Member News
3rd June 2011
The government's Big Society message is clear: 'we expect more of you, but you can expect less from us', writes Andy Thornton, chief executive of the Citizenship Foundation.
In 2009 and 2010 there seemed to be no escape: my inbox swelled with events 'exploring' what exactly Big Society meant in ideology and practice. Most conversations were studded with a mix of suspicion and hope: could it be that the Conservatives really 'got' civil society and how it was integral to developing citizens?
A year, and a few initiatives later, the answer feels closer to 'no'. And all of the debates, discussions and hand-wringing that took place between charities hoping for a new lease of life look a touch naïve in hindsight. Most of us didn't realise that the Big Society was a vehicle for another agenda altogether; not strengthening civil society, but replacing citizen activism with neighbourliness.
On this agenda, the government is delivering. We are an organisation that has always been concerned with engaging people in politics to find collective and organised solutions to the inescapable problems of living together. But the conviction in the prime minister's rhetoric shifts more and more responsibility from government on to individual citizens at the local level, as if we are human and citizens when we act locally, but collectively we are an electorate in an economy. The message is clear: 'we expect more of you, but you can expect less from us'. This is probably a winning formula: the government that promises less is more likely to deliver on its promises and be re-elected.
And less is what we have got. The Citizenship Foundation is one of the many organisations to lose government funding. That's obviously a blow, but it is worth highlighting that the civil society organisations that promoted equality of opportunity and access to public life all lost their strategic partner status at the Cabinet Office, while many of those organisations promoting the localism agenda retained theirs. There is a strategy behind these decisions, and it may incrementally erode our belief that citizens are national problem-solvers, as well as reinforce the notion that politics should be left to the professionals.
Another move – devaluing citizenship education in England's National Curriculum – also serves to undermine dissenting citizens' voices. When questioned about citizenship education's future in Parliament last week, schools minister Nick Gibb replied: "The government is fully committed to empowering young people to become active citizens", and illustrated this by reference to the National Citizens' Service (NCS) programme launched last year.
This year every student in key stages three and four in English secondary schools has a right to citizenship education. But only 11,000 of those 700,000 have access to the NCS. Though the NCS aims to scale up year on year, only 10 per cent of 16 year-olds in England will be involved in three years' time. Replacing citizenship education with the NCS would not show commitment from the government to empowering the next generation; indeed, it would show the direct opposite.
Have your say...
Please enter your comments below.