a launchpad, or quicksand, for community power?
We’re often aware that localisation and community power can become a political football, booted around between the official parties.
The Big Society of the early years of the Cameron government came with a ready-made ideological soundbite: “there is such a thing as society - it’s just not the same as the state”. What it did was often ride roughshod over longstanding and existing volunteer and civic networks - bright young entrepreneurial men reinventing wheels, in resistant localities. And as some have said, the BS (sic) was also really just cover for funding cuts.
The other parties have also paid their dues to localism. The Labour MP Lisa Nandy, once Shadow Minister for Civil Society, has consistently pursued the agenda of how Labour’s statist and centralising tendencies must change, and refocus on local empowerment. Labour’s own Blue Labour tendency has also promoted the idea that political and economic power is relocated to town, cities and regions. The Lib Dems have long-standing localist traditions, and the Greens have an equally venerable slogan of “think global, act local”.
So one might be immediately wary of another report on the glowing value of civil society from a central government source. What’s a little different about Danny Kruger MP’s report to Boris Johnson - commissioned to explore what could be done to maintain the extraordinary burst of community activity that characterised the early months of the response to coronavirus - is that it does seem to be addressing long-term demands from leading voices in the civil society sector.
For example the proposal to set up a “Levelling Up” community fund, a sum of £2bn amassed from dormant accounts that the government is in charge of, is similar to calls from the Local Trust and others to set up a £4bn fund to support development in “left-behind” areas.
The “deal with Big Tech to design new ‘digital infrastructure’ for communities” is doubtless responding to how local communites used the socio-technical networks to hand, in order to organise themselves to deliver services to the needy and marginalised. In our own report for the Local Trust, we saw how readily the Plymouth local groups used tech like Zoom, Miro and Google Docs to self-facilitate their own mappings of COVID futures.
Yet there is a tension here, which our recent post on the Social Dilemma highlights - in that communities may not be minded to trust giant operators, corporate or government, when they offer civic tools.
Things start to become all-too-Whitehall when notions like the Volunteer Passport are suggested, leaning on whatever structures are set up by Big Tech. Again, does it quite work that you accumulate credits for your local voluntary work through a nationally adminstered scheme?
We’re thinking of initiatives like CounterCoin or Open Credit Network, who have been slowly building their credibility as managers of mutualist and volunteer activity. Could we be in another Big Society moment, when existing and genuinely independent endeavours are trampled over? Again, we might suggest that digital centralism might be downgraded, and investment in decentralised, truly bottom-up projects increased.
(There’s a notable passage in Kruger’s report where the main objection to the Big Society is duly noted: “the essential problem was the association with austerity, and the failure to establish a better narrative than the one the public seemed to hear, namely: ‘We’re cutting spending on public services, and you’re not doing enough in your neighbourhoods anyway, so from now on you’re on your own.’ The idea took hold that the government wanted communities to fill the gaps left by the retreating state, while the fundamental economic order remained in place, palliated by the efforts of volunteers picking up the pieces from a broken model.”)
This is the nub of our biggest objection to these measures - which is that they might still look like “volunteers picking up the pieces from a broken model”. Or perhaps it should be called the breaking model. Autumn looks like it will herald the announcement of the first ten “freeport” development zones in the UK. As The Sun reports:
The Chancellor wants the freeports to become “international hubs” for manufacturing and innovation – attracting major global corporations to set up new factories and processing sites.
They will be legally outside the UK’s customs territory, meaning that goods imported and manufactured within the designated area will not incur import tax or VAT until they enter the rest of the economy.
The areas will also benefit from major research and development tax credits, extra capital allowances, cuts to stamp duty and business rates and a sweeping reduction of planning laws.
The conditions inside these frenetic, deregulated, often tax-laundering zones are hardly to be imagined - but the areas around them are likely, as reports from other areas say, to be further immiserated. And while this wild industrial development scheme does its divisive worst, and actively avoids paying their fiscal due to fund public services, these civil society organisations are given relative scraps to repair the damage?
No doubt social enterprisers and the tribunes of community power will grab whatever resources are lying around, and continue on in their localist, often soft-anarchist spirit doing what needs to be done. But we reserve the right to shake our head at the consistent incoherence of government policy on matters local.