Prepare for this week’s latest set of unemployment figures – to be announced the day after the City’s much-trailed £7 billion payout is confirmed. Marvel at the seamless way the Prime Minister David Cameron conflates terrorism with cultural integration. Be not surprised that the big chiefs of the voluntary sector are railing that the cuts are “destroying” volunteering, a massive increase in which lay at the heart of the Big Society concept.
Mr Cameron’s abstract was always defined more by what it is not. It was never a government programme for greater social cohesion and well-being but an ideological cover for the eradication of the state in society. As it takes more tangible form through the effect of cuts we see it is holed below the water line. Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, for 36 years the head of Community Service Volunteers, delivered the most damaging torpedo. She was originally sympathetic to the Big Society idea. Now she is in the vanguard of a number of organisations warning that the cuts are achieving the precise opposite of Mr Cameron’s stated aim of replacing state-run services with a new army of volunteers. Services are simply disappearing.
Local councils are set to lose more than £5 billion, or 40 per cent, of their government funding as the Big Society demolishes libraries, Sure Start, the arts, museums, youth services, bus services, forests, waterways and services for the elderly. It is the old, the young and the most vulnerable who end up worse off. The Big Society has its priorities. As Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Associations, put it, we are in the midst of “a tidal wave of growing needs and cuts”. And it’s only just begun.
Mr Cameron’s social experiment is proving that the state and volunteering are not interchangeable but coterminous and inextricably linked. But the vehicle he and George Osborne have constructed has no breaking mechanism, as is likely to be born out in next month’s Budget.
The Prime Minister’s distance from the society in which he lives was underlined by his speech in Munich on domestic and global security, a speech in which counter-terrorism equated with community cohesion, or rather the “failure” of multiculturalism and in which there was not a word about racism or inequality. A speech made hours before the English Defence League assembled one of the largest and most overtly provocative anti-Islam demonstrations but which contained not a word of censure against the EDL. A speech which coincided with cuts which are hitting and closing Muslim community groups whose very purpose is to prevent young people from straying down the path of fundamentalism.
A dog whistle in a Big Society created by a flailing, increasingly detached and desperate Prime Minister.
