David Cameron has every need to come out with his guns blazing after his nervous and on the whole quite poor performance on the Leaders’ Debate last week, and one can certainly say the publicity floodgates have opened.
In the run up to this week’s debate, hosted by Sky’s battle-hardened political editor Adam Boulton, Dave and his team have become more upbeat, casual and Clegg-like. Until you get to the policies.
Yesterday he was out in Staffordshire publicising his latest campaign poster about taking benefits away from layabouts that can’t be bothered to work, or for whom going to work is not a sufficient financial incentive to getting off benefits.
A decent policy by all accounts, and what seems to be a differentiating policy for the Conservatives. But given the level of welfare dependence could it actually end up being a vote loser? After all, there is and will continue to be the perception that all Tories are rich toffs that can’t empathise with those of a lower social class. Will voters take the view that this is little more than taking away their last few pennies to fund policies to benefit the better off: an improved Inheritance Tax for millionaires being one example?
One wonders whether families such as the Pollitts who choose benefits careers via mass-reproduction instead of getting jobs will lose benefits.
The other big issue being pushed this week is Dave’s Big Society. It’s a policy that I quite like the idea of, but that’s not to say I think it would actually work. Dave is obviously confident in his brainchild; he even released a special, last minute video about it two days ago in a semi-desperate platitudinous plea to the floaters that have deviated towards the Liberal Democrats (it was the open shirt, wavy hair and staring into the camera that gave it away). Unfortunately voters are not buying it, because they don’t really get it. It’s not a dossier of clearly defined policies, more a guiding philosophy, and it’s going to take more than rhetoric and arm waving to get the public on board.
So what is Big Society?
Big Society has been named in order to provide a contrast with Labour’s Big Government, although it’s not entirely antonymous. I must admit I first thought of it as a simple devolution of power back into villages, towns and cities, and whilst that is included, there is a lot more to it. In fact you can attach the Big Society label to a good number of the Conservative policies, but Big Society is more than that. It’s a way of thinking; a change of behaviour. One way of trying to understand it is to understand the problem is is trying to solve;
“When the welfare state was created, there was an ethos, a culture to our country – of self-improvement, of mutuality, of responsibility. You could see it in the collective culture of respect for work, parenting and aspiration. But as the state continued to expand, it took away from people more and more things that they should and could be doing for themselves, their families and their neighbours.”
- David Cameron
As Dave explains, we’ve had aspirations drummed out of us by Labour. We’re told we’re all the same. We believe we are helpless and can’t do anything about anything. Labour treats us as a big flock of sheep.
To kick the Big Society off, Dave would inject 5,000 so-called “community organisers” into society in order for them to indoctrinate people into being community minded rather than the current materialist dog-eat-dog culture. You could, I suppose, call it social engineering.
I am not suggesting that this is a bad thing in this case, though. It’s clear that we do have a problem with the ASBO culture, lack of personal respect and lack of social responsibility. Society is far more diluted than it was. Over 85% of people on a Gasjet poll yesterday said they didn’t feel safer than just 1 year ago, despite the police reporting a 37-year crime low in Lancashire. People are afraid of the way society has become, that there are animals lurking around every corner to savage them.
No more friendly “hello” and “good morning”; these days it’s, “oi boss, you got 20p for a bus fare?” followed by intimidation if you say no. Close knit communities are things of the past.
“The paradox at the heart of big government is that by taking power and responsibility away from the individual, it has only served to individuate them.”
Big Society aims to empower people into believing that they can solve problems as a community rather than clamouring for Big Government to make a ruling. It aims to support social enterprise with a “Big Society Bank”, funded by unclaimed bank assets.
Dave claims that Big Society means that local people will have the ability to change their council and have local referendums about things such as council tax.
The power to open charter schools (schools run by private organisations for profit) will be granted, except as I have mentioned in other articles the implementation is charter schools lite. They can’t make a profit and the government will only support it if it’s in a poor area. It’s better than what we’ve currently got and what any of the other parties are proposing, though, and education is a key issue for a better, more aspirational society.
Big Society also includes policies to boost old fashioned family values, with incentives provided for doing things the “right way”. The £3 a week marriage allowance is an example of this. It’s not going to encourage couples to get married just for the £3 per week, but it might encourage people to think more seriously about it because it is deemed, socially, as the way forward.
Labour, after all, has parented a society of disjointed single parent families. Believe it or not, over a quarter of children now have a single parent, and single parent families are far more likely to live below the poverty line – often in housing that fails to meet minimum standards. Labour has done nothing to discourage single parent families, and their comfortable welfare state means that benefits-claiming promiscuous men of the Jeremy Kyle generation can impregnate as many women as they want because it’ll all be paid for by the state and he wont have to demonstrate any commitment. This could still happen with Big Society but the Conservatives aim to discourage this lack of social responsibility with their policy on cutting benefits for work-shy layabouts.
