Guess who said this:
“This is not about trying to save money. This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”
Say hello to the ill-considered world of one Mr David Cameron, who’s got what he believes is a great idea but absolutely no idea how to sell it. The ‘Big Society’ is a horrible, horrible name for a project that seeks to make some of the buttons and levers of the State accessible to the outer party members or something. That’s got to be a good thing, right? So why is he having such difficulty winning support for the idea?
Consider: At any point normal members of the public already have the ability to get together to build or start a school already. They just raise the money and do it, and voila. There’s currently nothing stopping them. The ‘catch’ is that if people want to send their little darlings to this new school they’d have to pay themselves. The world of free money is the exclusive preserve of the State schools.
So what is Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ trying to achieve?
Imagine, instead, starting your own school AND getting the Government to give it the Free Money that’ll let you send your darling children to it.
No risk. No responsibility. Monkey see, monkey take.
Makes you wonder if this really will save any money. If anything it sort of sounds a bit… expensive, doesn’t it?
“This is not about trying to save money”
Ah. Right. Of course.
I’m just confused because people are attacking it (yes, really, attacking it) because it might deliver the same services for less money, which of course would be an abomination and an unspeakable horror. Those ghastly Tories! IT MIGHT COST LESS! AGHH! We’re dooooooomed!
But, no, calm your boots everyone. It’ll cost us more, don’t you worry. But, if it’s not to save money, what’s the point again?
“This is about trying to have a bigger, better society”
Oh. That… that sucks. Really? That’s it?
The thing about giving individuals and groups access to public money to do stuff like this is that they’re not accountable. No-one’s really going to be accountable. It gives people access to public money without having to go through the democratic process and that democratic process is supposed to protect tax payers from the monkeys that would ‘fill the world with bananas’.
The democratic process will be sidestepped but the bureaucratic process, the bit where someone, somewhere, says ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ is going to be enlarged and made more complicated. Someone, somewhere, will have to take responsibility for that decision to release the funding. Who’s that going to be? What’s their salary going to be? How many of them will there be? What sort of supporting infrastructure – call centres, form processing etc – is going to be required?
This is still taxpayer’s money we’re talking about here. You can’t simply invite this ‘bigger, better’ society to spend whatever it wants from the taxpayer’s purse and then have the politicians send the ‘bigger, better’ bill… or… is that what’s going on? Is this some sort of political game to (ironically for a Coalition obsessed with localism) render local councillors even more pointless than they already are?
I don’t know about you but I’m even more confused than I was.
old holborn said...
19 Jul 10 at 10:27 am
It’s very simple
It’s time to sack the wet nurse and wean the fat spoilt benefit child
http://www.oldholborn.net/2010/07/healing-power-of-bonjela.html
David Chiverton said...
19 Jul 10 at 10:28 am
I wouldn’t wory about not understanding it Charlotte, all the evidence suggests not one Tory candidate understood it during the election campaign. It’s just some fluffy notion which keeps escaping from Cameron’s brain from time to time.
Dave Gregory said...
19 Jul 10 at 10:31 am
Great blog. You have summed up the confusion in a way that confirms how utterly meaningless ‘the big society’ idea is. And here was me thinking it was a simple plan to shift the blame onto the general public, charities, local authorities (in fact everyone apart from central government) when it goes inevitably tits up.
ejoftheweb said...
19 Jul 10 at 11:12 am
The trouble is, politicians don’t really have time to do any serious thinking, because they’re too busy doing politics – cowering under Damocles’ sword. So they come up with meaningless idiotic soundbites like Big Society and Stakeholder Society – with no intellectual underpinning, just calculated to appeal to the right demographic. For the tories, town-hall bashing has always been nearly as much fun as brussels-bashing.
ThinBaldWizard said...
19 Jul 10 at 11:16 am
I think the underlying idea is that parents want their children to be well-educated…well, more often than not. Statistically, from an evolutionary point of view, they’re more likely to want it than anybody else is. One could therefore expect the new schools to focus on effective education, rather than whatever is flavour of the month in the bureacracy.
