Is there such a thing as the Big Society?

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher gave an interview which for many summed up the 'greed is good,' every-man-for-himself culture of the era over which she presided.

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families," she said in an interview with Woman's Own magazine in October 1987.

Although she had merely been talking about the need for people to stand on their own two feet rather than relying on the state for handouts, the comment swiftly gained a life of its own.

And while it initially captured the late-80s zeitgeist, in time it came to be seen as part and parcel of the "nasty party" image that the Tories fought to shake off during their wilderness years.

At one level, the 'Big Society' was to David Cameron what 'New Labour' was to Tony Blair – a marketing slogan whose main purpose was to detoxify a brand that had become tarnished.

Its aim was to demonstrate that not only did the Tories now believe in society after all, they actually had a vision for the kind of society they wanted to create.

But whereas New Labour had a genuine philosophical basis - the embracing of the Thatcherite economic consensus and the abandonment of 'tax-and-spend' - the Big Society has always been much harder to pin down.

Tory candidates reported it had caused bemusement on the doorsteps during last year's election campaign, a state of affairs not helped by the fact that many of the candidates were similarly bemused themselves.

In government, the more urgent question has become less about what the Big Society is, and more about whether it is compatible with the kind of policies the Coalition is pursuing.

Liverpool City Council thinks not. It pulled out of a Big Society pilot project this week on the grounds that it is not deliverable in the context of £91m budget cuts and 1,500 job losses.

Although the Labour-run authority was swiftly accused of gesture politics, it is self-evident that it is hard to sustain local community activities and initiatives if the funding that underpins them disappears.

The closure of large numbers of Citizens' Advice Bureaux as a result of town hall cutbacks is surely a case in point here.

The wider problem with the 'Big Society, though, is not so much whether it is compatible with reductions in public expenditure as to whether it is compatible with free market economics at all.

Will our forests, for instance, end up in the hands of cuddly 'Big Society-ish' institutions like the Woodland Trust or other local community groups, or will they all simply be sold to the highest bidder?

Will local people really be able to club together to buy and run their failing village pub when the brewery is being offered ten times as much by a developer who wants to knock it down and build ten flats on the site?

It is for these sorts of reasons why people would not necessarily regard the Big Society and the Tory Party as the most natural of bedfellows.

Mr Cameron may be a skilled PR man, but to regard the Big Society as no more than a piece of spin is probably to do him a disservice.

He passionately believes in it, even if he sometimes struggles to articulate it in a way that the voters can relate to, and would probably like his government to be remembered for it above all else.

The great historical irony about the Big Society is that at the time Margaret Thatcher came out with her infamous quote, there was actually much more of one than exists today.

It will take much more than words if Mr Cameron is somehow to recreate it.

Wrong kind of snow - or wrong kind of government?

IN last week's column, I wrote that the coalition government's key political success since taking office was to have pinned the blame for the savage spending cuts it is implementing on Labour.

It is no small matter. On the question of who takes the rap for the country's current economic plight will hang much of the politics of the next five years.

If the government can hold the line all the way to the next election, it is inconceivable that the electorate would let Labour back in after just one term in opposition to atone for its economic sins.

But this, in turn, depends utterly on how the economy actually performs – and whether Chancellor George Osborne is proved right in his strategy of putting deficit reduction before economic growth.

Up until now, the country has by and large been prepared to give Mr Osborne the benefit of the doubt on this point.

Whenever Labour politicians – notably Ed Balls –have tried to argue the opposing point of view, they have been swiftly condemned as "deficit deniers."

But this week came the first sign of a chink in the Coalition's economic armour – a 0.5pc fall in GDP during the final quarter of 2010, following two preceding quarters in which the economy grew.

Could it be that Mr Balls was right after all, and that far from providing a springboard for recovery, the Coalition's deficit reduction strategy is actually strangling it?

Timing is everything in politics and in one respect, the GDP figures could not have come at a better time for Mr Balls, newly-installed as Shadow Chancellor following Alan Johnson's surprise resignation last week.

He certainly made the most of the opportunity, tearing into Mr Osborne with a self-assuredness that made the Chancellor look like the new kid on the block.

