Abstract
Before and Beyond the ‘Big Society’ opens with the author, Joseph Forde, reporting a personal sense of confusion at the Church of England's about-face on centrally delivered state welfare following the Great Recession of 2008 and the election of the coalition government of 2010. ‘The idea for this book emerged out of a sense of bewilderment I had about a change in direction the Church of England had taken on welfare’, he says, when it ‘offered qualified support to the Coalition government's “Big Society” project’ and thereby contributed to a general rebalancing of ‘welfare provision in the United Kingdom—by making it less statist and more localist and voluntarist in its delivery’ (p. 1). Given the Church of England's historic support for state-delivered welfare, Forde inferred that something of ‘a paradigm shift may have occurred in [the Church of England's] thinking on welfare, and I wanted to identify and scrutinise the reasons for that change of direction, as well as the implications stemming from it for those in need of welfare provision, then and since’ (p. 2).
Looking for a source for these changes in the Church of England's outlook, Forde turns primarily, though not exclusively, to the work of the Radical Orthodox, Anglo-Catholic socialist theologian John Milbank, who was a significant contributor to the Blue Labour and Red Tory projects which were prominent in the 2010s. Through his influence on Malcolm Brown, currently Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Archbishops’ Council, Lord Maurice Glasman, and Director of the ResPublica think tank Phillip Blond, Forde sees Milbank's denouncement of the secular encroachment into society, capitalism's depersonalising bureaucratisation and the state's appropriation of the Church's historic welfare role as major influences on the Church's advocacy of the ‘Big Society’ agenda in 2010 and 2011. What is telling in this book, ultimately, is its ironic, tragic, carefully reconstituted account of how a socialist theologian inadvertently made it conceptually possible for the Church to naively baptise a neoliberal government, which did extraordinary social and economic damage, thinking all the time that its actions were socially and theologically prudent. Forde concludes that the Church of England missed that kairos moment, that sense of the present in the context of the future which the shrewd possess. There was a missed opportunity to align itself clearly and forcefully with those who opposed David Cameron and George Osborne's cuts to social services, as the 250,000 to 500,000 who attended the ‘March for the Alternative’ in 2011, or those who Occupied St Paul's, did. Forde writes: ‘for the reality was that Milbank's and Blond's influence on Brown's thinking, for example, and hence on the Church of England's handling of the [Big Society] project, meant that the Church's ability to evaluate and challenge the cuts of £1.3 billion in state provision to the voluntary sector in 2011/12 was significantly compromised, largely because of its stated support for the project at the time’ (p. 233).
The key original research chapter in the book is chapter 5, ‘The “Big Society” and the Church of England: An Analysis of the Influences that Shaped GS1804’, which recounts the Church of England's adoption of Malcolm Brown's advice to accept and endorse the ‘Big Society’ agenda. But the proceeding chapters, which recount the rise and fall of the welfare state since 1945, along with the two lines of reasoning in the socialist Anglican tradition—which Forde calls the Temple and Christendom traditions—are informative, engaging, and well produced. Those who are interested in the genealogy of Milbank's political theology will find good summaries and introductions to the writings of J.W. Figgis and V.A. Demant here (who are much more sceptical of the potential of the state to deliver Kingdom goods and see instead the church as the fulcrum and realisation of the true society). And those who see a classic social democratic welfare state as politically desirable will also learn from Forde's well-researched introductions to the writings of William Temple, R.H. Tawney, and John Atherton. The book is somewhat truncated by its assumption of a socialist theological and political outlook, which marginalises the space and explanatory power which can be given to those in the lay and ordained Anglican communion who hold other political outlooks, but such a limiting of the purview is necessary to the demarcation of any academic text.
There is a degree of tragedy, again, in the author's own preference, by a process of elimination, for the Temple and Tawney tradition of state-delivered welfare once Milbank's own policy suggestions have been discarded. Milbank, Forde argues, is too dependent on Frank Prochaska's account of civil society's decline in the twentieth century, wrong to think that the church has the capacity at scale to compete and replace state-delivered welfare, wrong to homogenise the modernist tradition as rationalist, and wrong to take a romanticised, idealist view of the medieval and early modern epochs. But when it comes to Forde's advocacy of a renewal of the post-World War II welfare state, I cannot help but feel a sense of futility and despair, an inevitability of inertia. Covid has significantly contributed to the visibility of the state and perceived importance of state interventions in the last two years, not least in a traditionally welfare sceptical Conservative Party which is currently riven by its contradictory desires to cut taxes and defend its recent social and economic interventions as legitimate and expedient (the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ and the furlough scheme, notably). Yet, even if a Labour government is elected in 2024, a significant rise in welfare spending (which is consistently found to have not hit minimum income standards for recipients) seems unlikely. Branko Milanovic's Capitalism Alone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2021) paints a sober picture of the constraints on welfare spending in Western democracies given the increase in social heterogeneity, corruption, and ability to transfer citizenship and capital which are characteristic of our globalised economy. I come back to a suggestion I have made in my own work on welfare and food poverty (Bread of Life in Broken Britain: Food Banks, Faith and Neoliberalism, London: SCM, 2020), in which I argue that the most coherent position available to the Church of England is to simultaneously support both the welfare state and the disestablishment of the church. For a state that cares for and prioritises its poorest and most vulnerable may be worthy of a chaplain and a chapel, but our present arrangement does not match that description. I am happy to recommend Forde's book, as a traveller needs to be told that this road cannot be taken. But what we do not yet have is a path.