James and I have a column in the mag tomorrow in which we critically analyse David Cameron’s “big society” big idea.
In the meantime, a couple of related things.
To what extent do people want to be part of this “big society” and accept the Tory invitation to “join” the government? Gary Gibbon of Channel 4 News asked Cameron where the evidence is that people want to be “prised away from the telly” in order to run public services or their local communities. The Tory leader said he “profoundly” believed that people want to be more involved.
Really? This poll from Ipsos-MORI asked voters if they wanted more involvement in the provision of local public services. Only one in 20 wanted “involvement”, whereas one in four wanted “more of a say” and half of them only wanted “more information”. (Incidentally, the poll also showed that less than a quarter of the public agreed with the statement: “There is a real need to cut spending on public services in order to pay off the very high national debt we now have.”)
Another, earlier poll from the same company asked voters to what extent, if at all, they would like to be involved in “decision-making” in their local communities, to which 50 per cent responded “not very” or “not at all”. And when asked about being “involved” in the running of the country as a whole, the percentage of “uninteresteds” increased to 55 per cent.
People seem to opt for quality over control. My colleague Tom Calvocoressi makes an interesting analogy between the “DIY government” being proposed by the Tories and the do-it-yourself checkout procedures on offer from Tesco self-service tills.
In a busy superstore, with long lines for the checkout, self-service seems like a great idea to start with, supposedly speeding up your progress and handing power and responsibility to you, the customer. But then the barcode won’t swipe, “approval is needed” for your carton of milk, the bags have run out and the whole procedure ends up taking you even longer than queuing for a cashier.
Ultimately you conclude that it’s quite nice having someone who is paid and trained to do the job for you. We have other things to be getting on with.
Or, as Jackie Ashley put it in the Guardian yesterday, “Perhaps the biggest problem is that the politicians dreaming up these plans are different from the rest of us. After all, they are quite happy to spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week working at politics. The rest of the country have a life.”
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