This post has been abridged:

Thought 1:

Machiavelli is out of date – there’s a new truism when it comes to the successfully holding onto power: No longer is it better to be feared than loved. Now, I think, it is better not to be thought of at all.

Thought 2:

If a collective wants ruin and damnation, that’s what the collective gets. I’m looking at the Middle East and I don’t know whether the people there will get what they want – or, if they do, whether they will like it once they have it.

As a child, death meant Jesus coming down from Heaven and taking someone away with him on a cloud. It also meant lying flat on your back, arms spread into a T shape, eyes crossed and tongue lolling, a child’s cartoon interpretation.

Occasionally I would perform this pantomime, every time disappointed by my lack of success. Perhaps, I thought, I moved. I breathed. I did something to give myself away. I just didn’t understand.

As a teenager, it meant the mysterious disappearance of a sad but much loved relative and a complete reordering of the family to adapt to new circumstances. I didn’t understand.

In my twenties death meant drug overdoses, car crashes and gunshots: Life lived so close to the edge that one simply fell off. Death was just around the corner and I was never afraid. I suppose I just didn’t understand.

Now, in my thirties, death means getting some news from a doctor and, after going under a knife, you get drugs that, after a while, make you wish you were dead. Sometimes the universe obliges, other times it does not.

This time it’s not me. This time it’s a friend, not a friend of a friend, or the relative of a friend. Suddenly I understand a terrible disease, understand what ‘The Big C’ really means and suddenly this disease is a part of my cosy, comfortable little world and finally, at last, I think I’m starting to really understand what mortality really means. Perhaps, in ten years, I’ll see that I did not.

It seems late in life to be learning these lessons. Life, it seems, isn’t just what you make of it.

I freely admit I still have no idea what the Big Society is. I know that, from the Government’s point of view, it’s about trying to get people to volunteer to fix things they feel passionately about rather than relying on the Government to do everything for them. Such a cultural shift would go a long way towards the ever increasing size of the British State, and the near limitless reach that it has.

Speaking of ‘near limitless reach’ they’re setting up a new Bank. Hurrah! Not an evil bank like the Big Four, though. No, this is going to be the Big Society Bank – The Little Bank with a Big Heart. It’s a new Quango, obviously, and won’t lend to businesses directly – it will, instead, lend to… er… investors.. and funds… and things. Those investors will then lend to ‘social enterprises’ and ‘New Green Industry Of The Future’ which, in turn, will create the Big Society.

So that’s the plan. The money it lends out, quite obviously, is your money. At least to start with. The contents of your dormant bank accounts are being confiscated cos, well, they can. That’ll raise them £100 to £400 million, which I’m sure they’ll be very pleased with. Then, after that money’s been used, they’ll begin buying money from the other main commercial banks at commercial rates.

Essentially, then, the Big Society Bank is a middleman between high risk investors – and the actual banks who, currently, because they have this legal obligation to make money for their shareholders, cannot even think about lending to The Green Industries Of The Future or Social Enterprises.

Such a state of affairs is considered a “Market Failure”, or “a politically inconvenient outcome”. The Big Society Bank, then, will step in place between the Investors and the Banks. When it makes a loss, as it inevitably will, it will be the taxpayer that makes up the difference. That £100m float money – which, again, is your money – won’t last very long.

Yet the Government is insistent that the Big Society Bank won’t make a loss, that it will pay for itself and from it will bloom the businesses of the Future.

If this is true, the obvious question is this: Why is Government having to set up a Bank like this? Wouldn’t it be more ‘Big Society’ if people did this themselves?

There’s two possible reasons. The first is that the barrier to entry into UK banking is as steep as they come. Not even Richard Branson can get a banking licence. Alan Sugar? No chance. Virtually every banking brand you see belongs to one of the Big Four banks, using their operating licence.

In addition to the sheer nightmare and cost of getting a banking licence, the current climate surrounding banks means that our new people powered Big Hearted Bank would be subject to the same levies, the same tax regime, the same regulatory structure. The need to make enormous quantities of money just to stay afloat would override all other concerns.

The second reason is this: Banks are only lending – when they lend at all – to very low risk enterprises at the moment. Green Tech and Social Enterprise are very, very, very high risk. No bank could survive with a portfolio comprised entirely of long shots and losers and charity cases, but the new bank won’t even be doing that – they’ll be putting your money into the hands of other people that are utterly detached from the source of the money or the people who underwrite it – that’s you, by the way. They’ll hope that the Investors are wise and clever and able to pick out the winners and losers with an unerring degree of accuracy.

