Anyone seen the Big Society?

 

It's getting serious.

Cameron's biggest wheeze has gone missing. The committee running the Big Society has not met for 11 months. The guru Lord Wei fled his job and has not been replaced. Leaderless, rudderless, clueless. Is it terminal?

It was a 'Dead wheeze walking'. Has it now stopped walking?

Early tomorrow I will be on local radio in Warwickshire in my mission to find if the final remounts of the Big Society are twitching or stone dead. One of the select committees on which I serve recently reported on the condition of the wheeze - not quite rigor mortis yet, but any day now. 

In Warwickshire up to 18 libraries were threatened by Government closures. Many will close. They have summoned up Cameron's Big Society to rescue. There is  hope that small sums of Big Society cash will rescue them. The sums are meagre. Not enough to run a staffed library. An attempt may be made to run one withe volunteers. It may work with the first flush of enthusiasm for perhaps six months. If they are exceptionally dedicated, perhaps it will continue for twelve months. Then disagreements and disillusionment will set in and the volunteers will drift away.

It's all part of the Big Society confidence trick. Cut £3 billion from good causes. Hand £42 million back as a gesture of generosity.  The full big disillusionment with the Big Society will come in a few years time.  Just right for the country's vote in the 2015 General Election.

 

Comments

[DG]

Perhaps when he quietly drops the BS, Cameron will also quietly come to the realisation that underclass idleness is far less of a problem for the Treasury than middle-class tax avoidance

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/feb/16/civil-servants-union-tax-schemes

I can't imagine that the scale of it in the civil service is anywhere near the scale of it in the private sector.

[HuwOS]

You are rather assuming DG that Cameron doesn't know that underclass idleness is a nearly non existent problem.
Every part of everything that helps to balance both society and the economy is pretty much anathema to modern tory economic theory, especially if it works efficiently.

The standard approach is to tinker with it to make it as inefficient and useless as possible, then scrap it for being inefficient and useless.

Welfare is for corporations and other large or influential business, anyone else is scrounging and taking the bread out of the mouths of heard working taxpayers.

They have the police alternating between working for virginmedia or working for the lobbying organisations for movie studios and record labels. That's what the state is there for after all. To outsource civil law issues to the criminal justice system represents a massive saving for these companies while becoming a fairly massive burden to everyone else.Result!
Shortly they should be able to provide free labour en masse to the supermarkets thereby doing away with the need for the supermarkets to have to employ so many part time workers, with gold plated 16 hour a week minimum wage contracts.

Workers, free at the point of use, captive to the new right's policies.
Ah, if only there was a labour party.

[DG]

That was rather optimistic of me, wasn't it?

Hopefully the adverse publicity of accepting corporate welfare will mean this practice is halted soon.

[DG]

Just read in the Guardian that Tesco are asking the Government to remove the loss of benefits threat. They don't listen on moral grounds and they don't listen to the economic arguments, but I'll bet the farm they'll be all ears once a corporate interest is seen to be threatened.

[HuwOS]

"We have suggested to DWP that to avoid any misunderstanding about the voluntary nature of the scheme, this threat of losing benefit should be removed." - Tesco

It's probably just me, but threats and coercion were never to my understanding any part of the concept of voluntary.
So, for me, it wouldn't be matter of any potential misperception or misunderstanding.

[D.G.]

"We have suggested to the DWP that to avoid any further understanding of the non-voluntary nature of the scheme, this threat of losing benefit should be removed as it's damaging our brand"

There you go Tesco, fixed it for you!

Still in an optimistic vein (must be the lighter nights coming in), perhaps this is the future of the fight against worker exploitation.

It's almost impossible to fight for your own rights as an employee/contractor/human resource but as consumers, we can fight for the rights of others and hopefully they will fight for ours in return. Reminds me of the Roman legionaires who used their sheild to defend their neighbour on their left from attack and relied on their neighbour on the right in return.

[Ad]

Other companies like Matalan have been pulling out from their involvement with workfare too.

Even the Mail has been criticising this scheme:

This is not wartime Nazi Germany and Cameron's attacks on the vulnerable and needy must be stopped

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2102484/This-wartime-Nazi-Germany-Camerons-attacks-vulnerable-needy-stopped.html#ixzz1ml9MeT2l

[HuwOS]

Wow, the Daily Mail hurling accusations of Nazism at right wing policies.
This isn't April is it?

[DG]

I was very cheered by the pattern I saw in the comments too - the compassionate ones had likes, whilst the lazy-minded "scroungers" narratives were voted down. Maybe folk have got tired of hating.