All main parties, sceptical of both state and market, want to embrace Edmund Burke's "little platoons". John Lloyd reports

You would not know it, but the main parties are converging on more than economic management. They are converging on what is supposed to be the main area of contention between them: their attitude to society, and its relation to the state. Although there are still real and important differences, the philosophic approach is inexorably getting closer as the parties respond to the same pressures, and seek enlightenment and guidance from the same sources (which remain, as they have for decades now, predominantly American).

Both the Labour and Conservative leaderships share a scepticism, amounting at times to a contempt, for the organisations and institutions that deliver services to citizens: local government, the National Health Service, social security offices and the criminal justice system. Both leaders, before they came into full-time politics, were members of a global elite: Tony Blair as a high-flying barrister; William Hague as a management consultant for the most global of consultancies, McKinsey. Thus they have a low tolerance of the bureaucratic, the local and the quotidian.

But, more important, their parties have lost faith in both the state and the market. Shorn of their moorings, they can only drift towards what is neither wholly one nor the other - which is society. A decade and a half after Margaret Thatcher said there was no such thing (she did not mean it: it was a misphrasing too good to drop), her heirs to the right and left are realising there is little else.

The speeches of senior politicians have begun to smile upon sectors left out, or patronised, for much of the postwar period. Edmund Burke's phrase, the "little platoons" - the 18th-century equivalent of the voluntary sector - is in vogue. Indeed, Burke himself, who searched for a synthesis of the Whig principle of freedom with the Tory principle of order, is now a 250-year-old spectral presence at the construction of a third way - Tory and Liberal, as well as new Labour.

The appearance of (yet) another think-tank, the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, illuminates this trend. The institute was founded by David Green who, for 15 years, worked for one of the 1970s path-breakers, the Institute for Economic Affairs. Two years ago, the IEA gave him enough funding to set up on his own. He says the parting was amicable; but there were probably tensions.

This is because Green is much more emphatic about rejecting Thatcherism than are his former colleagues at the IEA. He thinks that "the renewal of civil society was simply not on the agenda of the Thatcher governments of the 1980s", and that such a renewal is the most urgent issue for today's governance.

"The experience of the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the subsequent development of these societies was a lesson to us," he says. "The communists had destroyed much of civil society as a matter of policy. There were many on the right who thought that all you had to do once communism was gone was to keep the state out of things. But that left out the rule of law and the institutions of society developed by people. Conservatives were slow to see this, there and here."

Green believes that while civil society is relatively strong in Britain, it has been thinned out by both state and market and has to be revived - ironically, by a deliberate state policy. He wants the main statist institutions that provide health and education to be turned over to voluntary or charitable or "faith-based" (religious) groups. Noting that, in the US, about 80 per cent of hospitals are trusts, and that there is a growing movement, especially in poor areas, for independent "charter" schools, Green says that such a move in Britain would both increase efficiency of the services and refresh democratic habits. "In countries that have insurance-based schemes, such as France and Germany and the US, the amount spent on health is higher and people's preferences better served."

These ideas are percolating their way into practice, and into speeches. Gordon Brown, speaking to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in February, promised them tax breaks and assistance to renew themselves, and said that "individual initiative was stifled" in the process of building up the welfare state. John Reid, the Secretary of State for Scotland, spoke in May of a "new civic society" that "sees people not as inherently selfish, but as sociable and co-operative". Successive postwar governments, he said, had allowed "the state to increasingly become a replacement for communities . . . it was a wrong turn. A much larger role must be given to local communities and their institutions."

Hague, earlier this year, laid out a plan for "free" schools - schools that would receive funding directly from the government, and whose governors and heads would be "free to manage their own budgets, free to employ their own staff, free to set their teachers' pay, free to determine their own admissions policy, free to run their own school transport, free to manage their own opening hours and term times and free to set their own standards of discipline". David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, has gone further than Green would have believed possible in putting the management of schools, even education authorities, out to tender.

Yet, while both parties are straining to reduce the state's role, they are also striving to make services more efficient - which usually means more centralised. Hague's plans for schools would cut out elected local authorities entirely, and draw the line of responsibility directly from every school to Whitehall. Blair has increased central control by making the NHS accountable to him, as head of a special cabinet committee.

This division - that of the libertarian against the paternalist - runs deeply through both Labour and Conservatives. Phil Collins of the Social Market Foundation (another think-tank) says: "Theresa May, the Tory shadow education minister, was talking about free schools and how much freedom they would have. I said - as a good liberal, I am happy to hear you say this; but, as a good conservative, you cannot do it. Once schools start setting their own curriculums, then the paternalist side of the Tory party would demand that they teach that and not this. It's a dilemma they can't resolve."

Nor can Labour. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has criticised "Hampstead liberals" who object to his plans to reduce the number of criminal cases that go to jury trial, and declared that "I am not a liberal". Collins says: "I think that both parties tend not to libertarianism, but to social conservatism, and are doing so increasingly." Hague, with Ann Widdecombe as his spokesperson on home affairs, is unlikely to be tempted far down the libertarian track. Rick Nye, the former director of the Social Market Foundation and now head of strategy at Tory Central Office, points to a Hague trip to Texas to see how churches and other bodies run welfare organisations, and to approving mentions in subsequent speeches. But these thoughts have not yet gelled into a cohesive whole: the Tory party has not become a neo-Burkean force, putting all of its faith in the little platoons, with a state confining itself to equal justice and law and order.

Social conservatism - the search for a moral stability - is too beguiling for both parties. Green himself, searching for a liberal order, stresses that he wants one that is compatible with strong families, no drug-taking and leaders who are not relativist about good and evil. If the trend is towards continued privatisation, it is balanced by a wary sense that society might not, if given the powers, do a good job with them, and that the man in Whitehall would still, in the end, know best. Indeed, Green's version of civil society harks back to a vanished world of decent artisans combining in friendly societies to better their lot - the example he gives when asked to name an ideal state.

He has probably caught the tide of a new trend. It is what the Americans are doing, and they say it is a success. The 1996 welfare legislation, which ended nearly all federal aid programmes and pushed welfare down to the states, has resulted in a myriad of experiments with the US equivalents of little platoons; and their leaders come here to talk to ministers and their shadows. Reluctantly, haltingly, future governments of any stripe will go down the road of empowering a thing called society to look after itself, wishing all the while that they could be sure it knew what it was doing.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website