A new Mutual Aid?

In the late nineteenth century the mutual societies, co-operators and trades unionists could have gone on to invent a welfare society in which more and more people governed themselves, employed their own doctors, ran their own schools and created a commonwealth of a country.

 

But they didn’t. They decided to go down the road which led to the welfare state. During the twentieth century this state came to do these things ‘for’ and ‘to’ people, just like an empire.

 

This worked for a long while. It fed the hungry, most of them, and housed the homeless, most of them. But we now know that it has turned out to be a well-intentioned but wrong choice.

 

Public housing now haunts us in graffiti-strewn, high crime, no-go areas. By the end of the twentieth century, the welfare state resulted in expensive, top-down, one-size-fits-all services which now fail to satisfy ordinary folk. We may be materially better off, but the quality of life is poorer. We are up a cul-de-sac.

 

One political answer to this risks turning down another cul-de-sac by saying the state is too powerful. It needs to be slimmed down, services need to be privatised and we should spend and tax less.

 

This is superficially attractive. For while the range of needs which people have are diverse, public services have remained uniform. People's experience of the private sector is of choice. So they could be persuaded that introducing choice and diversity into the public sector by privatising it would work.

 

A better answer entails creating in the first century of the new millennium a modern version of yesterday’s mutualism, in a renewed civil society. This means a strong, but enabling state. Not fewer taxes, but spending them in new ways which empower and inspire people to take control of their lives, agreeing their own agenda for the action needed to drive up the quality of life where they live. The result will be a new compact between people and a modern state.

From an article in New Start Magazine by Dick Atkinson, drawn to my attention in the Senscot  Newsletter. (Subscribe here)

Dr Dick Atkinson is chief executive of Balsall Heath Forum in Birmingham. His book, Civil renewal: mending the hole in the social ozone layer, is published by Brewin Books, www.brewinbooks.com, price £18. Alternatively, tel: 0121 446 6183/2 or email: [email protected]