Austerity and the redefinition of citizenship

The imposition of austerity economics – often in conflict with democratic mandates – has obviously had profound economic effects; but it has also at heart a democratic issue.  Austerity has in many cases been imposed in the face of democratic mandates or by the installation of “technocratic” governments; but I believe that at heart it is redefining the way we think about citizenship and the status of the individual in a market society.

Thanks to a recent tweet from David Graeber, I’ve just become aware of this article by G M Tamas, published in 2000 in the Boston Review.  Tamas writes with reference to nationality and citizenship, responding specifically to the rise of Jorg Haider in Austria; but it seems to me that his arguments are profoundly relevant to the way in which, quietly but surely, austerity economics – and in particular the way in which benefits have been cut – have redefined concepts of what it is to be a citizen; and in turn that has profound implications for democracy.

Tamas and post-Fascism

In summary, Tamas writes about how a resurgence of nationalism and a deep hostility to immigration has been reflected in policies that lead to the exclusion of citizen rights and the creation of classes of citizenship.  Tamas – writing at a time when the End of History was being widely touted – writes about how the triumph of capitalism has led to a breakdown of narratives about class and economic power, with the left focussing instead on issues of civil rights; and Tamas, quoting Lipset, describes a “fascism of the centre” in which hostility to the state combines with a belief that rights are not universal, but are the preserve of a particular group, usually based around national or ethnic identity. For the first time in history, popular ire about unfairness in society is being directed not at those wielding wealth and power, but at the dispossessed.

For me, what makes this article so fertile and important is the way in which it points to how Western market societies increasingly treat those who are unable to work – whether through unemployment or disability.  It seems to me that part of the process of austerity is to deny the citizen rights of those who cannot support themselves through paid work, through processes similar or identical to those pointed out by Tamas.  And I believe that this process has a fundamental effect on our conceptions of citizenship and democracy.

Universal benefits: the Beveridge legacy

I’ve written elsewhere about the case for universal benefits – as well as the costs advantages, pioneers like Beveridge saw universality as a means of social cohesion – a recognition that all had a stake in society, whether rich or poor.  Writing in the aftermath of European Fascism and the struggle of total war (a war in which victory was intimately bound-up with the mobilisation of state power) Beveridge was keen to see benefits as a route to stability and an expression of citizenship; all were to have rights, including the right to a basic minimum standard of living.

Citizenship and austerity

It is obvious to anyone who follows politics that in the UK, as in the rest of Europe, Beveridge’s vision is being abandoned – we are being told, in an age of austerity, that we simply cannot afford it (there’s an obvious point to be made about the difference between level and scope of benefits, but both are under attack).  Drawing on some of the issues Tamas raises, it’s possible to define some important themes in the way that the austerity consensus – in Britain at least – is seeking to redefine the concept of citizenship in, I’d argue, destructive and dangerous ways.

It is obvious that the debate around benefits in the UK has moved to a place where austerity is being used to justify a change in the conception of citizenship.  At a time when living standards continue to fall across the piece for all apart from the wealthy, those who rely on the support of the state have been recast into the role of the oppressor – an unproductive burden, a charge on the productive.  Citizenship increasingly appears to be contingent on conformity to a capitalist model of monetized income (so for example a carer, whose daily unpaid work not only brings real and tangible benefit to the person who they care for, but is also – potentially – saving the state money, falls on the wrong side of the citizen divide, because their contribution is not monetized and does not generate profit).  We are in a society in which your citizenship is increasingly defined by your ability to obtain and hold down paid work, and to consume accordingly.  The Big Society, to the extent to which it means anything at all, replaces entitlement with largesse doled out on a whim; it means that the privileged retain the right to decide whether those in need receive the essentials of life or not.  It’s the antithesis of citizenship.

