David Cameron has launched his “big society” drive to empower communities, describing it as his “great passion”.
In a speech in Liverpool, the prime minister said groups should be able to run post offices, libraries, transport services and shape housing projects. Also announcing plans to use dormant bank accounts to fund projects, Mr Cameron said the concept would be a “big advance for people power”.
Voluntary groups and Labour have queried how the schemes will be funded.
The idea was a central theme in the Conservative general election campaign and Mr Cameron denied that he was being forced to re-launch it because of a lack of interest first time around.
While reducing the budget deficit was his “duty”, he said giving individuals and communities more control over their destinies was what excited him and was something that had underpinned his philosophy since he became Conservative leader in 2005…
Mr Cameron rejected suggestions that the plans were “cover” for substantial cuts in public services due next year and that the public were either confused by or uninterested in the proposals.
“I don’t accept that people don’t understand what this is,” he said.
Everyone was aware of the “great work” that volunteers were already doing in communities up and down the country, he said, and it was his ambition to simply expand this.
- BBC News
19 Comments
In principle I support this kind of thing. I only wonder how they’ll prevent a mass rorting bonanza.
You know what this reminds me of? It reminds me of the devolution of mental health care into “care in the community”. Now, in principle, not locking mentally ill people up in asylums is a Good Thing. However, if we just leave it up to the community to care for them without adequate resources, then it will just end up in disaster…
LE: A great horrible example. On the other hand, DC PM is talking about things rather more normally manageable than difficult mental health issues.
Lorenzo
A luxury DC PM can afford to assume, not having over 10% of his polity voting for the Australian Greens, 50% of whom provide a water-tight case for re-opening the loony bins!
You’ve not worked much in the voluntary sector, have you Lorenzo? It’s like herding cats.
Amen to that. Also, I have a general allergy to working in groups, and don’t trust committees to decide anything sensible, unless they are well run. Whether you get a community committee which is well run is really pot luck.
And when those committees are government funded…..
Sometimes the “rent seeking” isn’t of the type you’d think. When I was a director in a local village development trust in the Welsh Valleys, the chairman was the sitting Plaid Cymru MP for the area and his vice was the new labour wannabe. The rest of us seemed there mainly to further the political careers and ambitions of those two (and make their campaign literature look good for the next election). I rather fancied going for vice but as I wasn’t a politician I wasn’t even in the running.
These things need to form in a bottom up fashion. I believe in big society but I’m not of the view that government will be any good at delivering it.
I do have some experience in the volunteer sector (a political party and a medieval recreation group: both attracted dysfunctional personalities, the difference was that in the medieval group, they got better). They were also perhaps somewhat more focused, with a clearer reward structure, than other volunteer groups, so I take your point.
Volunteer structures perhaps also worked better when local notables took the lead and communities were relatively small, so it was part of a whole series of “repeated games” with the same people.
It is clear that government action crowds out other structures and ways of getting things done, but it may be hard to go backwards.
Lorenzo, I think part of my dislike of team work stems from unstructured teams when the lines of authority are not clear. If you have clear and experienced leaders, and a not-too-unwieldy group, then it’s okay.
My worst volunteer experiences were with student activist groups. Made me think of that episode of Red Dwarf where Rimmer runs around with a protest sign.
hmmmmm…. Large teams… co-ordinated more by example than demands, with elevation by acclamation and merit? capable of running the world? Look to the open source and open standards mob for lessons.
the proof is literally in front of your eyes and at your fingertips.
The secret is the rewards sought – warm fuzzies, a job well done and a gift economy.
How can we migrate this to the less ether(net)eal plane? are the barriers attachment to worldly things we should not have?
In particular, for this blog, what do evolutionary mechanisms for standards for info operations and protocols have to say about legal systems, which are analogous?
Altruism is weak in humans. To quote E.O. Wilson “Wonderful theory, wrong species.”
DEM@13 : Altruism is weak in those humans who could learn a thing from other anthropoid apes.
http://balneus.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/adoptive-chimp-single-dads-and-evolution-of-altruism/ is the heavier one – chimp males adopting unrelated infants and the socio-economic *hardship* that creates altruism (plenty isn’t good for goodness, it seems). The photos, when you realize what they are, are “awwwwwww”.
http://balneus.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/chimps-altruism-and-helping-with-the-kids-of-others/ is the one with the photos that make you go “awwwwww” without any knowledge.
The hacker (old sense) ethic is big on karma, the more personal payoffs are the same as the starving artist “ooooh, so lots of people are using my stuff… cool”. In my case, the benefits of sharing my wizardry meant (a) extra privs on various systems so I had more to share, (b) lots of postcards sent to my daughter from around the world (those days, you including your email, street address and phone number to everyone on the net).
So, altruism and gift economies are possible on a large scale, and there is nothing in our biology preventing it. We’ve just got to make more people wake up to that possibility, and maybe they’ll apply the lesson in a wider context.
Does this mean what I think it means? If so, gah. Also apologies to those trapped in the spammer, I’ve only just had chance to let you out. After years of not being terribly good with dairy products, I ate a large piece of pavlova with whipped double cream last night (DEM did the cooking; it was delicious).
I am now reasonably certain that my dairy product days are over. Today has been most unpleasant.
SL, can I recommend that you take lactase tablets when you eat dairy? My brother-in-law is intolerant to dairy, but when he takes lactase tablets, he can eat a little dairy.
DB Interesting paper. Chimps are a mixed behaviour species (their homicide rates can be pretty gruesome, for example).
I am leary of inferring from online behaviour, though. There are all sorts of entry/exit/selection/limited domain issues.
Studies of humans suggest relatively stable proportions of saints (fundamentally moral), knaves (in it for themselves) and pragmatics (depends on the incentives). The trick seems to be to enable the saints to prosper, redirect and/or repress the knaves and encourage the pragmatics to go with the saints: with some difficult identification issues thrown in (knaves who pass themselves off as saints, for example). Both Peter Turchin and Elinor Ostrom have some useful things to say on these issues.
sl@15: (sorry OT) yes, many had public pages in the usenet, with all contact details. I asked as a reward for my efforts either to pass on the favor, or send a postcard to my daughter. The US Forestry Service sent her a whole lot of Smokey the Bear stuff.
Even bank account numbers for “donations” were put up by some people. The usenet was limited to goverment, edu and IT companies pretty much. This was when you merely emailed a request for a domain name and class c address to some guy in the states, and you’d get it for nothing.
The wasn’t /that/ much of a spam problem (spammers were often letterbombed in retaliation – their sysadmin would notice the explosiom and withdraw user privs, and we circulated blacklists.
Pron was no problem if you simply blocked alt.sex.* and similar trees.
Basically, if you read advice, you were 95% sure it was well meant, and 85% sure it was good advice.
It’s where my hope for humanity became immunized against total cynicism, that it was possible for a worldwide community of a not insignificant size to have the basic rule of “I used when I was young, it’s time now to give back my experience”, to assist people you’d never before had contact with when you got an email asking for clues or detailing a problem.
How much more we should put ourselves out when it’s for people who we might one day meet in the street or on a tram, where suffering can be seen, where we have at least a voice that can make things better, give at least some comfort.
For all we consider ourselves an advanced society compared to our predecessors, we are callous compared to societies that will flourish further down the track, even if things darken again beforehand, as they do.
To me, the callous politicians who do this, and the callous public who let them get away from it, augur ill. I hope it’s a short and impartial eclipse, not a nightfall.
Sadly, I think it will get worse before it gets better.
Oh yes, pavlova…please come back mum, won’t be naughty any more…