Over time, experimentally, they should therefore discover what works best, which will be of benefit to the state system. The investment of the parents is not their money, but the future of their children. Yes, I know plenty of parents manage to make a spectacular mess of that anyway, and I’m not saying it’s going to work, but as an attempt to break the log-jam of the present, hugely failing, system, I can see the reasoning behind it.
JuliaM said...
19 Jul 10 at 11:31 am
The ‘Daily Mash’ did a superb skit this morning, bearing out David Chiverton’s point about how little the Tory MPs understood it. I’d link, but I’m on the iPhone…
It’s just a catchy souvenirs that I expect iDave never really thought about having to make reality…
JuliaM said...
19 Jul 10 at 11:32 am
‘souvenirs’..?
Good god, Apple, the word was ‘soundbite’!
ejoftheweb said...
19 Jul 10 at 11:35 am
@ThinBaldWizard – of course, engaged middle-class parents want good education for their kids. Mostly, they get it (paying through fees or house-prices); it’s the kids of parents who aren’t or can’t be that engaged who don’t, who go to the shameful sink schools that Gove says free schools will get rid of.
And almost all the stifling educational bureaucracy (SATS, league tables, national curriculum) now comes from Whitehall, not townhall. Great to get rid of it, but don’t blame LEAs for it.
Free schools without the pupil premium will just be another way that pushy middle-class parents get to keep scary disruptive oiks out of their kids’ classrooms; funny how the pupil premium isn’t being pushed through in a week.
ThinBaldWizard said...
19 Jul 10 at 12:21 pm
@ejoftheweb – in my experience, engaged middle-class parents can screw their children up as spectacularly as anyone else! God knows one can push unhelpfully, but if you do want your children educated well, a certain amount of push is an elementary requirement.
Conversely, the “free” schools might (and there’s plenty to go wrong, but might) offer poor parents who want a better education for their children an escape from the sink schools. And I don’t see an argument for not wanting disruptive pupils excluded from a class.
This doesn’t address the issue of educating the disruptive pupils of course, who are most in need of it. And malfumctive parents are likely to be a major reason for their disruptiveness. If you see the Welfare State as a safety net, then remedial education should probably be the core of what the state system is doing. In general terms, these proposals seem consistent with that.
ejoftheweb said...
19 Jul 10 at 1:03 pm
@ThinBaldWizard Children of malfunctive parents need much more education – real resources, good committed teachers, discipline and motivation – than those of middle-class parents who read bedtime stories. The problem isn’t that the shameful sink schools are so bad, it’s that they’ve never had anywhere near enough resources to deal with their much more challenging intake. Teachers are demotivated by discipline problems and burn out earlier. This is the problem that the pupil premium is supposed to address. Without it, free schools will just increase segregation – which middle-class parents want – and make the sink schools worse. But to be effective it will need to be much bigger than Osborne will allow, and better targeted than just fsm-eligibility. So it’s a difficult policy, politically and fiscally, and I will be very surprised if it’s implemented in this Parliament, but without it, the market logic for free schools is utterly hollow.
Jill said...
19 Jul 10 at 3:22 pm
I don’t know if anyone here does anything voluntary in a local/community sense, rather than, say, do the odd Race for Life or shake a tin for the Air Ambulance in a non-organise-y way, but if *that* is what Dave has in mind, I can assure him nothing at all will get done! Nightjack’s evil poor won’t do anything so won’t get anything (some may say hooray to that, but personally I’m neutral). Everywhere else, Hyacinth Bucket will be in charge of EVERYTHING. It’s a truly terrifying thought. I say this on the back of experience as a school governor (three schools), PTA member, village hall committee member, social club committee member (cheap beer, hooray!) and parish councillor. I try my best, but Hyacinth and her pals enjoy a petty power battle that much, they fuck everything out of sight every single time. Dave, I’m afraid, is light years from the truth on the ground.
