Society’s Volunteers

In his 1948 work, Voluntary Action: a Report on the Methods of Social Advance, William Beveridge warned of the potential for an expanded postwar state ‘to destroy the freedom and spirit of conscience’. In particular, he feared that the state’s expansion during and immediately after the Second World War could marginalize a rich voluntary tradition. While supportive of much of the ‘social service state’, Beveridge was concerned about the diminished significance of the bodies that had commissioned Voluntary Action, the friendly societies. He offered an ominous, albeit indeterminate, warning about the state’s capacity to eclipse ordinary citizens’ organized activities on behalf of their fellow citizens.

This anxiety has been a recurring theme of politicians and public commentators ever since Beveridge’s day, right up to Prime Minister David Cameron’s critique of the centralizing tendencies of Labour governments, to which he counterposed his own (now largely defunct) ‘Big Society’ programme. According to Cameron, Labour’s expanded welfarism had atomized citizens, leading to a ‘Broken Britain’. The ‘Big Society’ was the putative cure to this social breakdown.

In fact the decades between Beveridge’s report and Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ had seen plenty of voluntary action. The Wolfenden Committee on Voluntary Organizations reported in 1978 that ‘for the most part we have been impressed with the health and vitality of the voluntary sector’.¹ Surveying the sector in the 1990s for his Meeting the Challenge of Change (1996), Nicholas Deakin likewise found that voluntary action was still robust, and that the greatest challenge facing the sector was not diminished significance or vitality but rather the risk that the sector’s independence would shrink as it developed closer state ties.

The collection of essays reviewed here, edited by Deakin and Melanie Oppenheimer, amply demonstrate the persistence of a voluntary impulse whose continuing energy has been matched by its adaptability. The overviews of voluntary action in Britain (Pat Thane), Australia (Paul Smyth) and Canada (Peter Elson) demonstrate the dynamism of voluntary agencies within their specific national contexts. Measuring civic engagement over half a century is difficult, but the evidence suggests that any decline narrative is far from compelling. The data compiled by the University of Birmingham’s ‘NGOs in Britain’ project points to the persistence of voluntary action within Britain throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This can be seen in a particularly modern form through the prevalence of the modern non-governmental organization (NGO).²

Oppenheimer and Deakin see their volume as offering ‘lessons on which civil society can draw to address the problems of the twenty-first century’. A key lesson is the need to heed Beveridge’s warnings that voluntary actors must ‘preserve independence while seeking constructive relationships’ with the state. Certainly this is a major challenge. Voluntary agencies have relied increasingly on the state especially since the 1980s, and this has created significant difficulties as well as opportunities. All the contributors to this volume emphasize this issue, but it would have been useful to be told more about how these difficulties have emerged over time. If lessons are to be learnt, we need to know which policies and approaches have been most effective in letting voluntary agencies remain autonomous while working effectively with the state.

That all the contributors here find something to say about Beveridge’s thoughts on voluntary action reflects the wide-ranging content of his 1948 report. The volume’s first five chapters focus on Beveridge’s reasons for writing Voluntary Action, describing it variously as a product of his deep commitment to mixed-economy welfare provision (Jose Harris); as the result of his personal experience of providing relief for academics escaping Nazi Germany (Nicholas Deakin); as an idealized vision of the work of the friendly societies (Daniel Weinbren); and as a response to the fate of the voluntary associations during the Second World War and the early years of the ‘social service state’ (Frank Prochaska). All these chapters are very interesting, but they do not speak to each other, leaving the reader with a series of competing and, in some cases, conflicting accounts of Beveridge’s motivations. For example, Harris’s claim that Beveridge’s commitment to voluntary action was a result of ‘long-standing contradictory tensions about the respective roles of individual states and voluntary associations’ offers a rather different and more compelling rationale for Beveridge’s faith in voluntarism than the threat fascism posed to academics, as discussed by Deakin. Such interpretive tensions could have been teased out more productively. Also, given the volume’s aim of providing international comparisons and developing transnational themes, it is curious that there is little discussion of the relevance of the immediate Cold War settings of the report. In such a context, the voluntary sector was seen as an important part of a functioning civil society representing a coherent alternative to Soviet-style socialism.

We might also ask about whether it is useful to frame questions about voluntary action so closely around Beveridge’s 1948 report. True, the challenges addressed by Beveridge continue to be relevant today. However, the contributions discussing the report find that it was his ideas on social insurance and full employment that most excited his contemporaries. It remains unclear if later interest in voluntarism was profoundly influenced by Beveridge. Within Britain, the report was largely seen as an irrelevance. Harris’s contribution aside, the chapters in the book that step away from the report offer more significant observations about the relationship between the state and the voluntary sector.