This is made all the clearer by aspects of the debate around how benefits are received.  Market economics places choice at the heart of its rhetoric; increasingly, approaches to benefits assume that choice should be taken away – through workfare or through the growing advocacy of (expensive and insecure) payment cards for those receiving benefits. This has nothing to do with efficiency, or the operation of the market.  If you are receiving benefits, your participation in one of the defining rituals of market capitalism is to be denied; you do not deserve the benefits of citizenship.

To me, one of the nastiest and most insidious pieces of contemporary political rhetoric is the cult of the “hard working family” – used across the mainstream political spectrum in the UK but particularly associated with New Labour.  It’s not just that for this reader it conjures up images of a sort of Betjeman-esque domestic nightmare of white-shirted middle-manager paterfamilias, company car in drive, with wife and children in consuming subservience; it’s the way the phrase, consciously or not, is designed to exclude.  In defining whose side we are on, we also – inevitably – identify those who fall outside the scope of our politics. Like so much ideological rhetoric, it defines as much as it describes – and I for one find it both profoundly obnoxious but deeply revealing of the assumptions of our increasingly homogenised political class.

One can only conclude that underlying all this is a new definition of citizenship – one that is dependent on a property qualification.  If you have a job, or private wealth, and have the power to consume, you are a full citizen.  If you are unemployed, or disabled, or ill, you are not.  You have forfeited your citizen rights in favour of the largesse of the comfortable, and the whim of those who bear far more responsibility for the current economic crisis than you do, but for which you are being called on to pay a disproportionate price.  Your citizen status is not defined by your humanity, but by the casual Poujadist thuggery of the tabloid press and a political class – increasingly drawn from those enjoying extreme privilege – that is happy to ride that thuggery.

And we need to place this in a wider European context: there is a big movement – encompassing the imposition of “technocratic” governments in Greece and Italy, to the creation of a new treaty in the EU to entrench austerity in European law, to the increasingly frequent pronouncements by senior bankers and officials that economic policy should be taken out of political hands – to take economic policy out of politics and away from democratic scrutiny.  As David Harvey has argued eloquently in his book Neoliberalism,  this remains the ultimate neoliberal dream; to claim the kudos of being a democratic state while ensuring that the distribution of wealth is a matter over which electors have no real control.  It depends, of course, on economics being seen as an objective science and its practitioners being seen as expert manipulators, rather than – more realistically – being seen as a set of more-or-less empirically-derived  generalisations based on largely subjective psychological assumptions.

Extremism of the centre

Following Lipset, Tamas uses the phrase “extremism of the centre”, and it’s a formulation I find extremely compelling. In the absence of the big narratives about class conflict and economic power, it offers an understanding of how political and economic elites can rationalise and legitimise prejudice against the poor, vulnerable and especially the disabled into something that they appear to have little difficulty in reconciling with liberal democracy.  The way in which the collective view of disability in particular appears to have swung away from a belief in support (even if only to bring disabled people into the workforce) to outright hostility is, in my view, one of the defining phenomena of modern Britain.  We are a society that apparently provides a willing audience for Government press officers who see their work as the spreading of unattributable lies about the benefits enjoyed by disabled people; that apparently cannot understand that a 20% cut in benefits “justified” by a less than one percent rate of fraud is an act of collective punishment that moves our political class firmly into moral equivalence with those who, seventy years ago, were decrying disabled people as “useless eaters”.

In conclusion, Tamas’ piece seems to me to offer a way into understanding the mindset that underpins the kind of society we are becoming.  We neglect issues of citizenship and democracy at our peril – and we need to understand that the implications of austerity go well beyond economics, leading to fundamental questions of what society is and how we relate to one another.

