As the Conservative government cuts away at public services it hopes to recreate some of them, at no or little cost to itself, by relying on volunteer replacements with little support or funding to help. It's called the Big Society.
There are many problems with this idea. In my village the local library is to shut. A few jobs will be lost, a local resource ended, the many elderly people in the area will be that much more limited in their access to company, books, information, newspapers and the internet, a social space gone. The alternative is to set up a new 'community run' equivalent, relying on volunteer staff, presumably open for vastly reduced hours and without specialist workers. Where the funding for this will come from is anyone's guess.
This blog is not intended to critique government policy. What I want to focus on is the patronising idea that the Big Society is something new or that it depends on government support. Most of us don't have to look far to find examples of extraordinarily generous acts on behalf of volunteers - or, as often as not, we even use services that we don't even realise are being carried out by volunteers. There are a host of television programmes on at the moment recording the nineteenth-century history of social entreprenurship and philanthropy, see the one about Robert Owen or Dr Bernardo. In the former the presenters are amazed to discover that the Big Society wasn't a twenty-first century creation. It isn't a nineteenth-century one either.
Every medieval monastery was obliged to give hospitality to those who asked for it. Tithing in medieval villages was intended both for the poor and for the church. I'm sure there are ancient examples too, but it's a period of history I'm less familiar with. Government can help a little - it can provide funding and expertise, and it can seek out the projects that need these resources - but it isn't the creator, only a sustainer. And now, of course, it has stopped doing even that.
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