On the Fringe said...
19 Jul 10 at 8:06 pm
Big Society my arse.Our Dave wants us to join in
some big push for responsible citizenship,at the
same time treating 11 million adults like plague ridden rats,just because they smoke. Go away, Dave and your fellow travellers, you’re not even going to get
a foot on the first rung of big ideas untill you
start spreading a bit of freedom and choice.
And for good measure any dipstick joining in Dave’s
jamboree will soon find their cowtowing endeavours
spoilt by those who are pushed into the gutter
All in or none in.
Its that simple.
Radical Chav
Andrew Zalotocky said...
19 Jul 10 at 8:25 pm
The cynical interpretation is that the “Big Society” is just a way of building up a pro-Conservative client state through patronage. Like Labour’s expansion of the state bureaucracy and the welfare system it would give lots of people a financial interest in keeping a particular party in power.
The charitable explanation is that the Cleggerons really do want to promote the growth of voluntary associations independent of the state but just don’t know how to do it. They’ve heard all the Hannan/Carswell arguments for localism, but they belong to a political culture that is so statist in its assumptions that they cannot really conceive of any system that isn’t ultimately run by central government. So the “Big Society” is the Ministry of Civil Society, offering a centrally planned localism run by Sir Humphrey.
My guess is that the truth is a mixture of the two.
Dilettante said...
20 Jul 10 at 1:24 am
I take a stab at explaining it here.
Roger Thornhill said...
20 Jul 10 at 1:31 pm
@Jill “but Hyacinth and her pals enjoy a petty power battle that much, they fuck everything out of sight every single time”
Just as Reginald Smallpiece at the Town Hall does.
We need PLURALITY and that is something the State – and Cameron – does not “do”.
Plurality means the worst gets bypassed and not so bad steps in. It tends to ratchet up quality most of the time. It is not perfect, but it is a damn sight less imperfect than any planned system over time*.
* now and again good things can pop out, but eventually it gets screwed up.
Ambush Predator: Yes, Beetle Tastes Nothing Like Chicken, but… « Feed said...
23 Jul 10 at 3:57 am
[...] Charlotte Gore Blog The Big Society Explained? You Wish! 2 days [...]
George Thomas said...
24 Jul 10 at 2:24 am
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Jock said...
25 Jul 10 at 7:56 pm
Fifteen million good, wholesome adult citizens all members of the same giant co-operative – what can possibly be wrong about that?
I find it all more sinister personally. The idea is to put an enthusiastic volunteer representative of the state, via the proxy of the 15 million member co-op that is the Big Society Network’s ambition, in every other household, curtain twitching on their (obviously less wholesome) neighbours and acting as the agents of “nudges” being passed down as “best practices” from the “elected board” at the centre of the 15 million member co-op.
“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” is the doctrine it comes out of IMO.
Jack Hughes said...
25 Jul 10 at 9:12 pm
The German word for “community organizer” is Gauleiter…
Steve Tierney said...
27 Jul 10 at 4:10 pm
It’s just the rolling back of the Big State with an innocuous name so as not to get the socialists all antsy. Though that hasn’t really worked.
Some sections of the public are addicted to the state. It has been force-fed them for thirteen years and they’ve begun to believe that they need it. It’s a wicked trick.
Libertarians should be jumping for joy. But they wont. Because the last decade has ground cynicism into their every pore. “It can’t be what it says! It just can’t!”.
I think (and hope) it is.
Rick said...
11 Aug 10 at 10:15 pm
Thanks for this opportunity folks. Just wanted to clarify that some ‘BIG’ Socialists like me are still here and very ‘antsy’ indeed to anything Tory with ‘Society’ in the title. Or for that matter New Labour or Lib Dem. We saw through Cameron’s lie the second he uttered it.
Two things depress me beyond reason. The first is the idea that politics somehow stops at Parliamentary Democracy and our current corrupt Party system. Bit like the only choice in Tesco is ‘The Sweet Counter’. Tempting but very bad for you.
