Arrogance, cynicism and ignorance: the foundation of the 'Big Society'

Listening to Phillip Blond on this week's Beyond Belief reinforced to me the cynical, empty and arrogant assumptions behind the Conservative Party's 'Big Society'. This is nothing new of course, it has been well attested to by political commentators, Labour Party politicians and the archbishop of Canterbury. Even David Cameron appears to have lost faith on this empty, ill-considered slogan left over from a failed piece of electioneering, relaunching it time and time again with no new policy ideas, little funding and no sign of public confidence.

How staggering it is that the hubris of politicians leads them to believe that in dismantling the welfare state, the single most important force in helping voluntary organisations offer care in communities, it is politicians who must be central to its every reduction. Only a Conservative politician with staggeringly little experience outside public school and TV public relations could fail to understand how many small societies there are, and have always been, providing services in damaged communities, and how much they rely on the state funded bodies which he is attacking. How patronising it is for a lofty think tank wonk in Westminster to tell religious organisations he's letting them take over libraries, after school clubs and so on. What hypocrisy from a bunch of elite men at the centre of the political machine. I just keep remembering this delightful quote from Francis Maude, who admits to doing no volunteering and then has the arrogance to claim its unfair he's been asked (why on earth should he have to do anything?) - at the same time as he tells local communities to volunteer to fill in the short fall he is creating. Phillip Blond also seems to have memorised important and meaningful phrases very well, listening to him speak is full of soothingly old fashioned left-wingism, until he tries to talk about the welfare state or about religious organisations. The welfare state keeps people poor! Religious groups'll fill in all the gaps! They just need the cuts to help them get it off the ground! Volunteer groups always do it better than the state! Cuts are good for you!

Few tropes are as short sighted or ignorant as that of 'Broken Britain': a nasty, damning sneer on how things look from houses in the Home Counties which rely on the Telegraph and nostalgic hearsay for their information about the world. The problem is almost as glossed and oversimplified as the solution: to fix broken Britain you first take away resources first from the poor and vulnerable, then from state sector institutions that provide services for the poorest people, then from voluntary organisations that vulnerable people rely on. That this outlook, a blinkered pessimism that judges without evidence and condemns without empathy, is so widespread and so instantly accepted shows how little information percolates through the right-wing media firewall to the kind of people who fill the political classes. Why bother hunting after examples of communities in impoverished areas supporting their own or attempting to form a nuanced conclusion based on actual observation and curiosity when an entire world view can be granted in two words? The seductive power that instant condemnation grants that suits both the Tory party and the boor by the bar: "I'll tell you why's this country's going to hell in a hand cart mate, it's the immigrants, the nanny state, health and safety, red tape, blah, blah, blah."