Lower funding for libraries means they will close, not miraculously improve

It is Tory policy to “shrink the state”, so that it intrudes less into our lives and takes less of our money. But the section of the state it seems most interested in shrinking is that closest to our daily living, namely local government. Central government grants to local authorities have been cut and cut, and are about to be cut again until they eventually disappear.

We know that this has already throttled the Government’s once visionary idea, the so-called “Big Society” project launched by David Cameron in 2010. He’d failed to notice that the institutions of civil society, such as the so-called voluntary sector, were so intertwined with local government that weakening the one necessarily weakened the other. Big Society theory, based on a flawed understanding of how things work, had expected an energising transfer from one to the other – not the decline of both.

It ignored the fact that successive governments had deliberately created a relationship of financial dependence between organs of the state, local and national, and the institutions of civil society. In other words, local government had been funding voluntary agencies to take on the work they no longer wanted to do. Take away the funding and that work stops too.

There is no sign of a new theory, no alternative vision of the relationship between the citizen and the state and the role of intermediate institutions within that relationship. Instead, we have this, from the 2015 Autumn Statement: “A modern and reformed state is built on the understanding that higher spending does not automatically mean better services.”

What they are really trying to tell us is that “A modern and reformed state is built on the understanding that lower spending does automatically mean better services.” In other words, if you squeeze local government until the pips squeak, things will improve. Like the mistake regarding the Big Society, this flies in the face of the empirical evidence. Lower funding for public libraries means libraries will close, not miraculously improve.

It is true that one strand of government policy is aimed at empowering rather than undermining local government, namely that geared to the bolstering of local industry. The most famous example of this is the so-called Northern Powerhouse, centred on the Greater Manchester conurbation, which creates a new tier of local government to devise and coordinate policies to attract business investment. It is a favourite of the Chancellor, George Osborne, which may explain why it is focused on the local economy rather than on wider society. Perhaps the hope is that invigorating the first will renew the latter.

But what we are more likely to see is a civil society crushed between the operation of the market and the agencies of the state. In other words, the things that affect them most will be more and more remote from the lives of ordinary people. Although advocated as the new localism, the effect is the opposite of subsidiarity. It is difficult to see, for instance, how the administration of the Northern Powerhouse, necessarily technical and economic, can be made subject to local democracy.

Perhaps there is a job here for Labour’s new rising star, the victor in the Oldham West and Royton by-election, Jim McMahon. Despite the adulation heaped on him by Labour’s left-wing leader, he is on the Labour centre-Right – more (Liz) Kendall than (Jeremy) Corbyn, more Blue Labour than Karl Marx. He has wide experience in local government, and an OBE to prove it. Of a Catholic background, we would expect to find Catholic Social Teaching is in his political DNA, which includes, therefore, an instinctive understanding of solidarity, subsidiarity and the common good. And hence of the necessity for a healthy local government, not just to express the real wishes of local people but as the key to a healthy local society.

So this is what we stand to lose. Sarah Neville, writing in the Financial Times last week, drew attention to the lack of coherence in government thinking since the collapse of the Big Society project. “There has been no wholesale rethink of the purpose or scope of the state,” she wrote, “other than the narrowed priorities that flow from reduced means. ‘Health care; security, both domestic and foreign, and education’, is how one government adviser sums up the stripped-down role of the state under David Cameron.”

But is that really enough?