In the summer of 2007, as Gordon Brown’s political stock soared briefly, David Cameron was much taken by Seth Godin’s theory of “the Dip”. Godin, an American marketing shaman, described “the Dip” as “the long stretch between starting and mastery” in every field, and warned that “successful people don’t just ride out the Dip. They don’t just buckle down and survive it. No, they lean into the Dip. They push harder, changing the rules as they go”.
Cameron did just that, and survived his most bruising year in Opposition. Now, four years on, safely installed in Number 10, but at the helm of a government still in its infancy, pursuing a ferocious deficit reduction strategy as well as an ever-broadening range of public service and welfare reforms, the Prime Minister is once more experiencing the Dip. The mystery is why anyone is surprised that this should be so, or – in the case of some ministers – panicking.
To be fair, fate has conspired in the past fortnight to encourage a bout of the jitters. The unleashing of Ed Balls as shadow chancellor would have upped the ante at any time, but, unhappily for the Government, coincided with the news that the economy shrank by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter of 2010 – the talk last week of all those snow-booted sneerers at their annual economics jamboree in Davos. Back in Westminster, the word “double-dip” can be heard more frequently than in an ice cream parlour.
The departure of Andy Coulson has also prompted a bout of Tory navel-gazing: with the Messenger gone, what should the Message be? Anxiety that the deficit reduction plan is too harsh merges blurrily with fretful muttering that the Government is identified in the public eye with spending cuts – and little else.
Added to the worry-fest is the familiar charge that the “Big Society” means nothing to the voters, and is too numinous a concept ever to gain electoral traction. “The 'Big Society’ story is being drowned out by the reports of cuts, cuts, cuts,” concedes one Cabinet source. “The charities are too busy complaining about losing Government funding. It’s a headache.”
The two anxieties are connected because ministers’ response must be the same. Both strategies – fiscal and social – sit uncomfortably in a political, consumer and media culture that is pathologically impatient, expects instant gratification, and rewards speed above all else. The implicit question that underpins most critique of this Government is essentially: “Christ almighty, haven’t you fixed that yet?” To which ministers must have the guts to answer: “No, not yet.” It is little more than three months since George Osborne’s spending review set out the fiscal recovery plan. It is less than two months until he spells out his growth plans in the Budget on March 23. The doubters at Davos should recall that Rome was not built in a day (nor for that matter was Davos).
And while the painful work of financial reconstruction is going on, ministers must continue to blame Labour for the original damage, even if broadcasters interviewing them roll their eyes and groan when they do so. The narrative for some time to come – years, rather than months – must be one of national crisis and crisis aversion. The electorate cannot be reminded too often that the two Eds, Miliband and Balls, were the team that brought Britain to the economic precipice – the Brownite spenders who would not heed any warning, least of all Tony Blair’s, that it was time to turn off the cash-taps. Labour’s own focus groups show that the party has lost its hard-won reputation for economic competence. It will not return to office until it repairs that damage. It follows that the Coalition must miss no opportunity to prevent it from doing so. Cameron, Clegg and Osborne can withstand unpopularity over the cuts more or less indefinitely, as long as Labour is perceived to be the party of economic incontinence.
As for the “Big Society”: the sheer scale of the idea is both its greatest asset and its greatest liability. Not surprisingly, given the fiscal context, it is confused with shrinkage of the state, a mere relabelling of the ambitions of the Hayekian and Friedmanite Right. Again, it cannot be said too often that the spending cuts are driven not by ideology, but by an insistence upon sound finances – the consequence of which is that the state is being brought back to a scale that is affordable. Saying this is state shrinkage is like saying that a man who buys a Bentley he can’t afford, and is forced to return, is being denied the right to drive a car – or “automotively challenged”, as it would probably be described nowadays.
The cuts are easily grasped in their totality as an unpleasant process that will affect almost everyone: the political question is who gets the blame – in the ballot box in 2015, rather than in opinion polls now. In contrast, the idea of the “Big Society” may never command public attention or applause as an integrated strategy, but still be a success in its practical consequences: in what President Bush Sr called the “thousand points of light”.
The “Big Society” will work if people perceive a new tier of bodies gradually coming into being between the individual citizen and the bureaucracy of town hall or Whitehall. Consciousness of the change could be ignited in a great many ways: by a volunteer-run community centre for the elderly; a social enterprise that helps the deprived (like the remarkable work done for the homeless by the Quintessentially concierge service at the House of St Barnabas in Soho); a drug rehabilitation facility set up by a faith group; after-school reading classes for children, managed by parents; and so on. According to one Cabinet minister engaged in the strategy: “This battle will never be won on Newsnight or Today because those media think in terms of national categories. It will be won patchily, gradually, and the force for change will be local experience, not ministerial speeches.”
This is the work of years, not months. The post-war state achieved great things, notably the NHS. But it also destroyed a culture of mutuality, small charitable activity, neighbourhood social enterprise. The “bare ruin’d choirs” of our era are the social wastelands that stand untenanted between family and government. Cameron’s objective is not, specifically, to shrink the State, but to occupy that terrain; to nurture a society that will grow and, in some cases, replace the State – not to save money (although that will usually be the case) but because locally inspired social enterprises will almost always do the job better than centrally run branches of the government.
A difficult idea to communicate and to enact? Just a bit. And how much more so when you are trying to restore the nation’s economic credibility with painful spending restraint. Before the election, senior Cameroon all but boasted that the task ahead would be nightmarishly hard, that the setbacks would be grievous, that everyone would hate them after six months. Well, be careful what you wish for. Time to lean into that Dip, Dave.
