Britain's Prime Minister, David Cameron
While fighting the last General Election in the UK, Conservative leader, David Cameron, put forward the idea of the Big Society. During the election campaign he didn’t go into many details about it, perhaps he hadn’t worked them out at that point.
Now he’s Prime Minister in a coalition goverment with the Liberal Democrats, he has just launched his plan and told us how it’s going to work.
Instead of problems being solved by central government or local councils, volunteers will come together to work towards solutions. Each group will put forward their proposals to the ‘Big Society Bank’, and will receive funding if the ideas are accepted. The BS Bank will get its money from dormant bank accounts, ie those bank accounts that have had no transactions on them for at least 15 years. I wonder what will happen when a savings book or old bank statement is unearthed and the bank account holder or their heirs wants the money from the dormant account.
This is how it works, according to the transcript of his speech on July 19, 2010.
First, social action.
The success of the Big Society will depend on the daily decisions of millions of people – on them giving their time, effort, even money, to causes around them.
So government cannot remain neutral on that – it must foster and support a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy, social action.
Second, public service reform.
We’ve got to get rid of the centralised bureaucracy that wastes money and undermines morale.
And in its place we’ve got give professionals much more freedom, and open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need.
And third, community empowerment.
We need to create communities with oomph – neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them.
It sounds plausible, doesn’t it?
Or does it?
In the concluding part of the speech he says,
Whether it is in building affordable housing, tackling youth unemployment, inviting charities to deliver public services…
…the people in Britain worked out the answer to the big social problems.
This sounds like central government, the coalition of which David Cameron is Prime Minister, is washing its hands of social problems and public services. It’s up to the rest of us tax payers to work out the solutions and provide them. That’s while we continue to work, to pay our own rent or mortgages, bills, bring up our children, look after elderly relatives and the myriad other things required of us in our daily lives.
While proposing to use other people’s money in dormant bank accounts to finance the Big Society, this government is slashing local authority budgets leading to big cuts in services. It has cut all school rebuilding programmes leaving thousands of children in sub standard school buildings. At the same time it is rushing through its plan to expand academy schools and finding the money for them.
The poor and those on average salaries are going to get poorer and public services we have paid for throughout our working lives are being cut back. Meanwhile, banks are making big profits and bankers are again receiving large bonuses. There is no campaign to crackdown on tax loopholes used by the very rich nor to tax non-doms living in this country. It seems like David Cameron and his Conservative – LibDem Coalition government are doing more damage to Britain’s welfare state than Margaret Thatcher ever dared to do – and that is not a compliment.
Read what Alastair Campbell says about the Big Society.
Tags: Big Society, britain, Conservative, David Cameron, Government, libdems, Liberal Democrat, Local government, Politics, Prime minister, uk