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.

Polling Station in England

Well, it’s nearly the moment of truth. Tomorrow, Thursday, the polls will open at 7am and we will be able to vote to decide on the future government of the country.

I admit, I’m in the minority and do not want the Tories to get into power. I don’t trust them to look after the interests of ordinary people. I don’t feel that David Cameron is genuinely interested in us. I think he’s ‘Blair Lite’, just not as convincing as Tony Blair at getting people to like and trust him. I certainly don’t think that George Osbourne would make a good Chancellor of the Exchequer. Considering that the Tories have kept Osbourne under wraps for most of the election campaign, it seems they don’t think he’s an electoral asset – I agree with them.

Will Labour win? I don’t think so even though I hope I’m wrong. Gordon Brown has had such a bad press throughout the campaign and for a year or more before it. He’s not Blair – he’s hopeless at chatting to people he doesn’t know, he can’t smile without reason – when he tries, it doesn’t look natural. He’s just not a populist. It should be remembered, though, that his policies for getting the country out of this current recession were successfully adopted in countries around the world. We saw the real, passionate Gordon Brown in his speech at Citizens UK yesterday – see the video below. It’s just a pity that he didn’t do more of this.

Will there be a hung Parliament with no overall majority for any one party? This might be the best result for the country – who knows? Certainly the Liberal Democrats are higher in the opinion polls than they have ever been in a general election campaign. If there is a hung Parliament, the Lib Dems maybe the ones who decide who becomes the next government.

Nick Clegg, LibDem Leader

In just nine days, here in Britain we will be going to the polls to vote for a new government.

As General Elections go, this one has been fairly boring apart from the introduction of leaders’ debates. Because we’re a parliamentary democracy and we vote for individual Members of Parliament to represent our district not the Prime Minister, debates between leaders of the main parties has always been resisted.

In the run-up to this election, though, we’ve had two televised leaders’ debates featuring Prime Minister George Brown for Labour, David Cameron for the Conservatives and Nick Clegg for the LibDems. Undoubtedly, the dark horse Nick Clegg won the first debate but the winner of the second was much harder to call. All I can say is that none of the three did badly.

We have the final leaders’ debate this coming Thursday and I would be surprised if the three men are not much more aggressive than in the last two. The opinion polls show there is all to play for and that Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats could hold the balance of power if there is a hung Parliament, ie neither Labour nor Conservative have enough Members of Parliament to form a majority government but need an agreement of support with the LibDems and the smaller parties.

Judging by Twitter, other social networks and opinion polls, it seems that a hung Parliament is the preferred option for many people. Of course, the two major parties phophesize doom and gloom if this is the result but they would, wouldn’t they?

Well, in a little over a week we will know the result. Will it be more of George Brown or will we get Conservative David Cameron as Prime Minister? If the Conservatives win, it will be interesting to see if they manage to pull together a consistent set of policies – something they have failed to do so far, in my opinion.

If it is a hung Parliament and LibDem Nick Clegg has to make the choice of which of the two major parties he will support, can he really get LibDems to support a Conservative government? Considering they are on the liberal end of the political spectrum, it seems unlikely.

We certainly live in interesting times.

Picture above: Copyright © Nick Clegg, Creative Commons Licence

They were right because Brown went to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament so an election can be called. This is a largely ceremonial act but still, it is the first public move in the process.

The meeting took place at 10am today and then Gordon Brown went straight back to Downing Street. His Cabinet assembled outside Number Ten and then he came out and formally announced the election will take place on Thursday, May 6th.

Immediately, the BBC cancelled its BBC1 programmes to show a politics special about the election talking to all the usual suspects who said all the usual things. When they couldn’t find anybody else to interview, the BBC political correspondents interviewed each other which seems particularly pointless as they didn’t have anything new to say either.

Oh joy! We have four weeks of campaigning to live through and then we’ve got to choose. It might just come down to the party who annoys us least in that time.

Seriously, though, it is a big decision because of the times we live in. We mustn’t let the media coverage or the political spin from the different parties to put us off voting. People fought and died to give us the right to choose our own government.

Nick Griffin, the leader of the far right British Nationalist Party (BNP) which won two seats in the European elections last Sunday, intended to hold a press conference outside Parliament in London to talk about the victory.

Protesters heard about it and quickly gathered around him. He and his colleagues fled from them as they chanted “Nazi scum.” They also pelted him with eggs, one of which definitely hit him. He had to take refuge in his car which quickly drove away.

Last weekend Europe was celebrating the D Day invasions of World War II which eventually freed European countries from the curse of Fascism and Hitler. How can people in this country vote for these far right so-called politicians? Could their victory of two seats in the European Parliament ever have happened at a more inappropriate time?