I’ve mentioned Jeremy Kyle and he is another example of this predatory exploitative society, making his fame and fortune out of the humiliation of the unwitting on national TV.
In the Big Society, the civil service will be renamed to civic service, and staff will be forced to do community work in order to score a good appraisal. I think it’s fair to say this one will be put on the back burner, because it’s a load of bollocks. Not because community work is unnecessary or shouldn’t be done, but because I think it’s unfair to force civil servants to do it. That is a Big Government approach.
I personally would love the opportunity to do some community work, but how does one get involved in something that these days tends to be done by a boiler suit wearing chain gang of fairly serious criminals that were slapped on the wrist?
This of course brings me to another aspect of Big Society which I am not sure is actually in there: prisons. It’s all fine and dandy to encourage positivity and the right ways of doing things, but there will always be those that choose not to follow this and go off the rails into an oblivion of crime. If you create the Big Society, you have to protect it as well. So will there be sufficient punishments and proper jail terms for criminals, or will we just have more of the same? All Dave has said so far after a U-turn on committing to 5,000 new prison places is that he will end early release.
The overall idea of the Big Society is one that few can disagree with. There are bits that could be done better and a lot of vagueness, but there’s nothing inherently bad about it. But it isn’t going to have an instant effect either. It’s taken Labour 13 years to create this state dependent, alienated society we are now part of and it will take some years to start a reversal process.
I am hoping that Dave will work some Big Society rhetoric into his debate performance tomorrow, because the Conservatives are the only ones that are committing to having a go at sorting out the social issues that have been left ignored by the other two parties.
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Excellent post Phil.
I would say this will be a vote winner with the working class that actually still work as they are the ones who are surrounded by the “don’t work, won’t work” culture and nothing frustrates people more then going to work whilst seeing people that refuse to work getting away with it.
The question is how many of these people will vote versus how many from the underclass will vote.
One of my biggest problems with the open door policy we have had with immigration is that it allowed the elite to postpone the much needed debate on dealing with the benefits culture a culture that does no one any favours least of all the ones stuck in it. Rather than import workers hungry for work, lets create that hunger in our own workers and that means making the long term unemployed work for their supper.
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“One of my biggest problems with the open door policy we have had with immigration is that it allowed the elite to postpone the much needed debate on dealing with the benefits culture a culture that does no one any favours least of all the ones stuck in it”
Excellent point Zim, I Ihave said this before immigration and the welfare state are inextricably linked; you cant change one without changing the other.
Reduce immigration and reduce welfareism.
Reduce welfareism, reduce immigration.
Reading this Mrs Pollitt?
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Its a giant steaming pile of bullshit. Made up jobs like “community organizers” . I mean what the flock. Its just one more way BIG government is telling you WE KNOW BETTER, live your life like THIS etc. rather then getting the fuck out of our lives and letting us live it. All we need is the police to do there job and goback to policing real crimes. All we need is schools to be run by the teachers rather then management that don’t even teach.
A predatory exploitative society is the core of capitalism. If BIG corporations are told get get out of the bizness of government and government get out of our business, PLUS the police stop acting like corporate watchdogs and start acting like police again this capitalistic way of live in social terms would halt.
The reason no other party has come up with this “Big Society” is because its a crackpot idea. We already have a MASSIVE goverment which boils down to the same bullshit anyway.
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Why would you let teachers manage? Surely managers manage and teachers teach? Arguably having teachers manage means that their teaching role suffers.
It’s the same argument as whether nurses should manage. They aren’t trained to manage so why should they? John who comments on here a bit has seen both worlds and now works in a private company who employ more managers per staff than the NHS does. He claims that their operating theatres run at double the efficiency of those in the NHS because people and resources are managed properly.
Anyway Big Society isn’t a list of rules or laws, it’s a list of guidelines, and these community organizers are set up to get people doing community work and form community groups. They are not Dave’s apparatchik and they aren’t going round telling us how to do things.
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The problem with getting “managers” to manage is that unless they have a very good knowledge of how things work it’s very hard to get the best out of the service. They may think they know, but for example get a manger running a hospital and you get higher operating theatre turnover and bed turnover. But you also get increased hospital acquired infections and re-admissions. You need a team of both to get a really good service.
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Perhaps the case for hospitals, but going back to schools I think the product of schools is less to do with management of schools and more to do with both teacher quality and PC nannying regulations.
Teachers already claim they are too busy, so asking them to manage as well is surely a step too far.
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Theres too much PC in schools and a general lack of discipline etc,who in the right mind would want to teach in schools?
I know of 2 people who are teachers and the horror stories pf school discipline would scare Count Dracula, lol.
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What kind of managment are u talknig about?
