For those involved in providing public services and for those who use them, cuts to provision, especially at local level, and the rapid privatisation of what can’t be shut down has been the main show in town. The latter, of course, has a long and chequered history including, to its shame, under the New Labour Government. The Coalition administration has accelerated the pace of privatisation and imposed cuts to the living standards of the poorest that are the largest in memory. Thus we are faced on the one hand with rising and increasingly desperate demand from vulnerable individuals and whole communities, and on the other, an ‘arms race’ between private, especially global, corporations for the chance to make big profits from those human needs.
What is less well known is how these neoliberal forces have shaped, co-opted – indeed clobbered – whole swathes of voluntary action into helping these changes along, in many cases with voluntary groups themselves joining the new order.
‘Voluntary action’ is, in its broadest sense, a massive activity involving millions of people doing all manner of things simply because they want to. Voluntary action occupies a space within civil society that is distinct from the State and the private sector; a space in which citizens come together freely to exercise self-determining collective action. Voluntary groups do not have to exist; they are an expression of citizen action, usually driven by compassion, concern and determination to make the world a better place. Without the pluralism and vigour of this ‘ungoverned space’ we will be in deep trouble, and democratic freedoms in society will be significantly curtailed.