One Nation Labour and the abandonment of politics

Like many others, I’ve found the concept of One Nation Labour elusive.  The term is deployed in almost every utterance from senior Labour politicians, but its meaning remains obscure.  Like everyone who has studied nineteenth-history politics, I’m familiar with the origin of the phrase One Nation in reference to Tory politics and Disraeli, and it is a phrase that has been used predominantly on the centre-right – usually as a signifier for a more socially-liberal form of Toryism.  In this context it’s worth noting that the phrase originates from a scene in Disraeli’s early novel Coningsby in which an aristocratic  character realises that the gilded world in which he lives is not all there is – and that the poor exist too:  two nations – the rich and the poor.  The use of the phrase “One Nation” was designed to demonstrate that there need not be conflicts of interest between the rich and the poor – and therefore, ironically enough, originates in a denial of what most Labour people have argued for most of that party’s history.

Labour has obviously seen an attraction in seizing this piece of language from the Right as our society becomes more obviously unequal and divided.  Fortunately Jon Cruddas has, in a  widely-trailed speech to the Resolution Foundation, sought to set out a strategic vision for One Nation Labour, answering – if obliquely – the question of what Labour is for.  It’s a fascinating, eloquent read – but frustrating, because of what it does not cover.  It is in those omissions that we perhaps get closest to what One Nation Labour really means.

Cruddas’ paper is entitled Earning and Belonging, and he states at the outset that these two verbs are the building blocks of Labour’s policy review – and that they shine a light on what Labour has lost.  He contrasts them with a Labour policy paper of 2005 which sought to answer the question “what is Labour for” with the verbs earning and owning; a position which puts consumption at the heart of Labour aspiration. Cruddas (in my view rightly) argues that this reductivist view simply does not express the richness of the Labour tradition – it ignores community and the progressive instinct, and points out how the need to recapture a dialogue about community, important though it is, flirts dangerously with the reactionary.  But Cruddas argues eloquently about how Labour’s – I’d go further and say the English left’s – roots lie in mutualism and points out how many of Labour’s salient campaigns today continue to display that mutualistic and communitarian urge.

It is, as I have said, a powerful and attractive narrative.  Implicit in much of this is the need to reach out to an electorate that is disillusioned by process; on the one hand battered by the market, on the other deeply suspicious of what Cruddas describes as state managerialism.

But there are huge omissions.  There is not a syllable about the environment – whether in terms of the big issues of climate change or the more local issues about urban liveability and public space.  There is no real consideration of what the state is for.  And, beyond a couple of platitudinous sentences about the pointlessness of opposing cuts without an alternative,  nothing about the economy.

It is in the latter that One Nation Labour looks most like a tactic of avoidance.  Austerity economics is clearly failing; not only is it destroying living standards, in particular of the most vulnerable – even on its own terms it is simply failing to deliver the objectives of reducing the deficit and promoting economic growth.  Not only is the confidence fairy nowhere to be seen, but Labour is quite explicitly promising more austerity to come; a commitment to keeping the Coalition’s cuts and possibly making more.  Cruddas’ eloquent generalities about earning and belonging are conducted in the shadow of Ed Balls’ great clunking fist.  It’s ironic that if ever there is a figure in Labour’s past who could be seen as emphasising the One Nation tradition it is Keynes – whose writings were inspired by a need to rescue capitalism from the idiocies of its most fervent supporters and to create a stable society in which the benefits of wealth were spread.  Ed Balls seems intent on repeating the errors that Keynes excoriated.

And it seems clear that a deeper consideration of economic priorities is off the agenda.  Austerity, it appears, is assumed – but the narratives surrounding it appear to be falling into disrepute, as the economy continues to tank, living standards fall and the hope that this might be a simple recession preceding a return to business as usual looks increasingly untenable.  There is no recognition that this time it might be different – that, for example, we may be in the throes of a long-term depression like that at the end of the nineteenth-century (with the irony that Labour partly grew out of a realisation that the conventional politics of the time was simply not equipped to deal with that).  In this context, Cruddas’ review of Labour’s traditions is notably incomplete; redistribution and the use of the power of the state to achieve economic policy ends has always been central to Labour’s view of the world.  Everybody knows that the post-war Attlee government founded the NHS; most people know that it nationalised key industries like coal and steel; fewer know that it presided over the most significant redistribution of wealth from rich to poor undertaken in British history, and realise the way in which the experience of total war – in which trade unions and government worked together to provide the means for victory – shaped the debate about economic priorities.  Of course economic priorities and structures have changed – but one does not have to deny that fact to recognise that this very significant piece of Labour history is wholly absent from Cruddas’ survey.  And the time when the failure of market economics (explicitly recognised in Cruddas’ comments about housing) is all too clear, such an omission looks like a major piece of evasion.

