These times are hard for think-tanks, with those favoured by New Labour desperate to flash a bit of leg at the Con Dem coalition, in a frantic attempt to reinvent their credentials as 'independent’ and thus secure future funding.
A nice bit of flashing has been going on at Demos. A survey which provided little by way of startling results, in fact a non-story, was primed for the Tory media by linking dubious survey results with a need for Labour to adopt 'The Big Society' approach and to support Cameron’s cuts. It really is an hilarious piece of spin. http://tinyurl.com/29uo4zj
Demos surveyed 92,000 (as reported by the Telegraph but it turns out the respondent count was in fact half of that at 45,000) of Labour ‘deserters’. Clearly they were hoping to find a golden thread of why people deserted Labour. Judging by their own press release there wasn’t one. Some of the non-results reported were that 1 in 3 voters in 2005 felt local people should have more control / choice over local services compared to one in four at the last election. And the point of this is what? Hardly a swing to get Peter Snow excited?
And on the NHS a particularly warped interpretation was that ‘a third (33%) of voters Labour retained thought the priority was to ‘avoid cuts’ but among the voters that Labour lost that proportion was just over one in ten (only 13%)’. Explore this statistic another way and amongst Labour and former Labour supporters you get 49% across the board who supported avoiding cuts according to Demos’ own results! But hey ho why let your survey answers get in the way of your policy message?
The spin that would then put Alistair Campbell to shame was to make a quantum leap to say that the results show that labour was wrong to try and avoid cuts and should support the ‘Big Society’ ideas of David Cameron. Utterly bonkers! No survey results published suggested the sample group were asked one way or another about the ‘Big Society’ ( if that was a critical question then surely it would have formed part of their press release?) and given the Tories have struggled to articulate what this means to their own party let alone ‘Joe Public’ it was hardly a deciding issue for voters at the last election.
The delusionary politics of the ‘Big Society’ is of course a cloak for outsourcing public sector work and workers to the third sector who have neither the capacity or skills to deliver. It was a failed New Labour idea favoured by the likes of Ruth Kelly, to whom of course the report author, Richard Darlington, is a former special adviser.
An incapable third sector leaves the way open for fragmented public services to be picked off by the private sector fat cats. It is not a model that can command any form of public accountability or democratic control and is a fluffy means to dress up asset stripping the state under a dubious need for ‘reform’.
‘Big Society’ is about public services on the cheap and destroying necessary state provision, penalising the poorest and most vulnerable. All the dubious survey results Demos can muster will not escape the hard facts that voters were not and will not be seduced by rabid attacks on state provision however they’re disguised.
Anna Rose