"My message to George Osborne is – get a Plan B, get a policy for jobs and growth and do it quick," he said, winning the war of the soundbites with some ease.

Mr Osborne's cause was not helped by the fact that he tried to blame the fall in output on the weather, which, as one union leader put it, sounded "a bit like a rail boss blaming delays on leaves on the line."

Whether this week's exchanges will turn out to be of lasting significance will of course depend on where the economy goes from here.

The risk factors for the government are obvious. This month’s VAT rise seems hardly likely to encourage a resumption in the growth trend, while there remains the risk of another cold snap.

Some observers have argued that having clamped down on spending in last year’s comprehensive spending review, Mr Osborne would use his March Budget to shift to a more pro-growth strategy.

Had this week's figures turned out positive, he could have done that from a position of strength - but to do so now would look more like a panic-induced U-turn.

Either way, if the next set of figures in April show the growth trend resuming, Mr Osborne will be off the hook and Mr Balls and Labour will be back at square one.

But if on the other hand they show another fall, then the UK will officially be back in recession and the dreaded "double-dip" will have become a reality.

Not only would that give Mr Balls the whip-hand in the economic debate, it would start to shatter the current consensus that the cuts are (a) necessary, and (b) Labour’s fault.

And the voters might then start to conclude that not only did we have the wrong kind of snow last month, but that we also have the wrong kind of government.

The tough task facing Brown's children

As Sir John Chilcott's Inquiry into the war in Iraq continued to chip away at Tony Blair's historical reputation this week, another of the former Prime Minister's closest allies took his leave of frontline politics.

Amid difficulties in his private life that will surely elicit widespread sympathy, Alan Johnson became the latest in a long line of key players from the Blair Years to depart the political stage.

Looked at in terms of Labour kremlinology, the erstwhile Shadow Chancellor's surprise resignation, and his replacement by Ed Balls, means the Brownite takeover of the party is now all but complete.

Mr Balls, Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and Douglas Alexander were all denied Cabinet promotion by Mr Blair – but they now occupy the four most senior roles on the Labour frontbench.

But in this lies the nub of Labour's problem as it seeks to come to terms with opposition and put itself back into credible contention for government.

For as time goes on, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the general election result last May was not just a repudiation of Gordon Brown personally, but of much of what he stood for politically.

There are increasing signs that, like 1979, 2010 could come to be seen as a watershed election, a moment in history which saw a paradigm shift away from the top-down, statist brand of politics with which Mr Brown was associated.

That is certainly the way the Coalition would like us to see it, which is why the proposed reforms to the National Health Service announced this week are so central to its overall political strategy.

The reforms are certainly not without risk for Prime Minister David Cameron. With the possible exception of Coronation Street, the NHS remains Britain's best-loved institution and politicians tinker with it at their peril.

Not the least of Mr Cameron's difficulties, as Alastair Campbell pointed out on Question Time on Thursday night, is that he has no electoral mandate for it.

But the voters tend to be rather less worried about private vs public arguments in public service provision than politicians - and political commentators for that matter – tend to be.

And as long as the service improves in time for the next election – as it may well do once the dust has settled – it could even turn into a vote-winner.

The risk for Labour, on this and other issues, is that it finds itself stranded on the wrong side of a political tide – much as it did in the early 1980s as Margaret Thatcher's free-market revolution forged ahead.

Of all the blows that the Coalition has landed on Mr Miliband since he became Labour leader, none was more telling than Mr Cameron's "I'd rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown."

In truth, Ed Miliband was really only ever an adopted son. The true son of Gordon, the one who was by his side in all his most important decisions, was Mr Balls.

Sure, the combative new Shadow Chancellor will give as good as he gets, but it is already clear that the Coalition will exploit his closeness to the former Prime Minister to the limit.

On the surface, Balls for Johnson looks like a good exchange for Labour – a brilliant economist and pugnacious operator for a Mr Nice Guy who seemed out of his depth in the Treasury brief.

But the whole reason Mr Johnson was appointed to the role in the first place was precisely because he had no economic baggage.

The Coalition's key success since the election has been to pin the blame for the cuts on Labour's mismanagement of the economy and to fix this in the public's mind.

Mr Balls, of all people, is going to have his work cut out to reverse that perception.