The Plague Village: thoughts on the Big Society

During a cross country drive back to Cullingworth from Shropshire we stopped off at the village of Eyam in the Derbyshire Dales. You remember Eyam? You probably learned a little about it at school (assuming you attended school before dumbing down and the advent of eco-salvationist propaganda) – it’s the ‘plague village’.

In the summer of 1665, the village tailor received a parcel of material from his supplier in London. This parcel contained the fleas that caused the plague. The tailor was dead from the plague within one week of receiving his parcel. By the end of September, five more villagers had died. Twenty three died in October.

Some of the villagers suggested that they should flee the village for the nearby city of Sheffield. Mompesson persuaded them not to do this as he feared that they would spread the plague into the north of England that had more or less escaped the worst of it. In fact, the village decided to cut itself off from the outside would. They effectively agreed to quarantine themselves even though it would mean death for many of them.

Whether this act of collective self-sacrifice really did prevent the plague spreading to neighbouring villages – or worse to the slums of nearby Sheffield – we’ll never know. But it seems to me a rather apt – albeit morbid – illustration of what we might understand by the ‘Big Society’. The villagers of Eyam didn’t have to listen to Mompesson the local vicar. They could have left the village – fleeing the plague. They chose not to out of what appears to be a belief in doing the right thing, together.

Why you should vote...

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Why we should all vote.

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As well as my own meanderings round the matter of voting and not voting, I have been struck by two recent musings from a couple of more thoughtful – and probably wiser than I – bloggers on the matter of the election.

Firstly, we have Billy Gotta Job on the insignificance of voting (and why this is as it should be):

“Except that we’ve been deluded into thinking that democracy is an individual pastime, no different in essence from voting in the X-Factor. That by voting we can somehow take forward our own individual interests. That politics is like a pick’n'mix sweet counter in which we can select our favourite orange creme, but ignore our unloved nut cluster. That identifying interests that we have in common with others is a sort of ego annihilation, and a defeat for our personal independence. But in truth democracy is not about us as individuals. It is the right to be insignificant, to make no personal difference. The true threat to our democratic health is not spin-doctors, or the media, or expenses scandals, or sound-bites, or the distractions of celebrity culture. It is the myth that we should form our political judgments by totting up whether we’ll be 50 quid better off under this party or that, and that collective interest is no more than a quaint hangover from the past.”

Now I don’t really believe (and I guess that this won’t be a surprise to my small band of loyal readers) in the supremacy of collective interest – indeed I see collective interest as merely the mediated agglomeration of individual interests. However, Billy has a point – as an individual act, voting is of vanishingly small significance. You vote, my vote, Gordon Brown’s vote are not going to make the difference.

Whether or not we vote is unlikely to affect the outcome of the election.
The second piece – from the doyenne of Libertarian bloggers, Charlotte Gore – who says she does not care about the result of the election:

“So the most important lesson I learnt was that I really, really, really don’t care any more. In the choice between the Conservatives or Labour, the only real loser is everyone else. A different bunch of vested interests calling the shots, different types of interference with people’s normal day to day lives and I’ve no doubt that the State will be bigger and more expensive by the time they’re through, no matter what. Taxes are going to go up, the Private Sector will continue to shrink and there’s only one direction that Civil Liberties are going in.”

Except Charlotte does care – she cares enough to have spotted what Billy spotted – that her vote is insignificant. That only as part of a perceived collective interest can our votes count (which is why libertarians should oppose proportional systems of voting based on votes for parties). And Charlotte’s problem with voting is not resolved by there being a party somewhere for which she can vote positively – let’s call it the Laser Cat Party. Even with that party, Charlotte’s vote – insofar as it can really effect change – remains insignificant. The large parties (and attached vested interests) continue to control the process and – as membership declines – the use of public funding will act to exclude the Laser Cat Party since it would not receive funding.

So why vote? The answer is simple and it’s the answer your granny used to give. You vote because it’s the right thing to do and because, however insignificant it might be, voting is often the only chance you’ve got of getting something changed. People really did chuck themselves under horses, people really did get killed, people really did strike, march and protest so as to get that right to pick up a stubby pencil and mark a cross in a box once in a while. Don’t get me wrong, if you choose not to bother it doesn’t make you a bad person – you’re not really letting down your suffragette great grandma or the great uncle killed on D-day.

So go and vote it’s your chance to do something. And do it loudly, proudly and knowing that it’s the most significantly insignificant act you can undertake.