The Beg SocietyThe Beg Society
Revd Ray Anglesea, a self supporting minister in Northern Synod, reflects on a topical concern.
Peter Brookes’s cartoon in The Times, 17th February 2011, draws attention to a down-town inner city advertisement hoarding fixed to a red brick rail wall arch on which the words The Beg Society are written in large capital yellow letters on a graffiti strewn blue background. In the corner of the billboard slumped on the pavement is a hooded teenager; his cap acts a begging bowl together with a small sign which reads “Unemployed youth. Please give generously.”
The Big Society, mentioned by the Prime Minister in his conference speech last October and in further speeches since, is showcased as the Government’s defining idea for our future society. It embodies, in theory, a lot of good sense about public policy. The Big Society is to be seen as a foundation for policies which reduces the extent – and the cost – of direct state involvement in social and welfare activities. Sadly it is clear, in practice at least, that nobody has the first idea what this terms means, and the concept seems to be disappearing in the argument about cuts to public spending. A number of local councils, including the leader of Liverpool City Council have written to the prime minister withdrawing its involvement from his "big society" plans. The Archbishop of Canterbury put it diplomatically and guardedly in a speech last year, “Two and a half cheers for the Big Society.” Perhaps it is tempting to note that nothing so powerfully illustrates the prime minister’s failure to explain the Big Society as the fact that, after 8 months in government, he still has to bother. To the more cynical voter on the other side of the political fence, the concept is nothing less than a government attempt to “put a positive spin” on spending cuts.
Several national churches and other Christian organizations have recently joined Church Action on Poverty in warning the Government’s that its welfare proposals are based on a lack of understanding of the poor. Retiring executive director of Community Service Volunteers, Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, used her retirement speech a few weeks ago to say that the government lacks a strategic plan for the big society and that spending cuts are undermining volunteering. Voluntary sector groups, the platoons of which underpin the Big Society concept and who support poor and unemployed people and others are already heavily reliant on taxpayer funding. “Such groups,” says Dame Hoodless “will either have their funding reduced or at worst, cut back all together; some groups will not survive,” she was reported to have said. Indeed they will not. The RTPI charity Planning Aid North after 30 years of successful dedicated service to communities in the North East of England will be closing its doors for the last time on the 31st March with a loss of 5 posts, 18 months after my post with the charity was made redundant. The London Christian based charity “The Salmon Project” for which my son is the sports manager and which was featured on BBC Radio 4’s programme “The World Tonight,” 17th February 2011, drew attention to the impact that funding cuts will have on the educational and sporting lives of teenage children in London’s East End. In Waddington Street United Reformed Church last Sunday it was announced that the project, Moving On, an organisation founded to provide accommodation for homeless young people, and which the church supports, will have it funding slashed by 30%. Extra lengths will need to be swum by church members in a sponsored swim this week to raise funds for this worthy cause.
The devastating effects of the cuts on the voluntary organisations are slowly being seen by all and in some instances the effects are stretched to breaking point. Surely that cannot be right, fair or morally acceptable? The rhetoric of the coalition government on the Big Society offers no comfort and rings hollow to those already served with redundancy notices. It is clear that the big society cannot be built without parts of civil society – including charities, hospitals, local authorities, schools, social security and universities - now under threat.
For that unemployed hooded teenager with a begging cap in Brookes’s cartoon the future looks particularly bleak. Some measures indicate that one million young people are currently out of work, even before the cuts have come into full force. Dr. Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics in the University of Edinburgh in a recent paper wrote “The Big Society is more like a big shift of cash.” He maintains “that Christ did not like unemployment,” and refers in his paper to the parable of the vineyard owner who turns up in the market place at eight, ten, two and four o’clock and discovers men sitting idle. The vineyard owner is troubled by this and invites those without employment to come to work in his vineyard. At the end of the day each receives the same daily wage whether he has worked from early morning or late afternoon; Jesus concludes with his aphorism “so shall the last be first and the first last” (Matthew 20 v16). Down the centuries the fathers and mothers of the church have read the parable in a number of different ways. Those in the church who did not own land, and hence their own means of production, and who could not find waged employment as a substitute, received an unemployment benefit, paid out by giving, from the fourth century. The amount paid, although from charity was not intended to diminish the dignity of those who received it. And so it is that universities, hospitals, schools and poor relief of pre-modern England began their lives as ecclesiastical institutions. The Big Society was the church.
Such a Society is, in principle, natural territory for the United Reformed Church. In synods up and down the country, the church has already created and sustained a “Big Society.” The strength of the Big Society idea for the church lies in the extent to which it reflects a Christian understanding of being human. As in so many of Jesus’ parables, particularly the vineyard owner, God makes Himself known to us in the person of the other. It is when we ourselves recognise our dependence on others that we understand a little of God’s love for us. Neighbourliness is the first condition for treating others (and being treated ourselves) as ends and not means.
The church is, in many ways, a paradigm community, holding fast to the virtues of neighbourliness and fellowship because these reflect the relational nature of God as Trinity and the Kingdom in which all relationships are modelled on God’s unconditional love. But the empirical church in the world may often struggle to embody the virtues of community if the surrounding culture belittles and marginalises such virtues. The church not only models community to the world but there needs to be strong communal bonds in the wider society so that Christians have the chance to extend discipleship into the whole of their lives.
A Christian vision of the Big Society aims to generate the kind of strong social bonds that also appear among the objectives of the Big Society project. It will be important for us in the church to stress that, for Christians, such bonds are the prerequisite of any viable human society and are not to be valued merely for economic, expedient or utilitarian reasons.
As I had discovered working in the East and West end of Newcastle there is always a tension between Christian engagement with others in work for the common good and the Christian calling to hold up the mirror of God’s demands to the powerful in critical solidarity. At a time when the government’s austerity measures are sure to have an impact on the most hard-pressed communities, the unemployed and the vulnerable, it is vital that the church should not be co-opted into such close partnerships with government that its ability to speak truth to power is compromised.
Alas it appears to me that already emerging from the neo-liberal policies of the Coalition government (neo-liberalism seeks to transfer control of the economy from public to the private sector, under the belief that it will produce a more efficient government and improve the economic health of the nation), is an increasing dramatic shift in wealth from poor to rich as unemployment rises, welfare payments are cut and some benefits, notably the Disabled Living Allowance are abolished altogether. It is rather ironic that a coalition Government that claims it wants to give England and Wales back to the people should begin the Big Society project by announcing the sale of its forests owned by its people to private companies, a government proposal that has seen a dramatic “yew” turn as public pressure and objection to such a sale increased. Tree-a culpa indeed! In another u-turn mood, the Eric Pickles,, the Communities Secretary, may legislate to protect the Big Society from Council cuts. He has warned local authorities that if they cut their charity funding harder than their own budgets, he would stop them by law.
The one thing that the coalition Government cannot do is nothing in the hope that “society” will pick up what gets dropped. Many of the original volunteers of volunteer groups may have economic problems of their own and might not be able to pick up where they left off. And besides when a charity folds, or as social-services is shrunk the loss of expertise and experience is incalculable. We have to find another way to safeguard the precious services that are the lifeline to the unemployed, the vulnerable and those in despair. Surely the best way to achieve the Big Society is not to do things for ourselves but to do things for each other. The willingness from the churches to contribute remains. But the funding must not be allowed to dry up or else begging bowls may indeed be a feature of austerity Britain.