As far as a business strategy goes, it’s not a very strong one. In fact, I suspect the only people who’d lend me money to start such a bank (if I were foolish enough to attempt it) would be… I guess… The Big Society Bank itself.

This fact is, I think, important. I think it’s the crux of the matter.

Of course, the bank – and most importantly the Government – won’t be to blame when the Big Four demand their money back when The Big Society Bank goes bust. The companies who ultimately spend the money won’t get the blame, either – after all, they’ll have tried their best. No, it’ll be the “evil” speculators and investors who will get the blame. It’s all very neat. Win win for everyone, obviously. Politicians AND banks! Everyone!

Now, will someone please explain what the difference between the Big State and the Big Society is because, from here, I can’t see it. This looks like protectionism and planning: reinvented and rebranded, but ultimately the same toxic mess it always proves to be.

Despite the radical change in perceptions of the state of the country in the eyes of supporters and opponents of the current Government, very little has actually changed and, when all is said and done very little will have changed by the time they leave.

We will still be a nation fighting amongst ourselves over who gets the money and who has to pay – the sight of students acting as self-righteous citizen tax collectors demanding enough money from Vodafone to subsidise their own tuition fees illustrates this with depressing clarity.

The machinery of Britain’s surveillance state remains in place, the civil liberties we lost under Labour haven’t been restored and judging by the hideous exercise in double-think that the new Control Order system has turned out to be it would be unwise to expect much, if anything, from this particular Government.

We’re still a heavily taxed, heavily regulated country dominated by vested interests. That’s certainly not going to change under the Coalition.

And, most importantly, the majority of people seem to believe that if something’s worth having, the Government should pay for it. Dependence, we’re told, is not a sign of failure. There’s no shame, it is said, in relying on your fellow man.

Well, I think this is wrong.

Whilst it’s true that the vast majority of people will not really notice much difference between the state of the country at the end of this term of Government and the end of the last term, a small minority – the losers in the current reallocation of resources – will feel some quite striking changes in their own lives. There’s always winners and losers when Governments change hands and the winners of today are tomorrow’s losers

One group who’ll feel it most sharply are those who’ll have to move home as a result of Housing Benefit caps. Moving home is always a stressful, unpleasant experience and to combine that with the humiliation of having to leave a house because the taxpayer is no longer willing to pay such a steep rent (with the implication that the tenant has been greedy and inconsiderate of the taxpayer in choosing their current home)… well it’s safe to say I have some sympathy. I’m not entirely inhuman, it turns out, but that doesn’t mean to say I’m against the housing benefit caps or that this should be stopped.

Instead I’m going to use this as an example to illustrate that “there’s nothing wrong with being dependant on others” is as disgusting a lie as ever there was.

Living in a house on Housing Benefit is not, and never could be, a like for like substitute for owning your own home.

By asking someone else to pay your rent, you surrender control. You live in property that costs no more than the person paying is willing to pay, or you make up the difference yourself. You can’t hold the person paying to a guarantee to pay indefinitely. You lose, automatically, the ability to control how long you live in a particular property because you have placed such matters in the hands of someone else. You are, literally, at their mercy.

This is, by its very nature, is not a very attractive state of affairs to find yourself in – having been through it myself several times I know it to be utterly degrading, humiliating and destructive to what little self-esteem I have… but it is the price of getting for free what others have to work to pay for. You trade your dignity and your autonomy for it, and you hope and pray that the person in control isn’t a sadist who takes pleasure in abusing those who have no choice but to suffer whatever is inflicted.

In a polite, civilised society we prefer to leave this reality unspoken. We understand that there are people who have no choice but to take whatever they can get in order simply to survive, and it seems callous and cruel to compound the simple fact of having to live this way with reminding them that it is so.

By asking them to move somewhere cheaper, however, the Government has indeed reminded us all that it is so. Their cruelty is in exposing the lie that people who get to live in posh parts of London that normal people couldn’t hope to afford are somehow ‘lucky’. They are not.

This, they say, is the evil of Capitalism, this edge case of what happens to people who don’t have the means to support the lifestyle they’re actually living without charity from others.

Yet the alternative proposed is that the right to use money to take control and achieve autonomy is removed from all, to throw all of humanity into collectively owned housing with rent being a matter of what one can afford to pay, entirely disconnected from how much a particular property – or more likely room within a property – is worth, and where one lives becomes a matter of where you’re told to live and how much influence you have with the people who make such decisions. This is what the abolition of private property actually means.

Then we’d be equal? Then it’d be better? I think not.

It’s quite one thing to live in a society that grants people who live on welfare a certain measure of dignity and chooses – yes, chooses – not to be wilfully cruel or sadistic. It’s quite another to assume this means that there’s no difference between dependence and independence.