The other is this. For 30 years (not thirteen) it has disgusted me that I live in a pityfully small society in which a few can spend £40.0000 on just the drinks bill in a West End Restaurant. Whilst an elderly person can struggle to find £400.00 for the winters heating bill.
Thanks to Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and Clegg that vile inequity is about to get a whole lot worse.
If you want Liberterian, try New York and the US health system. But be sure to carry the obligatory gun. If Britain goes any more right wing it is off the cliff.
Jock said...
11 Aug 10 at 10:26 pm
US health system, “libertarian”?
Who told you that? And what made you believe them?
Psi said...
12 Aug 10 at 10:07 pm
Jock –
The voices told him. The voices, can’t you hear them…
Sorry you can’t? Someone must have turned off the BBC.
Rick said...
13 Aug 10 at 11:05 pm
Cheers good people, I even love the dig on the BBC. Tempted as I am to think voices from ‘Fox News’ may have prompted that. I think we all know better in both cases.
Just wanted to help join up dots maybe. Nothing complicated, difficult or mysterious about Cameron’s (or Clegg’s)’Big Society’.
It really is ever so simple. Cameron, Clegg, Blair and Brown golfing with their chums in the city. One says to the other ‘how can we sell off what is left of the welfare state and make even more mega bucks. ‘Whatever we do’someone say’s’ it has to have the ‘S’ word in it somewhere to fool the buggers’
Yes in that sense the US Healthcare system is the worst of libertarian. A free for all were the poor die younger. The rich just grow older.
My definition though is even more simple.
You are as free and liberated as the least free and liberated you share this planet with.
It is far worse than you think. Not the BBC. Marx
Jock said...
13 Aug 10 at 11:44 pm
Rick,
“Yes in that sense the US Healthcare system is the worst of libertarian.”
…is just nonsense. There is nothing whatever libertarian about the US health care system. It is chock full of state intervention, on behalf of insurance companies, on behalf of medical practitioners’ professional bodies, on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, on behalf of lawyers and the punitive medical damages industry, even on behalf of individuals for demanding that others pay for non-insurable lifestyle “conditions” that are not life threatening but that they want others to be emotionally inured to paying for – such as IVF and similar.
The US medical industry is fully part of the corporatocracy, nothing to do with libertarianism. And sadly, we have just seen an opportunity for an administration to do what it was apparently elected to do – to stand up for ordinary people and bust apart this coterie of cronies and it has failed miserably.
If you want to understand the libertarian view of healthcare, try Kevin Carson at the Freeman.
Rick said...
14 Aug 10 at 11:14 pm
Eh Jock, thanks for the links. I will look them up. It’s late right now so forgive my not looking at them yet.
Though from what you say;
‘It is chock full of state intervention, on behalf of insurance companies, on behalf of medical practitioners’
We do actually agree maybe. My point about the ‘Big Society’ crap is exactly that. The state is in league with the worst of private, and increasingly public, healthcare. It has been for decades. That is what is wrong.
The State
‘I think I am dying’ – ‘OK, what is your credit card number’…….What happened to our humanity? Tell me please.
Yes I still do call that a ‘Libertarian free for all’. Every man and woman for him/herself according to their abilty to pay. Not on how they may trip out a Beethoven Piano Sonata. Stuff that really does change lives.
‘We are in a lifeboat. There is one loaf of bread. We can fight over it, we can barter it, or we can share it’
Lot’s of liberty in sharing I find.
Cheers.
Jock said...
15 Aug 10 at 12:04 am
…and you think that notwithstanding decades (I would say centuries) of evidence, you think that can be changed? When will the idea of flogging a dead horse strike you as relevant.
Then it is linguistically sloppy and economically illiterate. If state intervention increases the costs of healthcare, so too does it also decrease our earning power. Not only would more people be able to afford the same healthcare without that corporatocracy, but since promoting that corporatocracy takes money from all of us and channels it via the state into their cronies, it *increases* the number of people who cannot afford things on their own.
