Active Citizenship

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Maclennan on initiating today’s debate. Inevitably, when talking about active citizenship, we need to examine the credentials of the big society as a concept. I confess that, when reading books and articles recently about the virtues of big society policy, I feel a little like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme”, who realises from his conversation with the philosophy master that he speaks in prose. I apologise to my noble friend for not reciting the original French. Monsieur Jourdain states:

“Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now, I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it! How grateful I am to you for teaching me that”.

Being an active citizen is something that many of us do, and have done instinctively, for most of our lives. I am sure that there is a great danger in this debate of giving too much autobiography, but the fact is that volunteering in the first neighbourhood law centre in north Kensington in the early 1970s helped me to define my politics and seeing the local housing and welfare issues from that perspective led to my joining the Liberal Party, as it then was. Of course, many things then fell into place in terms of political philosophy. My motives were to ensure that people had more control over their own lives. Through community politics—my noble friend Lord Greaves was a notable exponent of that in the Liberal Party—we had the makings of a tool to do so.

As a Liberal, and then a Liberal Democrat, I have never really questioned the value of the active citizen. Gladstone described the great fault line in British politics perfectly, and it is still there: some parties and people have trust in the people tempered by prudence whereas others have mistrust of the people tempered by fear. Gladstone applied this to the concept of the Tory/Liberal divide but it could have applied equally well to the division between Fabian and neo-liberal in the last century. Indeed, it is evident today in those who want to further the enabling and empowering society as opposed to those who simply do not want to take the risk. JS Mill summed it up well in his Principles of Political Economy. He said:

“A people among whom there is no habit of spontaneous action for a collective interest have their faculties only half developed”.

Of course, the balance between state and voluntary action has changed over the years since he wrote that work and the importance of the concept of the big society—a terrible name, especially for followers of Edmund Burke with his “little battalions”, or for devotees of Schumacher—lies in the way in which it has made us examine whether that balance needs to change.

In his stimulating new book, The Big Society, Jesse Norman, the newly elected Conservative MP, engages in an argument essentially directed towards Conservatives—namely, that the balance needs to change again. There is little reference to the great Liberal thinkers but his thesis essentially expropriates traditional Liberal and neo-liberal principles in the name of compassionate conservatism.

Should we Liberals care that our approach to the concept of the enabling state is now being annexed by Conservative think tankers? I do not believe that we should at all, provided that the limits of the big society are recognised in terms of its not being able to deliver the bulk of the welfare state. The coalition Government are prepared to act to make it a reality. Many colleagues have said today how that could be done, particularly through the encouragement of volunteering and the assumption of responsibility.

Over the years, I have been involved in many different bodies in the voluntary sector: Crime Concern, Cancerbackup and TreeHouse, the autism education charity. In my experience, voluntary organisations cannot just be left to get on with it; the big society has to be paid for. Particularly at a time of deep cuts to central and local government, government itself has to be reinvented to give space to voluntary organisations. Here, the issue of core funding is crucial. We need to alter the historic Fabian mindset that the man from the ministry or the person from the local government department knows best. Yes, of course, it is perfectly proper for organisations to have to compete for project funding, but over the years, even in the good times, while local government budgets have expanded, core funding of many organisations has gone down and down, which means that many small but effective voluntary organisations find it difficult to survive.

I am the trustee of an organisation that specialises in community development with young people in the inner city. It has highly innovative ways of tackling issues such as knife crime and gang involvement by stimulating creativity. Many projects are funded, but core funding has gone down inexorably from year to year and there is no real headroom for development. As a result, we are having to wind up the organisation. This is a deeply sad outcome. I strongly believe that our organisation in Brixton, and many such as ours, gained the trust and respect of young people in a way that no central or local government organisation could. That is a key feature of active citizenship in my view. There have been some good developments as far as capital funding is concerned. The establishment of Futurebuilders by the previous Government ensured that TreeHouse was able to finance an essential part of its new £11.5 million school building.

It is sad that the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, cannot be with us today. He is a friend whom I have admired for many years, as he is the most active citizen I know. He founded the Legal Action Group and the Citizenship Foundation, both of which are immensely valuable and influential. The great achievement of the foundation was to secure citizenship education, as my noble friend mentioned earlier, as part of the national curriculum. This appears to be in danger. If we are serious about the big society, we should be enhancing this element, not diminishing it.

Finally, there is nothing genteel or safe about the big society. If we truly believe in empowerment, we need to take the political and social consequences. That is where trust is so important, sprinkled, of course, with a bit of prudence.