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.