Theresa May is apparently not someone who acts in haste. It
has taken quite a few months for her to articulate her vision for the future of
the country. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/07/determined-build-shared-society-everyone/
There is a danger of a jaded response – we have seen it all
before, “No such thing as society”, the Big Society, and now the Shared Society,
but this would be a mistake. We are only seeing a glimpse of what she has in
mind, but it is something that could prove quite a challenge to people on
different ends of the political spectrum.
For conservatives the big question is always how much should
government do. The hard right want minimal government, some want a government
that just gives a safety net for the very poor and needy, Theresa May seems to
be willing to antagonise the hard right by insisting that we need a government
that feels fairer to those who have limited opportunities, and that the
government should be prepared to intervene in markets that are not seen as
fair. She also acknowledges the real injustice
of health inequality, life expectancy and mental health care, as well as
housing affordability and inequalities in educational opportunity. She wants to
tackle all of this.
I think that Mrs May is trying a difficult balancing act.
She cannot ignore the fact that many of the people who led the political arguments
for Brexit did so because they wanted minimal government, but neither can she
ignore that the narrow majority who voted for Brexit were often motivated by
the sense that they and their families were not getting a fair chance in life.
She has signalled a shift from the safety net approach of
social justice to a “more wide ranging process of social reform, so that those
who feel the system is stacked against them – those just above the threshold
that typically attracts the government’s focus today yet who are by no means
rich or well off – are also given the support they need”. It of course remains
to be seen what effect this will be in practice, and it will be interesting to
see to what extent those who feel that the political process does not work for
them will be engaged in working out what form this support needs to take.
One of the reasons that David Cameron’s Big Society never
took off is that the set of people who were needed to make it work saw the Big
Society as a sticking plaster, where charities were expected to cover over the
wounds left by austerity cuts. Theresa May’s Shared Society seems a lot more
subtle than that but she still needs to find a way to reach across the political spectrum if she is to have any chance of success.
What will be interesting to see is if there is a genuine
attempt to include people who think differently, or if it is an
attempt to characterise the activities of the left as self interest. The two
uses of the word union in the article could be seen as marginalising the role
of Unions, and it is likely that Unions will treat the whole idea of a shared
society with suspicion.
It was also interesting to read the editorial in the Sunday
Telegraph It appears that they would clearly be urging the PM to tackle union power.
The PM is hoping to build a “society that doesn’t just value
our individual rights but focuses more on the responsibilities we have to one
another; a society that respects the bonds of family, community, citizenship
and strong institutions that we share as a union of people and nation; a
society with a commitment to fairness at its heart”. There will be a thousand
and one interpretations of what such fairness should look like.
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