Mark Pack

UPDATE: The full version of my chapter from Reinventing the State is now online here.

That was the title of my chapter in “Reinventing the State”. The first edition has sold out, so it’s just been republished, with a new foreword (available from Amazon here). Amongst more famous contributors are both Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne, talking about tackling terrorism and devolving power respectively.

My own piece starts:

I have a secret to admit. I quite like big organisations. Of course – as you would expect of a liberal – I think power should be kept at as local a level as possible, that organisations should be responsive to individuals, and so that smaller is frequently better – and that individuals’ freedom and rights get trampled on when Big Brother gets free reign.

But faced with the reality of actually trying to change the world, in however small or big a way, the inconvenient truth is that big organisations are good. Lobby Tesco or frequent my local organic food shop? Sorry to say, but doing the former is going to do more to change the world. The impact of Tesco’s decisions on the production and consumption of organic food has been, and will continue to be, far greater than the efforts of clutches of organic food shops scattered around the country.

Moreover, the volume of public pressure required to change a large organisation’s behaviour is, despite its size, frequently quite small compared to the scale on which electoral politics operates. Mars’s abortive switch in the ingredients of Mars Bars and other confectionery to include animal extracts was derailed in spring 2007 after 6,000 complaints. For Mars 6,000 was a large number – but that is barely enough to get a mediocre third place in a parliamentary election … small may be beautiful, but big gives the individual leverage …

This slightly perverse relationship between an individual’s influence and an organisation’s size – larger bodies may be less responsive to an individual than small ones, but the results of individual pressure can be massive – gives a clue as to what is normally missing in discussions such as those about the size of the state or the growth of multinationals, or policies for devolution and subsidiarity.

If you only talk about the size of the state and other bodies, you miss the important question of how to make large bodies more responsive to individuals’ pressure, and how to help people influence them.

As to what can be done about those issues … well, buy the book from Amazon and find out!

To find out more about Community Politics, see this short Community Politics reader I’ve put together.