by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
I do not say that they were elected to govern as neither of the parties got a real workable majority, but that is a different issue.
Talk about the “Big Society” is increasing more and more in the beginning of 2011 as the government is cutting is cutting back services on a national and local level due to spending cuts and the attempt of tackling the deficit in the national coffers. The Cameron-Clegg coalition hopes that volunteers will step into the breach here where government services will no longer provide. And this in a country where successive governments have always treated the people as imbeciles and children.
Successive British governments have always detested empowering the people of the country, be this in creating their own habitats and homes or in running their own affairs. And on top of that all comes that the inherent secrecy culture in the UK governed by the Official Secrets Act 1911 Section 2 which is used as a blanket to cover everything possible that should never have been included.
So, what am I saying, you ask?
Personally I will have to be really convinced that what I am hearing David Cameron, the Prime Minister, say on this matter is also what he actually thinks and means. Britain just has a bad track record of empowering the grassroots regardless of what party has been in power. This is why I am so very sceptic here as far as this “Big Society” idea of his goes.
I am also concerned that it will be (i) done in a rather top down approach of “we need you to do this” and (ii) that those volunteers will be, intended, primarily, to run charity versions of what were government services.
Not that, probably, there is anything wrong with the latter in some fields, say in citizen advice, after school facilities for kids, and such. In fact, there are, more than likely, masses of services that would be better run by charities and volunteers, in both care, etc., and value for money.
Volunteers are, in general, enthusiastic as regards to what they do and highly motivated and care for the task; not something that could be said of every government worker in general. Many of the latter are just there, it would seem, to draw their salary and that's it. Clock in in the morning and out at night and home.
I am not saying that the “Big Society” idea and concept is bad. On the contrary! I think it is more than time that the people did get away from the notion that the government has to do everything for them.
In the centuries past when government was far away people did just that and they also looked out for one another. That's what community was and is all about. Over the last century or so, however, government has become ever bigger and ever more pervasive and invasive and people abdicated responsibility to the governments, local and central for this and that, in the same way that the abdicated and delegated the upbringing of their children to the state in the form of the school system. People have come to look to the state to do for everything short of wiping their behinds.
When a neighborhood is, say, full of litter residents immediately complain to the council and demand that that is immediately cleaned and cleared. This litter is down to everyone who live in that neighborhood and thus should be the responsibility of the residents but such a thought would, in today's society, never enter their minds. “That's what we pay our taxes for,” is the usual outcry.
The grass verges in our roads needs cutting, they say, never even even considering that all they'd need to to is to take their mower to the verge in the front of their homes when they cut the lawn. Some do, I admit, but the great majority just scream at the council.
It is these little things that anyone could do, and would do, if but someone would start is and set the ball rolling that make a neighborhood a community.
The one thing that bothers me with David Cameron's “Big Society” idea is that it is government putting it forwards and it was not conceived at the grassroots level of society and could, therefore, be seen as a means for government to band aid the cuts.
What worries me, aside from the afore, is that despite all the rhetoric from Cameron and Clegg, the “Big Society” will not really empower communities and individuals to do things in their way and to do the things that are neede where the people live.
Real empowerment of people is something the British government has always been afraid of as it would mean people actually doing and being able to do things for themselves without government having the control.
If this is going to happen and they really want it then I guess the fires have gone out in hell and winter has arrived down there. I find that about as likely as Silvio Berlusconi becoming a communist.
Can you just imagine the people of the UK running their own affairs. This is a total anathema to the modern state and is something that politicians detest because it undermines their power and control over the people.
It would be really nice if we could reduce the state and its interference in our lives to what it really only should be but I am not about to hold my breath. Blue may suit me by way of color for clothing and such but not in face.
In addition to the state relinquishing the power that should not be its I am hard pressed to see the majority of the subjects of Her Majesty to actually do things for themselves, even if they had the “right” to do so, and for their community and for society as a whole.
Most are way too much in this “entitlement society” mode believing that they are entitled to this and that as a right and that they have to do nothing for themselves. After all, they say, we pay our taxes so therefore we are entitled to this all.
The idea of the “Big Society” – I just wish Cameron & Co had chosen a better term – have been implemented for years already in “alternative” communities up and down the country and around the globe and in so-called Transition Towns. It can be done but it cannot be decreed from the top like the “solidarity” idea in former Soviet Russia and the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), for instance, though, to a great degree it did work, the “solidarity” thing, I mean. Many people of the former German Democratic Republic hunger back to that now.
Despite the Ministry of State Security (Stasi), etc., the GDR had a sense of community, it would seem, in most places, even in blocks of housing, and people looked after each other. I put this also down to the fact that there was no “keeping up with the Joneses” going on as things were, basically, all the same, and theoretically, everyone only could have the basic stuff that could be bought. Not that that always worked and was thus but... I digressed.
While, as I have said, I do like the very concept of the “Big Society” of empowering the people I have serious reservations that (i) this is going to work by having Whitehall tell us and (ii) that people believe that the state is there to do everything for them and that it is what they pay taxes for.
The point is that we should be (allowed to be) doing things for ourselves and not expect the state to do everything for us. But there are two sides here as well in that government has been telling us all the time to look to the “authorities” to do everything for us and the other one that, as I have said already, because they pay taxes, they are entitled to have everything done for them by the state.
The idea of the “Big Society”, sorry about the name, I didn't coin it, and the things it is supposed to achieve, I think, is good and the aims are great but I am not sure as to, and that is what I have been trying to say here, whether the government can get the people enthused about it.
If it would have been something that had originated in a broad demand from grassroots level then my scepticism would be less to nonexistent but as it comes, more or less from the top down and seen to primarily address the existing charities and such, I do not think that the people will follow. I hope I am wrong, but...
© 2011
