Nicholas Crowson

Introduction: The Voluntary Sector in 1980s Britain

This is an abridged and edited ‘witness seminar’ that was convened to discuss the voluntary sector in 1980s Britain. Witnesses were drawn from the voluntary sector and the civil service and included Nicholas Deakin, Julia Unwin, Michael Brophy, Richard Fries, Stuart Etherington, Jerry White and Justin Davis Smith.

Witness Seminar: The Voluntary Sector in 1980s Britain

Nicholas Deakin: I would like to underline the pervasive effect of the reliance of the Thatcher government on the market as the agent of change and not only, though perhaps primarily, in addressing Britain’s economic problems. Market mechanisms for that government were to be the guarantor of change and the means by which those notorious three ‘e’s—efficiency, economy, effectiveness—were to be achieved. Within this context the government’s repeated stress was on individual empowerment ending the so-called dependency culture. It seems to me the Conservative Government’s general dislike of the organised professional voluntary sector (which was seen as an expression of producer interests) links to its general antipathy towards the local statutory sector. And also, finally, the government’s particular distaste for lobbies, which was expressed by Douglas Hurd as Home Secretary, and Chris Patten in his Goodman lecture. ‘Crickets in a field’ one minister said about the poverty lobby. I can identify four different challenges that the sector had to meet over this decade and it is perhaps not too melodramatic to call them crises. They certainly seemed like that to us at the time. First, there was a crisis of resources. There was an increased level of funding from the central government over this period, but it came with the distorting effects of the policy objectives and the stresses associated with meeting the additional demands being made of the sector in the required form. The terms of trade with government were extremely one sided and there were chronic insecurities generated by frequent switches of programmes and policy emphasis. This often seemed to those at the receiving end like an attempt to constrain the organised sector to a programme delivery role, excluding policy dialogue and campaigning. All this took practical shape in the shift over the decade from grants to contracts. Second is the crisis of public management. I refer to the impact on the voluntary sector of the introduction of different management styles into the public sector at the national level: the Next Steps and so forth. This involved crucially the importation of business values and criteria for funding. We are now into the so-called ‘contract

Much Ado about Nothing: Macmillan and Appeasement

During an interview in November 1958 Harold Macmillan told his interlocutor that in his opinion it did not matter if a Conservative MP rebelled against the party line provided the individual concerned had justified the behaviour with the local constituency party chairman. 1 Such a statement suggesting that the national party structure is powerless to discipline a rebel is not unique, but it is surprising that it should be so publicly stated by a Conservative Prime Minister. However, it was an observation based upon personal experience from the 1930s. During this time Macmillan was drawn into conflict with the leaderships of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain over the conduct of British foreign policy towards the European dictators. The purpose of this study is to examine the attitude to appeasement adopted by Macmillan and to evaluate the implications of his behaviour in relation to the Conservative party.

The conservative party and the call for national service, 1937–39: Compulsion versus voluntarism

This article considers the hitherto neglected topic of the Conservative Party and national service before Second World War. It shows that from March 1938 national service was increasingly perceived as the missing component of the rearmament programme. However these demands for national service were not concerned with recruiting a million‐men army for a continental field‐force like in the Edwardian period, but rather were concerned with preparing to resist the feared aerial ‘knock‐out’ blow.

Governance and Professionalism

When Margaret Thatcher addressed the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS) in January 1981, an organisation that was 100 per cent reliant on central government grants for its core funding, she observed that there was no way that Britain ‘could produce statutory services to meet the needs which as volunteers you now satisfy’. Denying that she wanted to make such organisations the ‘creatures of Government’, she nevertheless saw ‘our role’ as being ‘to help you do the administration and work of mobilising this enormous army of volunteers’. This concern of central government to invoke the skills of the NGO sector in the delivery of services was to have a profound impact on the evolution and landscape of this sector. Previous chapters have shown the complexities of the NGO sector and illustrated its expansion since 1945.