Lifeboat situations are hardly representative. Let’s suppose the bread will keep one person alive for a week, and we are a week away from rescue. What human benefit has sharing it so that all will die before rescue achieved? See how lifeboat situations require a little more than your simplistic “altruist” credo.
A bunch of people ganging up to take, by threat of force or loss of liberty, resources from others is not “sharing”.
Rick said...
15 Aug 10 at 10:28 pm
I am getting the idea now. Bit slow sorry. It seems if I said that chair was green, you would just quip in seconds that it is orange. Defensive and vitriolic. Deconstructing and opposing every sentence I write. With about as much courtiesness, interest or thought as that bloody chair.
Ever tried a parachute? Like the mind it functions best when it is open.
I have just read your links. Yes some of it made me think. I could send you a dozen links in return. Little point there though I feel though old chum, is there?. The stuff about the spiralling costs caused by vested interests really grabbed me. Why does healthcare have to be so expensive?
It may have escaped your notice but Obama (I am no defender of him) had to sweat blood against the Republican right and the gangster US healthcare companies to even tinker with reform.
This world is run by gangsters. Unlike you maybe I do not accept it has to be that way
Something troubles me very much with your kind of liberalism and liberty. You know the cost of everything it seems. But the value and humanity of nothing.
The lifeboat analogy is so relevant today (Pakistan Floods). Maybe you are a flat earther? Most probably a climate change denier. Whatever keeps you happy in your ignorance, go for it. But please whatever you do do not share my lifeboat. I have a habit of wanting to eat.
‘When I feed the poor they call me a Saint. When I ask why have the poor no food they call me a communist’
Achbishop Camara
Jock said...
15 Aug 10 at 10:44 pm
I do not believe it “has to be that way”. I believe it will be that way so long as we have the state interfering, most often for the benefit of its cronies against those who think they (nowadays) control it by voting.
Obama was elected by people. Millions of them. Apparently they wanted health care reform. He had that mandate. Do you not think that exposing and destroying the cronyism in the system rather than taking even more money from the people as individuals with the threat of force in order to make a bloated system broken with the collusion of the state over several generations slightly less broken would have been possible? The outcome is absolutely outrageous. It will be an even bigger flow of money from real people to healthcare crony capitalists.
If you think it would not have been possible, then what is the point of democracy and a mandate from people to attack the vested interests? If you think it would have been possible, why did he not do it, unless it is that his interests are in fact not on the side of the people who elected him but the lobbyists and cronies.
Either way, the state is part of the problem not part of the solution.
When the Webbs went into East London and did their report on poverty and squalor there, the emotional reaction was that this was terrible and we needed to increase the state to ensure this didn’t happen. In fact it was being pointed out at the time that the London Building Act of 1844 had priced builders out of housing for the poor by insisting on not just particular standards that the people had not asked for, but also on using particular materials on which tariffs were higher than equally suitable alternative materials.
I fear the same will happen with the current progress toward the eco-building codes. Housing completions at the end of the scale that ordinary folk can compete for will remain woefully low because the technology is expensive. Then what – oh yes, massive state intervention will be required, channeling subsidy directly into the pockets of builders and manufacturers of eco-build materials.
I read a book just for you today actually – or at least part of one. “State Socialism or Anarchism” – it’s make your mind up time!
Rick said...
17 Aug 10 at 11:44 pm
Thanks for that Jock, anyone who maybe proves me wrong when I question their humanity is worth talking to. Quoting the Webbs experience like that tells me you are leagues better read than I am. Just found earlier it was a mite too personal and vitriolic for my own good. I hope I question the argument and not the person. Where does one end and the other begin? Please do not answer that. Even if you can. It’s just after a few beatings, not the idealogical form, I guess it makes me cautious.
