WE DON’T do small any more. We just do big. Small is fiddly and hard to control. Big is beautiful and computable. That is why Tony Blair’s legacy crisis is seeing yet another wave of “closures”, this time of 29 accident and emergency departments, 81 hospitals, 3,000 post offices, and more police stations after the 630 closed over the past decade. He also wants bigger (and fewer) local councils, bigger police districts and bigger health trusts, plus more Tescos and therefore fewer high streets. To Blair and his Cabinet, everything about Britain seems too small. New Labour hates Schumacher. Small is ugly. As the body politic grows larger, the brain politic can handle less.
Why can’t David Cameron’s Tories see the opportunity in this? Their increasingly desperate search for policy is like The Hunting of the Snark. The bowsprit is mixed with the rudder while the Bellman “had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due east, /That the ship would not travel due west”. On Monday Cameron grasped frantically at that old Tory standby, the family. “I believe in the family,” he said like a talking clock. Asked on the radio to define it, he said it was anything you liked. As the sailors discovered, “the Snark was a Boojum”.
To the Tories the evils of society lie in the failure of the family, just as for the left they lie in its poverty. Whether wretched families cause poverty or poverty causes wretched families is an empty topic. As the novelist said, each family is unhappy in its own way. Money is not always the cause of trouble, but want of it usually is. Hence the welfare state, and hence the struggle of both parties to give money without destroying the “incentive to work”. That road led to family income supplement and/or tax credits, both of fiendish complexity, but nobody disagrees over the objective.
No modern quotation has been so misinterpreted as Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society: There are individual men and women and there are families.” Her aversion to society was one of nomenclature. She had no objection to society’s chief agent, her government. In 1987 she declared that the job of government was “to serve all the people all the time”. It must “seek to set standards by which people lead their lives...a society which knows what is expected of it has a sure basis for progress.” The remark could hardly have been more dirigiste. To Thatcher, as to Blair, government was the agent of perpetual change. It was Lenin’s light burning in the Kremlin turret, never sleeping, ever planning, ever driving forward, always frustrated by the crooked timber of mankind.
Thatcher saw only a nationwide wasteland of clutter between her office and “individual men and women”. So does Blair, so does Cameron. This was illustrated in the debate this week over Iain Duncan Smith’s well-meaning but ludicrously inflated family policy report. While laws and taxes certainly impinge on families, I do not believe they encourage people to behave well or badly to each other. That has never stopped ministers from meddling in family life. They lay down the law variously on dieting, cooking, homework, and the hours to be spent reading to children, watching television, drinking and exercising. They stop playing nanny only to start playing God.
What is damaging is that this meddling conceals the real harm being done not to families as such but to those who might help them. Between a prime minister’s desk and 60 million atomized citizens is not irrelevant clutter but tens of thousands of humans whose role, formal or informal, is to assist those in trouble. They are what Robert Putnam, Jane Jacobs and others identify as the outward ripple of acquaintanceship, first as neighbors and friends, then as local churches, networks and clubs, and then as the more formal institutions of social support, doctors, police officers, youth leaders, teachers and local elected leaders. Help is the more effective where it is the more intimate, from people who know personally those in need.
In French, German or Italian communities, these people form a collective “antisocial behavior order”. Local mayors are known by name to 80 percent of citizens in these countries and are, with priests, doctors and teachers, the first aid for families in trouble. (In Britain a police officer can hardly address a youth without filling in a form for John Reid.) Polly Toynbee remarked that Denmark had the same number of single families as Britain yet no child poverty. I would suggest that this has little to do with money. Danish communes distribute social benefits locally, through people who know those who most need help. On many poorer British estates the sweeping away of local services into bigger, distant units has been so complete that the only informal leadership left is from the priest. While the welfare state has retreated to its middle-class ghetto, the poor are left with the medieval communalism of the church.
To central government there is no cost in closing a cottage hospital, a weekend surgery, a neighborhood police station, a branch library or a primary school, only an efficiency gain — though why fewer police stations and hospitals should cost twice as much as before remains a mystery. Patricia Hewitt believes that her national computer will compensate for the loss of weekend surgeries. Alan Johnson believes that a distant chief executive compensates for the lost authority of a single headteacher. John Hutton believes that the preening self-righteousness of his Health and Safety Executive is worth a thousand closed youth centers, scout troops, riding stables and activity centers. Sapping the springs of local leadership and responsibility removes the first line of support to failing families. Politics declares that any resulting rise in crime can be attributed to a collapse in family values and met with more Asbos.
Nothing better illustrates this erosion of De Tocqueville’s intermediate institutions than the current, desperate campaign to save small post offices. It is hard to imagine a more insubstantial social boon than a queue in a state shop. In France there would be a mairie, a market, a surgery and a church. Civic Britain has been reduced to a sub-postmaster and a line of old people, waiting.
I should have thought this narrative of what ails Britain was a gift to the Tories. Yet, like Blair, they are Thatcher’s children, seeing only a centralized “society” and lost, vulnerable individuals, with nothing in between.
