The most frustrating aspect of the 2010 general election was Labour’s defeat. The second was that Labour’s campaign allowed the Conservatives to appropriate the mantle of ‘people power’ from the erstwhile ‘people’s party’. David Cameron’s director of strategy, Steve Hilton, claimed the credit, but it could not have happened without the erection of a dividing line between Labour’s ‘enabling state’ and the ‘do-it-yourself state’ of the Conservatives. They did so because they foresaw what events have shown to be true: that the ‘big society’ vision was a false prospectus, that its rhetoric has been little more than a cloak for cuts. Contrary to the picture that the champions of the ‘big society’ have painted, the Conservatives have never been that interested in ‘people power’, unless it is the power of the ‘few’ over the ‘many’.

When David Cameron cites Margaret Thatcher’s enthusiasm for social housing tenants’ ‘right-to-buy’ as evidence of a past Conservative commitment to ‘people power’ he glosses over the fact that Labour suggested it first, and that the Tories implemented it alongside a cap on council housebuilding as part of an exercise less in ‘people power’ as in – at its apogee in Shirley Porter’s Westminster – gerrymandering.

More importantly, he neglects to acknowledge the absence of any Conservative interest in empowering tenants through cooperative and mutual housing schemes, as championed by Cooperative party councillors and Labour housing ministers in the 1970s and opposed not just by local authority conservatism, but Tory politicians too.

And it is the council house sales and British Gas share sales of the 1980s that are usually held up by George Osborne as shining examples of Conservative ‘people power’ which Cameron’s government can emulate.

The privatisations of the 1980s had little to do with people power. Very few of the British Gas investors – the mythical ‘Sids’ – held on to them for the long-term: for most it was the opportunity to profit from a quick sale to one of the institutional investors. Rightly or wrongly, it was nothing to do with any form of ‘big society’ in which consumers gained real ‘people power’ control over services formerly provided by the state.

In reality, the government’s actions are essentially Thatcherism with a Liberal Democrat face – the privatisation of public assets, this time with some employee share ownership thrown in. Cameron’s government is happy to sell off libraries to the librarians but there is no thought of making libraries publicly and directly accountable to their users – local residents and voters.

There is nothing about the consumer accountability that would make the ‘big society’ rhetoric of ‘people power’ meaningful. Labour’s 2010 manifesto promised, on the prompting of the Cooperative party, to mutualise British Waterways, the quango that runs Britain’s canals, giving real power to consumers. The coalition instead plans to turn it into a charitable trust – essentially a less accountable quango.

Cameron’s ‘big society’ vision is blind to the need for accountability to consumers and the public, and to the need for effective funding of public services. Unless proper asset-locks are put in place it may also end up with the asset-stripping of the public sector, if ownership of taxpayers’ property is simply transferred to the managers who run it. Small-mindedness will not a ‘big society’ build.

Moreover, it is far from clear how far Cameron’s government will go to support mutuals, as opposed to privatisation with some token shares to the employees. Indeed, as soon as Francis Maude entered the Cabinet Office he shelved detailed proposals developed by his predecessor Tessa Jowell to expand the role of mutuals in housing, sure start, health and social care. One of the early actions of the coalition government has been to axe the funding made available by Labour to schools that wanted to transform themselves into cooperative schools. Likewise, the coalition has betrayed Vince Cable’s former support for remutualising Northern Rock, a pledge Labour adopted in its 2010 manifesto on the urging of the Cooperative party.

But that does not mean that Labour should knock ‘people power’. Labour will need instead to reassert its importance, as action and not just as rhetoric. For, while the state has rightly played an important role in Labour’s thinking, it is, as Tony Crosland would have reminded us, a means and not an end in itself.

Labour has always been about enabling, but it has not always been about the state. Public services cannot be provided without funding. But why should they not be more responsive to the public? Why should the public not have greater direct control over whether, within a given budget, libraries are open later or at weekends? Why should English Heritage and the BBC Trust be unaccountable quangos? There is much that public services can do to improve.Without accountability, which is difficult to achieve without a mutual structure which gives real power to consumers, what incentive is there for that improvement to happen?

When Labour’s Clause IV refers to ‘the many not the few’, it means the people, not the state. That is why the Labour party and the Cooperative party have worked in such an effective alliance.

The Cooperative party has, throughout its history, urged greater use of mutualisation as an alternative structure to private or state corporations, but from the 1950s until the 1970s both Labour and Conservative governments embraced central state planning and nationalisation as a principal tool of policy.

To improve public services, Harold Wilson’s Labour governments tried technocratic managerialism. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown tried it again, with better technology and greater investment. Public services got better. But, as Ed Miliband has pointed out, there are limits to managerialism. The men and women in Whitehall do not always know best. And Labour voters have been saying so for years. Why shouldn’t voters get more say in how public services are run? At the next election, voters will want to know how a Miliband government would improve public services. Giving the public more direct control, through a structure of proper consumer mutuals, would be radical and it would be right. It might not be a ‘big society’. But it would be a better one.

This article first appeared on Progress Online
http://www.progressonline.org.uk/articles/article.asp?a=7789