During the General Election in the UK last year, Mr Cameron began to talk about The Big Society. It was clear that he thought it was something new and important, but it wasn’t clear, to most people at least, what it was. Some people think that his having laid so much emphasis on it, without really getting the people behind him, was one of the reasons he failed to win an outright majority in Parliament.
Few philosophical ideas have been exported from Britain to the rest of the world and most would bet good money that the Big Society is going to be one of those which isn’t. I think that would be a pity.
One of the reasons Mr Cameron seemed so vague is that he cannot permit himself to enunciate the clearest explanation of it: that at the moment, when something is wrong, people say ‘why don’t they do something about it?’ rather than saying ‘why don’t we do something about it?’ or ‘why don’t I start the ball rolling?’ Mr Cameron’s favourite phrase is almost as famous now as Margaret Thatcher’s oft misquoted original: Cameron says ‘there is such a thing as society, but it’s not the same as the State’.
But even if The Big Society never got going, it has now run into a blaze of negative comment. Here is Polly Toynbee in the Guardian: ‘civil society is rebelling at the great ‘big society’ fraud’. Her reasoning, if I can use such a word with respect to Ms Toynbee, involves the government ‘cuts’. Two examples which have been in the news:
- Liverpool Council, which was to be involved in some Big Society initiative with the Government, has pulled out, citing government cuts.
- Dame Elizabeth Hoodless, the retired head of Community Service Volunteers, said the cuts were destroying volunteering
It’s a bit odd, because one would have thought that volunteering was largely what the Big Society was about.
Let’s look at the local councils. The Government, interested as it is in devolving power, cannot tell the local authorities what to cut and what not to cut, only what their total budget is. They just have to hope that local councils don’t keep the Transsexual Outreach Department and cut children’s schoolbooks. And whilst we don’t yet know for certain, it appears that they are cutting money to charities.
And what is all this, Dame Elizabeth? When one thinks of a charity one imagines something like the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, or the Hague (poppy) Fund, dedicated volunteers rattling tin boxes and collecting money from the generous. And this is true of 75% of charities. But many, like Dame Elizabeth’s Community Service Volunteers, are reliant on government handouts. They are in essence, arms of the government. An example is ASH, action on smoking and health. It takes our money to persuade our elected representatives of its views on smoking; I want our representatives to listen to our views on smoking.
There is a very interesting website called Fake Charities which identifies these and what they are up to. The way it works is that we, through our taxes paid to the government, pay money to these bogus (a better word, I think) charities, who then use a part of it to lobby the government to change our laws to what they want. They are campaigning organisations using our money. Dame Elizabeth’s CSV receives £21.6 million, 75% of its income, from the State. She probably doesn’t have any idea what this volunteering stuff is about, and of course she is against ‘cuts’. CSV’s staff costs are a bit short of £16 million a year.
As the blogger Guido says, ‘a charity that relies in the main part on taxes is no more a charity than a prostitute is your girlfriend.’
Incidentally the CSV website has a survey on whether the Big Society has a future. You may find it strange that a charity should feel the need to take a survey about the policy of the elected government. Whatever you think about Cameron’s policy you might like to go and click ‘Yes’, just to annoy them.
For myself I do think the Big Society has a future. Whereas other societies, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, seem to operate a matrix of responsibility around the close or extended family, and others around a town or district, Britain has destroyed that and put a faceless state in its place. Where I differ from Mr. Cameron about his Big Society is that I think it will take a generation to implement.
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