On a blustery October day last year,
around 30 people schlepped their way to East London for a special meeting
about celebrating and reclaiming the role of voluntary and community
action. Something had appeared out of the email ether a few weeks
before, a ‘think piece’ about independent action for the voluntary
and community sectors (VCS). Advertised as ‘an antidote to partnership
working’, it was precisely what I had been looking for.
The call to re-legitimise independent
action is about more than safeguarding VCS rights and freedoms; it has
profound democratic implications. The meeting was a resounding success.
The activists, development, advice and public sector workers, consultants,
academics and others who turned up, moved from critique to collaboration.
We agreed that not only did government not get it but in the process
of not getting it, a whole ethos and culture was in danger of being
wiped out and that we would work together to challenge it.
The voluntary sector is routinely touted
as the answer to more and more social ills. It is cheaper, more
trusted, closer to the ground. Yet the more awkward bits – advocacy,
campaigning, challenging oppressive practice – are going the way of
our polar ice caps. Rhetorically it is possible to be signed up
to everything – Third Way politicians have made this an art form.
In practice those that work in the field know the ethical dilemmas –
the day-to-day compromises that each organisation and each worker makes.
But these compromises are also choices. The learnt helplessness
and defeatist posture of many in the VCS has to be challenged.
For too long the VCS had been strangely
quiet, content to have its interests equated with the State. But
Government is not just taking a friendly interest, it’s moving in
and taking over1. So what’s happening as a result?
Community is prescribed to the poor,
a new zone of interference. Where the VCS is not ‘contract ready’
a battalion of housing associations, private trusts, quangos, large
national voluntary organisations and reconstructed local government
agencies are willing to draw resources away from smaller community organisations
and local campaigns.
The voluntary and community sector has
always had an imbalance at the heart of it. The richer, more professionalised
voluntary sector is moreoften detached from its community organising
roots, and central government has exploited this tension to the full,
driving a wedge between the new corporate small businesses, who are
voluntary in name only, and the far greater unpaid mass of the sector,
that works industriously on the margins.
At its best the wealthier and numerically
smaller voluntary sector has always had an important bridging role,
mostly for the local council but increasingly for other statutory providers.
Alongside this influence comes a notional accountability to a wider
grass roots ‘community’ membership. In the new climate of
government capacity building (pathologising) of the VCS, what has been
most damaging is not so much the imposition of a ‘we know best approach’
with small pots of money attached. It is the frequency with which
those in positions of power in the VCS conveniently forget their wider
community obligations. By taking on government policy and funding
uncritically larger voluntary organisations consolidate their role but
risk diminishing the interests and involvement of local communities.
Government doesn’t need active citizens reinterpreting its top-down
dogmas. A handful of second tier VCS going corporate and Councils
for Voluntary Service to re-brand themselves as simply Councils will
do fine. Just follow the money.
The real problem with partnership working
is the insidious way in which it can claim to speak in the name of equal
access and yet ignore structural and power issues that actively disempower
people. A partnership implies many things but delivers few of
them: equality of resources, power and voice, a willingness to listen
and to engage with and be informed by different points of view.
In practice people read between the lines and act accordingly.
They are not deceived but instead lower their expectations and play
the game. Idealistic rhetoric becomes a code we learn to cynically
translate. But something gets damaged along the way.
Democracy has always been inherently
unstable, fractious and messy yet that is exactly what we need, so say
thinkers across the political spectrum2. But democracy
is not yet on the table. Gerry Stoker3 wrote of New
Labour adopting a high street bookie approach to local governance policy,
lots of combination prizes, many promotional drives, but where the house
always wins. He argues that New Labour’s deep distrust of ordinary
people and of local government radically undermines its own modernisation
project.
The closing down of independent community
space is a sign of weakness not strength. It is counter-productive.
If you are constantly fed the message that something is transformational,
socially progressive but is so obviously none of those things, where
do you go from there? Self-censorship is one option; organised
resistance is another. And in resisting, we create new options
and refashion democracy as a spirited encounter. Partnership,
if we must use the word, will be the healthier for it.
If you want to join the growing numbers
of those who believe that Dissent Protects Democracy, take a look at www.independentaction.net
Matthew Scott is a worker at Lewisham Community Empowerment Network and involved with the Independent Action Planning Group