Surly it makes perfect sense for teachers to be able to manage there own class rooms, time tables and use of syllabus. It also make perfect sense for heads to manage the school and accountants to manage the cash. None of which happens atm pritty much.
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It already happens.
At the school I went to, the head managed the school, the bursar managed the finances, the heads of department managed the teachers and the teachers managed the classrooms.
Syllabuses are I believe supplied by exam boards and I presume it would be up to the heads of department at the school to tell the teachers of any specific approaches to teaching it.
Of course, if the school is shite, it may not do these things, but most of the issues you have described are local problems to individual schools. If some schools can manage it right, they all should be able to, and fingers must be pointed at staff and governors.
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Heads rarely manage the school. A lot are failed teachers that the governors were so desperate to get out of the school they wrote good references to get them promoted out of the way. They fill in forms (if they don’t get their administrators to do it) but other than that a lot are doing exceedingly little except drawing a large salary and saying what’s expected of them. Governors are often dominated by politicans and church members in church schools, politicians otherwise. A lot of time is wasted making teachers fill out reams of paperwork on lesson plans and how a child is progressing for Ofstead and school records that no-one actually reads or uses. Indeed it would be harmful to a child for a teacher to read a previous year’s report and make judgements about them on that basis rather than giving them an opportunity to start from scratch each year. And syllabuses are normally reflected for most subjects in course books that are bought. As such there’s not a lot of scope in what they teach, just maybe how they discuss it to interest the children.
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Have you not just agreed with me and made the case for not allowing teachers to manage their schools, then?
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“they aren’t going round telling us how to do things.”
They are or will. thats how the torys work. Its how labour works also.
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100032381/david-camerons-big-society-is-a-grotesque-fantasy-inspired-by-leftist-subversive-saul-alinsky/
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lol good link.
“Are the Tories totally demented? Sending 5,000 community organisers to harass people into approved activities is reminiscent of the Red Guards invading the countryside during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”
Cracked me up.
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I though the same as you boney when I read it, I thought of chairman mao etc
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I prefer it as a concept to what we’ve had under Labour. How many patronising campaigns have we had about what we should drink, how we should exercise, how much we should eat, what “rainbow of colours of fistfuls of five a day fruit and veg we should eat, and that we should use contraception of all sorts – and then condoms because we have a STD problem, think “BIKE!” and so on. And does it work? Does it heck because we’re all fed up with being told what to do. A fortune’s been spent on government campaign advertising because this is the way it keeps itself in the public eye like a desperate attention seeking child.
I don’t like Dave. I don’t think he’s a good choice as leader. But I do think he’s the best we’ve got for the country right now.
I do believe the crime statistics are down merely because people have got fed up of the hours they have to spend to report it, for the police not to give a toss or try to think of an excuse to arrest the person reporting it for daring to increase their workload.
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Just got another leaflet from Paul Maynard, hes certainly hungry and keen, fair play to him!
I am starting to like him.
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“But we can say that the vast bulk of net job creation since 1997 appears to have benefited workers not born in the UK. ”
“Since 1997, there has been net migration out of the country by 988,000 British-born people. Put it another way – for every net job created for British born people in the UK since Labour took office, two and a half people who were born here have left the country. ”
Full article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/parties_and_issues/8634469.stm
Ah Nulabour benefiting everyone else…………………….except the people who voted em in, lol.
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I like the reference to the Pollitts, they are bottom feeding, benefit scrounging,festering anal parasites who should be stripped of their posessions and given back to the taxpayer.
superb Phil, your articles are outstanding in their insight and relevance, this is the best to date.
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At the hospitals I work at our hospital acquired infections run between 0.3% to 0.1% (I work over three sites) compared to the NHS which can run up to 15%. Our re admittance after surgery is a 1/3 of the NHS. By any measurable judgment of care my theatres out strip the NHS. The way to manage infection rate is a secret but I will tell you if no body tells the NHS. Employ more cleaners and manage them.
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The way the NHS managers worked completely justifies my points. It’s not really fair though to compare re-admission rates as you know as well as I do that many that need further hospital treatment would go via A&E to an NHS ward. Having said that I do concede that the vast majority of those re-admissions would not be cleanliness related.
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That last statement is not true Frustrated if we operate on someone and there is a complication through that operation then we would take responsibility and correct this error. Even if this would mean transferring to the NHS hospital it would still show up to us as a readmission. I don’t know what experience you have had with the private sector but our contract of care doesn’t end that abruptly.
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Absolutely brilliant article Phil, the welfare state is out of control and needs reforming but as you rightly point out the scroungers who make a living off the welfare system will want to keep Liebour in because Labour promotes laziness and professional benefit claimants. But I definitely prefer ‘Big Society’ to ‘Big Governmment’ the less Government interference the better.
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