As does the failure to ask questions about the boundary between public and private – it is hinted at in Cruddas’ comments about voluntarism, and it’s notable that he recognises the difficulty of this area, but it’s a pity that at a time when other thinkers on the Left are seeking to rediscover the Courageous State,  One Nation Labour appears incapable of moving beyond generalisations about state managerialism.  At one level, the coalition years can be seen as an experiment in the withdrawal of the state – and it is obvious that the consequences are disastrous (not least because the tired rhetoric about the Big Society fails to recognise the extent to which the voluntary sector and the state were already working closely together – it is ironic that the withdrawal of the state has decimated parts of the voluntary sector).  There is a serious debate to be had about the role of the state and the voluntary sector, and how such a relationship can be made more democratic and accountable.  On the basis of Cruddas’ comments that is not really a debate that One Nation Labour appears to want.

And alongside that sit crucial economic issues – the question of whether that collapse in living standards and growth in inequality is arising out of the pursuit of paper growth, and the way in which we fail to ask questions about the purpose of economics and the relationship between growth and prosperity when we continue to deplete the world’s resources at a wholly disproportionate rate  (a reminder here too that the traditional internationalism of the Left appears to have little place in this dialogue.

These omissions are important, and drive one towards the conclusion that One Nation Labour is not so much a slogan (although it is undoubtedly that) as a catalogue of omissions; a refusal to join a debate about the most important economic issues of the day.  Politics is about the big issues, or it is nothing – and policy reviews, important as they are, deal with the detail of implementing a larger political vision. Labour once sought to debate big issues of capital, of wealth, of distribution and of economic structure – indeed, as a Party it grew out of a recognition more than a hundred years ago that the polity of the day did not provide the framework for such a debate.  It is perhaps ironic that One Nation Labour seems to be represent a recreation 0f that political failure.

Tories are trashing their core supporters too

On the eve of the Tory Party conference, the anger among their opponents is very much – and rightly – focussed on the impact the coalition is having on the most vulnerable in society.  Unemployment, cuts in jobs and services, privatisation of the NHS, the bullying of the sick and disabled by Atos.  Single mothers are set to lose 20% of their overall income; of course the Left (an ambiguous term, I know) is bound to focus on what looks like a systematic attack on the old, the poor, the sick, women and children.  Tory populists respond by measures to allow faster driving, more bin collections, easier sacking – no Tory prejudice is left unstroked.

In the face of all this, it’s easy to overlook that the poor and vulnerable are not the only victims.  One of the most interesting outcomes is the way in which Tory policies are having a really devastating effect on some of the party’s most loyal supporters; older, hitherto affluent people, living in comfortable suburbia or in the nicer bits of the countryside, often on fixed incomes from private pensions, or from savings.  They’re people who have all the accoutrements of financial comfort, but are increasingly finding life very difficult.

Income from their savings has fallen drastically – and many of them are living off the sort of pension provision that was gambled away by speculating bankers before 2008 (there’s a trope about Gordon Brown’s raids on pension funds, but the total cost of Brown’s dividend tax is about £5bn per year. The cost of the bankers’ crash of 2008 to pension funds is likely to be around £500bn, and that’s before you consider the costs of the contributions holidays that companies regularly awarded themselves).  Many of them are people who were economically active in the Thatcher years, and heeded the calls to privatise their pension provision.  Now they’re facing huge increases in costs of living – double-digit increases in fuel costs – while their income stagnates and falls.  Ironically enough, these people are the backbone of charitable giving, the authentic heroes of the Big Society – but not for long as their income falls and they need to cut back to pay for their daily necessities, or prepare for an uncertain future of NHS cuts and private sector provision.  Some will still have children at university, or who cannot afford a home and are still living with them.

