There was a time when the Tory view of charity was of blue-rinsed ladies rattling collecting tins for ‘nice’ causes, charitable trusts donating to the deserving poor, funded by interest from massive bequests and the local squire looking after his estate. The patriarchal view was of the rich taking responsibility for those on whose backs their wealth had been earned. As late as the 1970s I remember an agricultural worker telling me that he would have liked to vote Labour “but I live in a tied cottage.”
The rise of the grammar school, industrial Tory changed all that. “There is no such thing as society,” said Mrs T, ‘small government’ became the mantra and the recent Tory charm offensive on the voluntary sector follows that same pattern.
Politics goes in cycles. Only recently did we hear Dominic Grieve’s analysis of Victorian values: “I don’t want to suggest that this was an ideal society, but it was one where a sense of moral values and of the responsibility people owed to each other did seem to be pervasive.”
In those Victorian values we find the Tories’ real view of that third sector which they have wooed so hard. There were no local authorities back then, housing for the deserving poor was provided by the church with workhouses for the less deserving. There was no encouragement for co-operative effort and what public services there were came from rich benefactors with a conscience.
It is too easy to dismiss ‘Breakdown Britain’ as a gimmick to encourage marriage. I was more interested in volume 6: the Future of the Third Sector under a Tory Government.
Admittedly, there is some good stuff in it – the idea of third select committee, for example. But he role of the sector, they say, should be primarily to address poverty. Do they want volunteers to take over this responsibility from government? The Tories will tackle poverty not by spending more but by spending less; directing a greater proportion of public spending through the voluntary sector and reducing the targets and discipline that any sensible service commissioning regime needs.
And yet, the report oozes disdain for larger charities. They threaten to make them better (meaning smaller) by darkly hinting that the £35bn of assets held by major charities should be dispersed. But how could a small organisation deliver, for example, the £95M digital hearing aids programme which Royal National Institute for the Deaf did for the Department of Health?
The document’s executive summary states that “Government should therefore give charities greater opportunities to deliver services.” Yet we already know that there will be less money to do that under the Tories. This aspiration therefore can only mean that the statutory services should be reduced in order to facilitate this take-over.
The same document says “Service users and local people should be empowered with a direct say in which charities receive public money.” This is dangerous stuff. What are the consequences of this for charities working in HIV/AIDS or with asylum seekers? What does empowerment mean in Tory-speak?
But it is in tackling their old adversary, the National Lottery, that the Tories really come unstuck. They call for “more effective use of national lottery funds” and for a bigger proportion of such funding to go to smaller charities. At the last election, Tory policy was for sports, heritage, arts and the third sector to each receive a quarter of National Lottery funding. Current spending on charities and ‘good causes’ is 35%. In other words, the Tories plan to reduce the level of Lottery funding to the voluntary sector by £65m.
So now we know what Ian Duncan Smith, the author of ‘Breakdown Britain’, meant when, at the 2002 Tory Conference, he said:
“During the next three years we hope to take control of more local authorities, presenting a golden opportunity to identify and promote best practice with the voluntary sector.”
In the same speech he clearly saw the role of the voluntary sector as replacing that of the state:
“One of [my] key themes will be the importance of supporting people – not politicians – to provide sustainable help for vulnerable people. I do not believe that the Government’s reliance on direct state intervention and means-tested benefits is sustainable. It undermines the networks of family and community that are best placed to support people throughout their lives.”
Even the very name, ‘Breakdown Britain’, demeans so much of what is good about our society, our people and the fabric of the communities which holds us together.
We know that we achieve more by working together than we could ever achieve apart. We know that this applies both to voluntary action and to collaborative action which puts the mechanism of the state at the disposal of ordinary people. The Tories’ ‘social justice’ report is nothing of the kind. It is a Trojan horse, designed to undermine the state and keep power and influence in the hands of the few at the cost of the disorganised many.