The Guardian reports that even the Tories aren’t convinced by David Cameron’s “big society” message.
This is unsurprising. The idea is that lots of people should volunteer and take over the role of the state in supplying social services. There will be no law to back this up, no provision to let people have time off work to do this, no compensation for their effort.
It’s a ludicrous idea. It assumes a world in which there is a class of very able people who do not need to work for a living, who want to give and do not wish to consume, and who will make sound judgement for all without direction of control of any sort to make sure optimal outcomes result.
This world does not exist.
It harks back to the time of a rentier class.
To a time when business owners, professio0nal people, medics and so on could spend most afternoons either on the golf course or sitting on the odd charitable committee to pass the time whilst their minions made the profit for them.
To a time of non-working wives.
To a time when mortgages were small.
To a time when “I consume, therefore I am” was not the mantra for living.
Jonathan Raban deconstructs the idea beautifully in an article for the London Review of Books entitled “Cameron’s Crank” — a title referring to Philip Blond, the so called “Red Tory” who I admit I steered clear of when he sought to make overtures to the Tax Justice Network on his way to becoming Cameron’s darling. As he notes:
Stripped of its obscurantist rhetoric and foggy sermonising, Red Tory issues a moral licence to government to free itself from the expensive business of dispensing social services and to dump them on the ‘third sector’ of charities, voluntary organisations, non-profits and the like. It won’t make Britain a more virtuous, civil, courteous or moral society. It certainly won’t restore us to that happy state of grace and comity in which, apparently, we all lived in medieval times.
That’s a good summary of the absurdity, and impossibility, of this idea.
No wonder it’s being rejected.
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As someone who is naturally inclined to support them, I must say that Cameron and Osbourne (in particular the latter, who I understand to be the chief strategist for the Tories) are unbelievably lightweight and have utterly misjudged the election.
But when this election is done and dusted, I think everyone needs to think very carefully about whether we want TV debates in future. It is scandalous that the LibDems have ben marginalised by parliament and the press for so long, and it is good that the debates have given them an opportunity to present themselves to the public. But I do fear that it leads to presedential style leadership and a focus on presentational skills that in the medium term won’t help anybody.
Or it may just be that I’m grumpy because I can now see that in future all politicians will be younger and better looking than me.
Richard,
To a time when “I consume, therefore I am” was not the mantra for living.
Outside of the everything is “free” crowd (think TR-UK and their fellow travellers) and those on benefits (courtesy of the everything is “free” crowd), exactly who has this mantra?
Georges
I think the combination of the Daily Telegraph’s crusade on MPs expenses and the TV debates may have – in the most accidental and unlikely fashion – become a catalyst for fundamental political change in this country.
The Telegraph started the ball rolling because they got people so pissed off with the status quo that they wanted to elect somebody – anybody – who promised something new. And the TV debates built on that because they gave Clegg a platform to say “I’m something new” and have several million people actually hear the message.
Unless the Tories can pull something out of the bag we’re looking at Labour-Lib Dem coalition once this election is over. An opportunity for fundamental change in British politics has been brought to the fore completely by accident. If it happens it’ll be the political equivalent of winning the lottery. I just hope that the Lib Dems don’t crumble under pressure in the last 2 weeks of the campaign…
Georges
Just about the whole of society – driven by corporate lobby and financial services industry which both wish to enslave people through debt driven over consumption fuelled by advertising
Read http://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Consuming-Neal-Lawson/dp/0141029412
Richard