David Cameron's relaunch of the Big Society

It must be hard to describe from the dais at Westminster how you will build a vibrant decentralized state on the strength of civil society. This is kind of an understandable problem.

They could do better calling it Decentralisation or,if you want a fancier name, Local Empowerment.

In my view it's incompetent for politicians to attempt to retrench and carry out sweeping change at the same time. The first is about efficiency, squeezing as much as you can out of reduced resources, fine tuning and getting people to do more with less. Completely different people doing brand new things is bound to be inefficient. It will take them several years to get to the same level of effectiveness as the first lot of people were in the first place. If you are doing it on reduced resources you haven't a chance.

Doug it is a bit ironic. Reminds me of the innovation committee we had at work ...

It'll all come to nowt. The first mistake was in launching it with a catch-phrase - Big Society - all too familiar to anyone who remembers the fuss over Back To Basics and Victorian Values, both also propounded by well-meaning Tories who had lost, or were about to lose, their political compasses. It's a bit too soon for Mr Cameron to lose his.

The second problem is bigger and, I think, already beyond remedy, however many relaunches there are. As sold so far, it seems to overturn most of post-war history, ie the experience of pretty much the whole nation. The State has been there doing these things for as long as anyone can remember. We are like hefted sheep: comfortable on one hillside and apt to bleat loudly if driven to an unfamiliar slope. When push comes to shove, we always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.

"One newly elected MP I bumped into at Westminster this afternoon was complaining that he has precisely no Forestry Commission land in his constituency, and yet had still been swamped with letters and emails from voters demanding that he halt the privatisation of a local wood, to preserve its open access to the public. As the wood in question is and has always been privately-owned, it was proving hard to know how to reply, the MP sighed."

Well... I know its a novelty after the Labour years, but he may want to try the truth. You'd be surprised at the results telling the truth can have.

More facts less spin! That was what I thought the conservatives wanted to bring....

Two observations:

1). "Conservative MPs hang their heads in dismay at the inept communication of the whole project". Yes indeed, yet another car crash of a policy roll-out. I remarked previously on this board that inept policy roll-out is already becoming a hallmark of this Conservative Coalition government.

2) Why do the Big Society promotors all act as though the public services (i.e. NHS) and the charities and voluntary sectors all exist in different universes - and that cutting funding for one has no impact on the other?. Charities and the voluntary sector organisations work in all sorts of capacities alongside, with, through and for public services (especially the NHS). If you hack away at the existing funding of the charity and voluntary sectors you; a) Reduce any capacity they had anyway to undertake mainstream services management and delivery
b) By reducing their existing activities (by cutting funding of them) you will significantly increase the demands placed upon public services (and make those services all the more daunting for any charity or voluntary organisation to take on board).

Perhaps they should define what they actually mean by decentralisation. It clearly isn't "subsidiarity" - ensuring that decision-making is pushed out from the centre as far as possible. This government has or is abolishing almost every regional institution and taking power back to the centre.
Eric Pickles, the Minister responsible for local government, appears to have an agenda written by the Daily Mail, the nastiest little-Britain tabloid in the country, has inflicted the worst cuts in living memory on local budgets, and appears to want to abolish local councils entirely and outsource everything (profitable?) to the private sector, with the voluntary sector for the rest. He constantly harps on about pay - but the comparison between the PM's salary and a local authority CEO is a false one. Cameron does not run the civil service (a job that understandably pays a lot more than his salary), and CEOs are not politicians. In fact most of the (politician) leaders of most large metropolitan councils get less than £50,000 for the job.
Local councils are democratically elected bodies, and rightly administer a host of important services, tailoring their budgets to the particular situation of their area. But faced with the need to make huge cuts, they are protecting the core services they have to deliver, and the small grants they give to support charities providing vital advice and help are suffering as a result. In the meantime Cameron and his cronies blather about the Big Society of volunteers and charities. Of course people connect the two - they are connected.
And as for transparency - this is cynical claptrap. You do not get transparency from the often rapacious private sector. They are accountable to their shareholders, not their clients.
Various local authorities up and down the country outsource services to the private sector, and sometimes this has indeed produced savings. But when these things go wrong, as they have done with the BT joint venture, Liverpool Direct, it is very difficult indeed to get proper information (Freedom of Information does not apply to private companies) much less do anything about it.