And even their environment is being threatened, as Tories eschew the obvious answer to Britain’s housing crisis – a massive social housing programme focussed on brownfield sites – to allow their friends and donors in the property business to build developments unhindered by considerations of sustainability or local impact on sensitive environments.

In other words, these stalwarts of Tory middle England are being trashed.  No, it’s not the same as the daily struggle faced by the low-paid, or those dependent on benefits as a result of disability, or single mothers. After all, we’re talking about people who own their homes outright and still enjoy a quality of life that is beyond the dreams of the poorest in society.  But the fact that people in their later years are having to count the pennies for the first time does not make their worries any less real.  It’s a telling comment on contemporary Conservatism that the Tory party no longer speaks for these people – in Cameron’s Britain, it’s the financiers and bankers who trashed the economy in 2008 who matter.  It emphasises that for all its attempts at populism, the Tory Party really only speaks for a tiny, financially-empowered minority.

Will these scions of middle England rise up against the party that has deserted them? It remains to be seen.

Combining income tax and National Insurance – simplification or ideology?

There is much speculation that in his Budget tomorrow, George Osborne will announce plans to merge income tax and National Insurance Contributions (NIC).  I have some real concerns about this.  On the one hand, to the individual in employment, it would appear that income tax and NIC could easily be merged into a single tax, making the process more transparent and possibly reducing the bureaucracy needed for collection.  But there seem to me to be problems both of principle and in practice, and I wonder whether this is about ideology, not efficiency.

As a matter of principle, income tax and NIC are raised, in theory at least, for two different purposes.  One is a general tax; the other is a contribution towards the cost of benefits, including unemployment and sickness benefit and the old age pension.  Of course, both of them go into the consolidated fund – as do excise duties like VAT and duties on petrol and alcohol.

But the point about NI is largely sympbolic.  It’s about entitlement and the right to benefits.  It allows people drawing benefits to do so in the knowledge that benefits are a right that they have earned, not a charity.  This is important when the principle of universal benefits and social provision is under unprecedented attack  – the Big Society seems to me to be an attempt to return collective social action to the voluntary sector, replacing rights with charity doled out by local committees of moral guardians.  The loss of the link to a national insurance payment seems to me to be a step away from the idea of universal provision .

Moreover, this seems to me to be a move towards the right’s dream of a single flat tax.  In many ways NIC is a highly progressive tax – there is a real risk that a combined tax could shift the burden from high to low earners, if not managed properly.

There are technical issues too.  The self-employed currently pay a low level of NI reflecting the fact that their benefits are lower – how would that be reflected in a single tax?  Many pensioners pay tax but no NI – merging the two could be a huge tax whammy for them, without special exceptions that would rather destroy the advantages of a single tax.  Currently NI contributions are paid by employers as well as employees – will those contributions be turned into a payroll tax – after all Osborne’s rhetoric in opposition about “taxes on jobs”? Or will the burden of the employer contributions be passed on to employees?  The problem with a single tax is that to make it fair – indeed to avoid it becoming a way of shifting the tax burden on to indivuduals and away from the corporate sector – it needs a set of exemptions and conditions which will mean no significant simplification.

I have a real fear that Osborne could use such a change for ideological ends – to shift the burden of taxes still further from the rich to middle-income and poor, and from business to individuals.  Many people now are unclear about the structure of the taxes they pay – this could just be the ultimate stealth tax.