NGO Income Streams and Giving

We saw in Chapter 2 that the overall income of all charities has increased from around £12 billion in 1970 to over £50 billion today (see Figure 7.1). Another way of seeing the sheer scale of the sector is in the total assets all charities have acquired. In 1980, ‘general charities’ held around £30 billion in total assets, a figure which tripled over the next 30 years. If we take a looser definition to incorporate all NGOs and ‘civil society organisations’, the levels of overall income are extremely impressive: around £50 billion in 1990 and around three times that amount 20 years later. As is well known, the charitable sector is dominated by many of its leading organisations: a few hundred are enormous compared to the many other tens of thousands. The income of the top 500 charities has continued to dominate, rising to well over £10 billion since the turn of the millennium (see Figure 7.2). For all that the sector remains incredibly diverse, populated by tens of thousands of organisations, it is clearly led by some enormous NGOs that are able to draw on vast resources to pay for many hundreds of staff, projects and campaign initiatives.

Leading Campaign Groups and NGOs in the UK

This chapter introduces 63 NGOs. These are not the ‘top’ 63 in the sense of being the largest or the wealthiest or the most prominent. Rather, they are a range of NGOs that represent the diversity of the sector. They have been chosen to help illustrate the range of activities and modes of operation that NGOs are engaged in.

The Impact of NGOs

The ultimate goal of NGOs, charities and voluntary associations is to have some impact upon the subjects they were organised to tackle. Impact, however, can be measured in various ways. Ideally, many organisations would like to think they could impact upon long-term change. The actions of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society and Smoke Abatement League, for instance, led to the 1956 Clean Air Act which in turn influenced Des Wilson’s CLEAR campaign for lead-free petrol and the Council for the Protection of Rural England’s (CPRE’s) campaign against stubble burning in the 1980s. These actions paved the way for the ‘Big Ask’ coalition of environmental and development groups that helped condition the debate that led to the 2008 Climate Change Act. Other groups campaign in favour of or against particular issues and problems. Campaigning by the morality lobby in the 1980s is acknowledged to have encouraged the tightening of restrictions on video recordings and sex education, as well as the controversial Section 28 legislation that restricted local authorities’ promotion of homosexuality. Or it may be that a more general impact on public opinion and political attitudes is proposed. Reviewing a decade of achievements in 2004, the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) believed that it had persuaded government to allocate significant resources to internet safety and awareness for young people whilst also influencing eight pieces of parliamentary legislation. Data tracking of the impact of NGO campaigns on MPs appeared to reinforce this verdict with the NSPCC’s ‘Full Stop’ campaign consistently being the most recalled campaign between 2000 and 2004, topping seven out of the eight six-monthly surveys, and at its peak being noticed by 35 per cent of MPs.

The Scale and Growth of NGOs, Charities and Voluntary Organisations

NGOs are by no means a recent phenomenon. They have their antecedents in the eighteenth century, if not before. Indeed, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge has published religious propaganda from 1698 up until the present. But it was in the eighteenth century that missionary work, as an organised activity, really expanded. Some continued to aim to spread faith in Britain, such as the Religious Tract Society (established in 1799) but others turned their attention abroad, following in the wake of the imperialist project. For instance, Methodists established their first missionary organisation in 1786 while the Church Mission Society, the wing of the Anglican Church, was created in 1799.

Membership and Volunteering

In May 2010, Britain’s new coalition government took office, committed to introducing the ‘Big Society’. It was an idea that David Cameron had chosen to make his defining offer to the British people, since being elected leader of the Conservative Party in December 2005. The phrase was a self-conscious neologism, an attempt to distinguish Cameron’s Conservative Party both from what was characterised as New Labour’s statism, and from the Conservative Party’s own hitherto unsympathetic public image. As a concept, the Big Society was embraced and derided, adopted and rejected in equal measure across party lines: it raised the suspicions of many more traditional Conservatives, while the left were divided between those who saw it as a cover for cuts to public spending, and those who wished to embrace community activism as a long-term way of revitalising their political fortunes. And yet, the novelty of the phrasing and the mixed reaction to the idea notwithstanding, the Big Society is in many ways a contemporary expression of longstanding ideas, embedded within much older debates over the respective roles of voluntarism and the state in British society.