Connected Communities

From the RSA website, Jonathan Rowson's blog on "Connected Communities" ...

David Cameron’s speech at the conservative party conference indicated that the conservative party might be interested in the work of our connected communities project, so I decided to take a closer look.

The RSA is a charity, and strictly non-partisan, but Mathew Taylor [Chief Executive of the RSA] has previously given his thoughts on Progressive conservatism and it seems important to engage with the main ideas of the would-be next government as fairly as possible.

Cameron repeated one of his more memorable signature lines: “There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the State.” This line sounds like a suitably respectful departure from Margaret Thatcher’s most famous “There is no such thing as society” quote, but in fact, when you read Thatcher’s original, and typically decontextualised quote, in full, she was saying something quite similar (to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987):

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

Ten years later Tony Blair spoke of the need to combine rights with responsibilities, which again makes you wonder if they all mean much the same thing, with only slightly different degrees of emphasis. However, the tone of Thatcher’s quote is rather different, and more combative in spirit than Cameron’s distinction, or Blair’s juxtaposition. When Thatcher says ‘there are individual men and women and there are families’, I don’t sense she is thinking of community, and her vision of the social world does sound relatively atomised.

Cameron clearly sees community ( “the ultimate warm fuzzy” as a recent RSA seminar attendee put it) as part of the picture of a healthy society, as he made clear in his speech:

"So no, we are not going to solve our problems with bigger government. We are going to solve our problems with a stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger country. All by rebuilding responsibility".

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