Make your mind up time? No problem there with the two choices you offer. Neither. Though you omit a third option. Rampant naked Capitalism. The Lib Dem Coalition. Given the green light by New Labour. The one maybe you were born into. Post Thatcher. Before that I have to confess a sort of post war social consensus dragged me up and made me who I am. Yes now I question it. But compared to the day I live in it was at least Socialist in that some of us still valued each other and this planet. Actually I now know it was patronising liberalism. Still thankful for it and grieve it’s loss.
So what is your future? What nirvana shall we live in?
There is something else other than State Socialist. It has never been tried. Stalin, Trotsky and Mao were war criminals practiceing state capitalism. Marx and Engels are still turning in their grave I imagine.
All I know is on that lifeboat I hope to god I would be a Socialist. Not altruistic. My survival depends on yours. It works both ways.
Sandwich anybody?
Rick said...
20 Aug 10 at 11:31 pm
So what about it? Putting any of your money where our mouth is?
Spending review 20th October. General Strike or will you sit on your arse in the ‘lifeboat’. Just expecting to be fed or indeed fighting/trading/killing for the crumbs left to us?
Hope to meet you on the picket lines. Unlike the lifeboat it can be a very fine place to live still.
‘They do not like it up em’
Rick said...
24 Aug 10 at 10:11 pm
http://www.mikemarqusee.com/?p=1059
Just about says the lot. Though I imagine by now in this discussion others think I have no mind or mouth and I fear they have ‘Wallet’s and purses’ for ears.
Forget the lifeboat. Relevant as it is. Think of a mine miles under the ground in Chile right now. 19 days and still it seems all are alive. Why. They shared what they had. Dignity in life and/or death.
Anything other than Socialism is just an excuse for naked greed. Yes we have our scroungers too. Most in the City who like Murdoch get rich from spinning lies about us.
General Strike in October. Cut the liberal crap.
Jock said...
24 Aug 10 at 10:21 pm
Far better…
http://jockcoats.me/what_mutualism_my_ideological_bible
ejoftheweb said...
25 Aug 10 at 6:59 am
Rick,
It gives me the screaming abdabs just thinking about those guys in that mine…. a truly amazing story. But it’s not about socialism.
The difference is that those 19 people each agreed to share their resources, whereas under socialism it would be forced on them. And in every self-proclaimed socialist state in history, the people doing the forcing would have helped themselves to a few extra spoonfuls of tuna each time.
You can’t just ignore selfishness and greed. You can try and suppress it, which usually just brings it out in another form somewhere else, or you can try and make it work for everyone, which is what liberal capitalism does, not always very effectively. But you can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist.
(And you know, without wanting to decry those heroes underground, I’d be surprised if none of them ever tried to sneak an extra spoonful for themselves).
Rick said...
26 Aug 10 at 10:12 pm
Thoughtful stuff ejo, anything that tries to ‘force’ Socialism onto people is not Socialism. Historically it is ‘State Capitalism’ Socialism has yet to be tried. It has to come from below. ‘From each and every man’. Lenin. He stressed that so often. From each and every man. Just wish he had included women in that. A man of his time I guess.
A few well meaning (some not) Marxist’s bravely seize the state. With little following. The state takes over the means of production. All we have known is just another capitalist tyranny. As bad as Hitler. Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and the rest a testament to it.
Capitalism is still the problem. Yours and mine. However liberals may tinker and try to temper and apologise for it.
Quote – (And you know, without wanting to decry those heroes underground, I’d be surprised if none of them ever tried to sneak an extra spoonful for themselves). – unquote
Yes of course. First because they breathed a free liberal capitalist culture of ‘each for themselves’. Secondly because they are bloody trapped down there because of the bosses naked greed. Safety gone to the wind. Naked exploitation that you and I benefit from every day. Thirdly – because if you put people into cages do not be surprised if they behave like monkeys.
Both human nature and nurture are based on the prison we are born into.
I have no doubt however we will soon read of some in the mine who maybe gave up their life for others. You cannot supress the heart and human nature. You can pervert it. Not heroes. Socialists.
Just imagine not being born into a prison! However liberal the guards