Taken as a whole, what the volume shows is that the expansion of the state does not seem to have caused a decline in voluntary action in Britain, neither in the immediate postwar period nor, in contrast to the ‘Big Society’ narrative, during the years of New Labour.³ Rather, the postwar state created a framework around which organizations and individuals productively mobilized. Frank Prochaska’s chapter shows how wartime circumstances and the expansion of the state led to a decline in older charities. However, as Pat Thane’s useful account of voluntary action after 1948 makes clear, organizations thrived in areas associated with expanded welfare provision including those offering advice on negotiating new welfare regimes like the Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, bodies extending rights or developing new ones, such as the National Association for Mental Health (now Mind) and the National Association of Parents of Backward Children (now Mencap), while other organizations continued the work of earlier mobilizations, such as the National Council for Unmarried Mothers. These bodies were representative of changes to the sector, and their development shows again that adaptability has been key to voluntary action. Furthermore, as James McKay’s chapter shows, the sector has played a key role in initiating new forms of social action. This followed Beveridge’s hope that voluntary action would ‘pioneer ahead of the State and make experiments’. Thane shows how issues central to the activist campaigning of the 1960s – minority rights, environmental issues, women’s rights, activities associated with the re-discovery of poverty – were taken up by voluntary groups, albeit in increasingly professionalized ways. The chapters offering comparative national histories reinforce this picture of responsive innovation. Also important to the sector’s vitality has been its role as a critic of the state, a function that was particularly apparent in those forms of voluntary action associated with the new social movements of the 1960s. Indeed, McKay’s use of the green movement and Thane’s brief discussion of the women’s movement are good examples of this critical role – a very different voluntary action than that promoted by Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ agenda.

The vision of voluntarism offered by the ‘Big Society’ narrative (and its likely successors in this ‘post-welfare’ age) ignored the political dimension of the sector. The experience of voluntary agencies during the 1980s is relevant here. Drawn into playing an increased role in service provision, they were unhappy at delivering policies which did not meet their approval, and unsettled by the limits that charity laws and grant-based funding placed on its independence. The ‘Big Society’ focused on encouraging mutuals, co-operatives and social enterprises. While such groups are important, they form only one strand within voluntary action. They also reflect an emphasis on the local, at a time when the voluntary sector has increasingly emphasized global concerns such as those of the environmental movement or international-development NGOs, both of which receive substantial public support.

The ‘Big Society’ promised charitable organizations freedom from interference and red tape, while at the same time offering up strong prescriptions for the sector. This is in itself was not new or surprising. Regulatory frameworks have accompanied government support for civil-society organizations in any era. Central government schemes can increase the capacity of voluntary action. The Manpower Services Commission during the 1970s and 1980s, Douglas Hurd’s ‘Active Citizenship’ programme of the late 1980s and the creation of the ‘Third Sector’ in the 1990s are all good examples of this. During the 1980s grants to the voluntary sector increased from £93 million in 1980 to £292 million by 1988.⁴ Funding was also extended by the hyperactivity of the New Labour government. Such initiatives brought new resources into the sector while also creating and extending mechanisms of state control.

What emerges from this volume is the huge expectations placed on voluntary action. Georgina Brewis’s chapter on voluntary action and young people in Britain between 1958 and 1970 demonstrates how problematic these expectations can be. Voluntary action is supposed to contribute to the delivery of services, offer answers to numerous social and political difficulties, pioneer new issues and discover methods of tackling social problems. But it also has a set of broader aspirations attached to it: building trust in society at large and trust towards politics, aiding the economy, allowing reductions in government spending and checking state power. This is testimony to the sector’s success and the broadness of its activities, but it also shows the near-impossible challenges facing voluntary agencies.

Deakin and Oppenheimer’s volume takes us much further in understanding these challenges. Yet significant questions remain. The ‘lessons on which civil society can draw to address the problems of the twenty-first century’, to quote the editors again, need further elaboration. Scholars working in the field need to develop a research agenda that sets out to explain the durability and power of all this voluntary activity. Warnings about the state’s potential threat to voluntary action and the difficulties of the state/voluntary sector relationship are mapped out here, often insightfully, but we need to know more about how this relationship changes over time and its relative power dynamics. This seems especially significant given the way in which the ‘Big Society' was so quickly replaced as a focus for Government initiative by an austerity agenda. We also need to know more about the successes and limits of voluntary initiatives. Elson’s contribution points the way here, showing how the voluntary sector in Canada provided effective service delivery and helped civic engagement but offered little potential for achieving social justice. More scholarship of this sort is needed, to push forward our understanding of the past achievements and future prospects for voluntary action in the twenty-first century.

NOTES AND REFERENCES