A party dying on its feet

Nearly thirty years ago, a politically-engaged student and president-elect of the Oxford University Liberals, I sat in a dingy hall in Llandudno with several hundred of my fellow party members and heard my then leader, David Steel, tell us to go back to our constituencies and prepare for government.  It was heady, inspiring – and unrealistic.  Nevertheless there was pride and passion in that party – admittedly some of the pride related to passing a pro-CND motion, moved by one Cllr Paddy Ashdown, on the conference floor earlier in the week – and radicalism.  Our mission on the radical wing of the party was to change the world, not to preserve its inequalities and power structures.

Over the ensuing thirty years, the Liberal Party and I went our separate ways – the Party moving to the Right  into merger with the SDP and eventually into government in alliance with the Tories, while I spent much of the next thirty years in Whitehall as a politically neutral Enemy of Enterprise, watching, thinking, reading and moving to the Left as my knowledge and experience deepened, and now in retirement engaging with the debate.

Following the Liberal Democrat conference this week, then, has produced mixed emotions.  Overwhelmingly, there is a sense of despatches from the front line of the shock doctrine.  They don’t quite know what’s hit them – from the intemperate reaction to the protests outside the conference to the growing realisation of their deep unpopularity.  Like Macbeth faced with Banquo’s Ghost demanding to know “which of you have done this”, there is a deep denial of the reality of what their party has done.

For anyone with a knowledge of history it was astonishing to hear Clegg referring in his closing speech to Beveridge and Keynes. Seventy years ago, William Beveridge was starting work on the most important document in British social history.  His report paved the way for the creation of the welfare state and identified five Giant Evils in society – squalor, ignorance, want, idelness and disease.  Keynes had warned of the futility of tackling economic crisis by cutting public expenditure.  Clegg claims that “ours is not a government of cuts”. And yet, in the face of all the evidence, from Ireland and elsewhere, Clegg is part of a government that is slashing and burning the public sector, while promoting the cruel lie that you can take £80bn out of the economy in expenditure and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.  He sounds like – is – one of the boneheaded fiscal conservatives that Keynes so excoriated in the 1930s.  It is not difficult to see him as one of the wing-collared Tories that had done well out of the First World War, arguing for cuts in the face of the depression and rationalising it by claiming that unemployment is down to the fecklessness of the poor.  Keynes and Beveridge knew those people, and their Liberal tradition opposed everything they stood for.

And what sort of failure of awareness does it take for a man who styles himself as a radical not to realise that, thanks to his Government, Beveridge’s five Giant Evils are more prevalent than they have been for a generation?  Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness and Disease.  The assault on welfare, the effective privatisation of the NHS, and perhaps above all – because this lies at the heart of Beveridge – a belief that benefits for the most vulnerable are not a matter of right but are charity, the hand-me-downs of a Big Society of the wealthy and privileged.  It takes a special kind of self-deception for the Deputy Prime Minister of this coalition government to portray himself as the heir of Beveridge.

So what of Liberal Democrat activists?

No doubt activists like to laugh at their predecessors.  I’m sure that there is no lack of smooth young folk in PR and marketing – people to whom the free market has been good – sitting in the bars at Liberal Democrat gatherings, patronising their bearded and sandaled predecessors.  But we stuck to the task and fought for what we believed in.  Do you?  Is it really more honourable or more adult to be the Tories’ useful idots? You may not have liked the protesters outside your conference, or for that matter the students who marched in London last autumn, but at least they had got off their knees. Have you?

I have no doubt that many of those in the hall in Sheffield were decent, progressive people.  But the record makes it clear: a government in which Nick Clegg is comfortable is one that no decent progressive could support.  And I’d say to those delegates – stop whining. You may not like what this Government is doing, but you have made it possible.  By going into formal coalition with the Tories, you’ve made it possible for them to pursue their shock doctrine.  Privatising the NHS and the Universities? Cleansing the poor from the inner cities? Do you really believe any of this would have happened had your party been deciding its position in the Commons on a vote-by-vote basis, rather than going into full coalition with the Tories?

