This is a lofty idea, or even an ideal. It has proved very difficult to articulate and may have lost as many votes as it gained at the last general election. Lyndon Johnson had a Great Society in the U.S., which he hoped would define his Presidency. In fact it foundered on Viet Nam. Margaret Thatcher considered there was no such thing as society. In the end these nostrums define the philosophy of the leaders who proclaim them, but they rarely bring about the change they are supposed to define. Whatever is achieved under the umbrella of the Big Society, will be rememberd as a product of the cuts.
I have no doubt that it would have been better to keep this on the back burner for now. No doubt David Cameron wanted a counter-balance to the rigours of cutting the deficit. He had learned from Tony Blair that reforms must be tackled at once and not left until later. But Tony Blair had a landslide and the economy was doing rather well. Reform undertaken at the same time as cuts, unless obviously intended as an economy, can become a muddle and reflect badly upon a government which begins to look accident prone. Thus education looks unstable, there is anxiety about healthcare and there are real fears about public services, especially as they affect the vulnerable.
It is easy to understand Cameron’s zeal to be seen as a great reforming Prime Minister. There have been only two since World War II, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. The rest have been tinkerers whose reforms meant more to the political class than to the people they served. It is also worth reflecting upon something else. Margaret Thatcher reormed only the tax system and the strike laws in her first term. The big stuff like privatisation and confronting the unions came in the second and third. First she set the economy on a clear path to recovery. People could see where she was headed and backed her again and again.
Clement Attlee pushed through his reforms at the same time as dealing with a titanic financial mess on a similar scale to our current difficulties, leading to post war austerity worse, in the end, than in Germany. Although history remembers Attlee’s Labour Government with affection, at the time it was regarded as serially incompetent and was out of office within six years, where Labour stayed for a further thirteen. This was because reform and austerity do not work well together and voters turn against the whole idea.
The majority of voters in Britain do not want reform and regard it with suspicion. They just want the country to be efficiently run and the economy to work. Ministers have declared the country is out of the danger zone. Conversly the government may have walked into it. Care is now needed to do only things that need doing and to do them well.