General election 2010: Cif at the polls

The village that shows us what society really means

A visit to Wanlockhead in Scotland provides a lesson on governing the people
Wanlockhead, where until the mid-20th century miners toiled to extract lead. Photograph: AA World Travel Library/Alamy

Our guide, as he escorted us along the empty seam, thrummed with indignation. The men worked in this dank burrow for 10 hours a day, six days a week, and got paid £20 a year, once a year. From that they had to provide their own tools, their own explosives, even their own candles, so it was dark, very dark. They began their working lives at eight years old. Many of the miners died in accidents. But mostly, the inhabitants of this early industrial Klondyke died of lead poisoning. In Wanlockhead, back then, a 35-year-old was very, very old indeed.

Pretty little Wanlockhead. It is the highest village in Scotland, in Dumfries and Galloway. Last Saturday, in the sunshine, it was delightful, all white-painted cottages nestling in the hills and the streams, mossy grass cropped short by sheep that wandered freely and even, for a time, gathered by the bus stop, looking comically expectant.

No lead has been extracted from these hills since the mid-20th century, even though they are still full of minerals. The seams got too deep even for modern technology to make them either economic or safe. All that Wanlockhead has left is its pub, and its heritage. Hardly anyone lives there any longer, and it relies on its mining museum – run by a village consortium – to pull in tourists.

It is a good museum, though, because the infrastructure of that old life is all still there, intact. After venturing 150 yards into the mine, visitors take a look at some of the cottages, decked out as they would have been in the early 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The guide thrums with indignation again. The early workers built the walls of their crude dwellings from stone, freely available in this landscape. But they had to get permission to take the turf and the heather to put on a roof. That belonged to the estate. If the estate wanted you out, they had the right to burn you out by setting the roof on fire; the roof that belonged to them.

It does no harm to remember how those with absolute power over employees, tenants or employee- tenants used to treat their meal- tickets, given the freedom to do so. But it does no harm either to remember the astonishing resilience with which a community can join together in mitig-ation of cruelty and dehumanisation, and change things for the better.

There is a reminder of that in Wanlockhead as well, for this remote hamlet boasts the second oldest miners' subscription library in the world; a library that was assembled by men who lived and worked in appalling conditions, yet set money aside for books and for a place where these books could be kept and shared. The library itself was open only once a month, but the building also hosted meetings of the village's silver band, its quoits club and its curling club. Literature, music, sport, leisure – all these were nurtured, and paid for, by the miners themselves. What a Big Society those people made, from so little. No state to sap their get-up-and-go, you see. No welfare, no rights, no easy distractions to featherbed them all and make them indolent.

The books in the library attest that these miners were very serious people. There is nothing frivolous – barely any novels. When asked if any particularly unusual books were included in the collection, the library guide explains that there were dire punishments for those who suggested the acquisition of books deemed unsuitable by the strict Protestant churches, which wielded the moral power in the village. She suggests that brave souls indeed must have argued for, and won the right to read, the Koran and The Origin of Species, the only books in the collection that could be said to challenge a Christian fundamentalist view of the world.

And bingo! There's the part missing from David Cameron's vision of a grassroots-up, sober, self-help society. It was not ordinary people who needed the state to keep them in line – fearful authoritarian religious leaders did that. It was the ruling elite, who abused their power without restraint, that made "big government" necessary.

Yet now, the party whose long roots lie in resisting the process that sought to restrain the excesses of the elites, seeks to persuade us that "big government" has robbed the electorate of initiative, and that only they can hand power "back" to "workers" (if they are voluntary workers, anyway). But what politicians fail to understand is that they never, ever governed the entire population. They were only ever there to govern the affairs of the powerful.

Labour has governed badly because it has sought to wield authoritarian power over the private lives of ordinary people – eat your greens, get an ID card, get checked by the Criminal Records Bureau, don't drink, don't take drugs, don't get pregnant too young, don't be a lapdancer; while leaving the market to please itself – sell ghastly food full of corn syrup, hire whom you like from anywhere in the world you like, run children's education, sell cheap booze at any hour, open clubs where young people can gather to get off their faces, bombard children with innuendo and sexual imagery, open a lapdancing venue. The "big government" spends much of its time and our money on servicing the people and communities that the market doesn't fancy, or doesn't treat well, rather than persuading the market that it has a moral duty to spread its own largesse, and use its power wisely. A "small government" won't even do the former.

Part of the problem is that the British are no longer very governable. Britain is largely a nation of libertarians, whether of the left or the right, who do not want to be told what to do, or how to do it. We despise politicians because they always want to tell us what to do and how to do it – that's why they are politicians. Dimly, the Conservatives recognise this, which is why they are concentrating on explaining what they won't do, rather than what they will. But all Britain wants or needs really, is a government that will persuade the powerful that it is right to behave in a manner that is responsible, humane and generous, and help the people who can't help themselves.

We have had 13 years of a government that thought it could do the latter, without doing the former. Come 6 May, we might just end up with a government that is eager to do neither.

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