And do you really think that Clegg, let alone the Tories, will take any notice of your vote on the NHS?  Yes, Lansley’s been talking the language of compromise, but you know that the die has already been caset.  The private sector providers are already looking for the opportunity to profit from the GP commissioners, just as the private sector has leached public provision through privatisation and PFI for the last two decades.  The fact is, Clegg’s loyalty – and Laws’ and Alexander’s loyalty – is not to you.  It’s to the Tories who control the coalition, and the ideology that drives them.  The electorate knows that, and it’s why you’re coming sixth in by-elections.

And if you believe in tackling Beveridge’s Five Giants, every Liberal Democrat leaflet you deliver, every sub you collect, is an expression of moral delinquency.  It’s over.  Your party is no more than the fading figleaf on a decaying Victorian statue – if you really believe in anything better, tear up your membership card and get out now with your integrity reasonably intact and before the denial poisions your soul.

Big Society Blues

The problem for David Cameron is not that the the Big Society is controversial.  Cameron’s bigger problem is that it has become a joke.  It’s taken its place in the long list of initiatives in which British politicians have tried to reconnect with their electorate, and have merely ended up as objects of ridicule.  Remember the Citizen’s Charter?  Or John Major’s Back to Basics campaign, where the appeal to return to traditional values rang out to the accompaniment of Tory Ministers pulling up their trousers and vowing to spend more time with their publicly-forgiving spouses?  Or Eric Pickles declaring war on bossy bollards? Or even the epic idiocy that was the Cones Hotline, now only remembered – if at all – for inspiring one of Steve Bell’s most memorable cartoons?

So why are Britain’s politicians so bad at connecting with their electors?  Why are these initiatives so risible?

It’s partly because the political class is increasingly remote from the population as a whole.  Drawn from an increasingly narrow social, educational and economic elite and made up of people who have never had any occupation other than politics, these are solipsistic initiatives drawn up by people who lack direct experience of the day-to-day life of their electors, and who can only communicate through focus groups and opinion surveys.  The messiness, vicissitudes and sheer humour of daily life never penetrate into the consciousness of the career wonk; the daily routines of work, health, school, childhood and commuting are alien to them.

In the case of the Big Society, there is of course the problem that most of the public think it’s about covering up cuts – with plenty of justification.  It’s a shallow Con-trick, a wheeze for replacing paid professionals with volunteers, and an expression of anti-State ideology.  Moreover, it reeks of the patronising ethos of the public school, in which people who are strong on chapel and team spirit assume the mantle of natural moral leadership.  It’s about all pulling together to create an illusion of unity in a society deeply divided by wealth and class, with cuts in the services that provide the decencies of life for millions widening that division every day.

But it also harks back to a particular British stereotype – that of the wealthy do-gooder, often female with plenty of time on her hands, and a passion for organising others.  It’s the world of Lynda Snell, Hyacinth Bucket and Margo Leadbetter, people who know what’s good for other people better than they do themselves.  Or, from a more left-wing perspective, the assorted Fabians, vegetarians and back-to-nature enthusiasts that Orwell mocks in Coming Up for Air. Such people are stock comic characters, and that this should be so tells us a lot about why people cannot take the Big Society remotely seriously.

But ultimately the thing that distinguishes them is the belief that they have the right to determine who is deserving and who is not.  There is of course a huge tradition of voluntarism that has more popular roots – co-operatives, mutual societies, trade unions, non-conformist religion, the Salvation Army.  But in all of these cases there is a belief in rights and universalism – the question of who might be “deserving” does not arise, and this ethos underpins the concept of universal benefits and state provision to which Cameron is so hostile.  And in all these cases, democratic structures are at the heart of the way they operate.

Cameron seems to think that the Big Society is about new ways in which the political system and electors can connect.  But in its way it’s just another demonstration of how the political class doesn’t get it.