Although the Labour party has argued that David Cameron’s ‘big society’ is no more than a cover for cuts in local services, all three political parties have supported the idea of community empowerment in recent years. In addition, many sceptical media commentators intuitively feel that communities have no great desire to take over the running of local public services, but there is very little recourse to evidence from past experience and there is no discussion of the relationship between evidence, ideology and policy.

What passes for social and economic knowledge is deeply affected by ideology and interests. In socioeconomic policymaking, what is treated as information is often no more than opinion reinforced by contagion. When ideas are united by a common ideology, they are confirmed without reference to the empirical evidence that would throw the assumptions of the dominant discourse into question.

In the search for knowledge, powerful actors, groups, bureaucracies and other institutions are able to shape the questions that are asked, ensuring that they are consistent with their worldviews and interests. In the social construction of knowledge, evidence is then selected by policymakers to ensure consistency with institutional cultures and the perspectives of their political masters. Information is filtered through a prism of culture, interests and power and radical ideas are marginalised, neutralised or co-opted in a distorted form. Powerful groups and institutions have the capacity to take up progressive concepts such as empowerment and redefine them as buzzwords which obscure the policies and structures that create inequality and powerlessness. Concepts come to mean what the powerful want them to mean, inconvenient information is ignored, and underlying ideological assumptions go unquestioned.

Historical and recent evidence supports the sceptics. Ipsos MORI surveys show that almost half of people in Britain would like to be ‘very involved’ or ‘fairly involved’ in decision-making in their local area. However, when asked in more detail about their intentions, only 5 per cent wanted active involvement, the vast majority just wanting more information or consultation. This has been interpreted by Ipsos MORI and the coalition as indicating a 1.5 million pool of potential volunteers who could help to deliver local services.

Research at a neighbourhood level paints a very different picture. Ipsos MORI’s own data in one London borough, suggests that while 26 per cent said they wanted to get involved in community action, only 2 per cent actually got involved. In research carried out by the Governance Foundation in other parts of the country, when people were asked how they would like to become involved, only a very small percentage made a firm choice from the various practical options that were presented to them.

In one city, when asked if they would like to have a bigger say in how neighbourhood services were managed, only 7 per cent said they would and almost three-quarters of these indicated that they only wanted to be consulted, not involved in management and delivery. In another city, poor areas were least likely to want to have a bigger say in how local services were run and the neighbourhood where residents were most likely to want more influence was one of the wealthiest.

Middle-class older people are most likely to become involved, which strengthens their position to obtain further advantages for their wealthy neighbourhoods. In these circumstances, empowerment does not benefit those in most need.

The evidence also shows that when people are consulted they are more likely to be happy with outcomes, but ‘empowered’ individuals who give their time to committees and boards are less likely to feel empowered. The experience of participation makes active citizens much more likely to say that they cannot influence decisions and, for these individuals, empowerment is a disempowering experience.

There is no evidence to suggest that deprived communities are interested in taking over the delivery of the services as unpaid amateurs. They may want more information and they want to be consulted about their needs, but they expect professionally trained people to satisfy these needs.

Individuals will continue to emerge to represent different localities on a variety of forums, much as they do at present. In the absence of large numbers of people wanting to become active, they are often underappreciated by officialdom and viewed with hostility by other members of their communities. Lacking local legitimacy, they can often get ground down by unpaid over-work, or they leave the neighbourhood.

Against a tide of ideology posing as knowledge, progressive concepts whose meaning has been appropriated by elite groups and institutions need to be reclaimed and relinked to other concepts such as redistribution, equality and social justice. The intellectual challenges for the left are to deconstruct the new knowledge industry of conservative thinktanks, expose the interests and agendas behind them, question the assumptions, worldviews and myths that have no basis in empirical reality, and lay bare the contradictions of dominant thinking.

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