Cameron’s Big Society As Told By Its Inventor, Phillip Blond
How can one cut state spending by 20% while at the same time improving public services? In Great Britain, where conservative prime minister David Cameron has recently announced a traumatic plan for relaunching the economy and avoiding a financial collapse like the one that happened in Greece, and it's all people are talking about. His critics accuse him of allarmism, recklessness and utopism. But he and his supporters are convinced that the winning ticket can be found in an innovative and fascinating political project called Big Society: a new form of society founded upon social entrepreneurship that surpasses the limits of capitalism and of the social state creating completely new opportunities for citizens.
The theoretician of the Big Society is Phillip Blond, 44 years old, born in Liverpool and professor of theology and political philosophy at Cambridge. Today he manages the London-based think tank ResPublica, which has become one of reference points for ideas of the new English right. It was Phillip Blond who suggested to David Cameron the road to Big Society. I interviewed him a few weeks ago in his office in London.
Professor Blond, what is Big Society?
A new form of society that seeks to resolve two great problems: the excessive concentration of power in the state and the enormous power of the market. Big Society is a society in which single individuals, brought together in associations, become the recipients of a profound political and economic decentralization, personally managing public services instead of the state. A society capable of putting the power to change things back into the hands of its citizens, distributing money to a greater number of people and entrusting those same people with the task of supervising the proper operation of public services.
Do examples of this model already exist?
Embryos of Big Society can already be found today in the autonomous management of health care in Lombardy, in the delocalization of the German economic model, in the strong civic sense of Denmark and the Scandinavian countries and in their high level of participation in local communities, but also in the strong autonomy of the federalism of the U.S. and in the participation of the Brazilian people in the planning of the state budget.
It seems like an idea of the far left. How will the powerful groups that finance the Tories react?
The new English right isn't reactionary, it seeks the conservation of society and of the relationships between people: that is to say what at the end of the day really determines their future. What I'm proposing is actually more radical than anything that the modern left has done in the last one hundred years: to entrust public infrastructures and services to citizens, so that they can use them to improve the quality of their lives. Many English conservatives have understood this and are now inclined to proceed in this direction.
Who will finance the creation of these associations?
The state especially, through a special bank called the Big Society Bank. But also private banking institutions will have incentives to participate.
And who will supervise the citizens appointed to supply these services?
They themselves will. The fixes standards that they will be held to and establishes economic incentives for who works best. But the true value of Big Society lies in the fact that if someone decides to supply a service to themselves, to their family and to their community, they will do it almost certainly better than the state does, which acts from high and far away.
How will these associations be able to compete with large industrial groups?
The European social state fights monopolies, but in fact has contributed to creating them. In Big Society the market continues to exist, but is open to a much bigger number of people.
Don't you think that entrusting the management of society to citizens may eventually threaten the very idea of the state?
The threat isn't to the state, but to a certain type of state, in which citizens have few possibilities to make a real difference in their lives. I find such a threat quite desirable.
Could the non-profit model ever take the place of an economy dominated by profit?
There's nothing wrong with profit: it's a way to reward those who work hard. That which we need to fight against is capitalism, where the value of objects prevails over the values of man.
