People working in the voluntary sector still don't get 'Big Society'

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I’ve lost count of the number of government initiatives and funding regimes that I’ve seen during my time in the voluntary sector.

And that's it really. The reason why the idea of a 'Big Society' isn't understood by those who earn their living working in the voluntary sector. For them - and this is borne out by any conversation with any of them - it's all about 'government initiatives and funding regimes'. I know they'll talk the talk about citizen engagement and 'helping people to help themselves' but their daily effort is more often directed to those 'funding regimes' and 'government initiatives' (and to moaning about how they aren't big enough or specific enough or properly targeted).

'Big Society' isn't about those funding regimes. It's about real voluntary action, about people doing things because they love the place they live and want to make it a better place. Or people helping poor people because they think those people merit help. And the involvement ranges from baking a cake for a fundraisers right through to running - entirely voluntarily - big organisations. At no point is it about getting a wage, recovering expenses, let alone having a career. The voluntary sector professional simply cannot get his or her head around the idea that someone might just do it because they want to do it - without payment, without needing their 'professional' input.

Now these voluntary sector professionals (metaphorically sucking their teeth) will then - in that uniquely patronising manner of such folk - explain that all this is fine in a place like Cullingworth, filled as it is with all that lovely social capital. But out there in those deprived areas (so often celebrated by people - I still inwardly cringe remembering the former leader of Bradford Council who wallowed in "I represent one of the 100 most deprived wards in the country" as if this was a good thing) there isn't any of this social capital so those voluntary sector professionals have to go in there and help. Give the community a great big cuddly hug and tell them it will all be alright once the right 'funding regimes' and 'government initiatives' are identified.

'Big Society' isn't about programmes or grand schemes, it's not about offices filled with paid workers (although all of these can and do play their part). It's about the bloke who, instead of moaning to all and sundry about the trough that isn't planted up, blags some compost and a few bedding plants and does it himself. Or the woman who pops in to see if the old lady next door wants a lift into town to do some shopping. A thousand different, small and simple acts of caring make up the big society. Some of them end up growing into fantastic nationally-significant voluntary efforts but most remain as simple and easy acts of kindness done just because it's the right thing to do.

It's this initiative - the real voluntary sector - that makes up the 'Big Society' which is why those making a career out of those 'funding regimes' and 'government initiatives' are blind to the idea. If people did those simple things - had permission to care - then a lot of the stuff the 'voluntary sector' employs people to do wouldn't be needed. And, rather than paid professionals using volunteers we'd have volunteers making use of paid professionals.

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The real voluntary sector - or the Big Society the sector's leaders want to kill off...

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The Community Development Foundation has published a report looking at what it calls the 'community sector'. This is the myriad of small local groups and charities - CDF estimate between 600,000 and 900,000 of these groups up and down the country. It is the real voluntary sector because, as CDF point out these groups mostly have an income below £2,000 per year and rely entirely on the efforts of enthusiastic volunteers. Nor have those volunteers been 'recruited', 'checked' and 'trained' in the manner of volunteers for big charities and 'voluntary' organisations.

The other thing about this real voluntary sector is where it gets its money from:

Figures from registered micro-groups suggest that community groups receive the largest portion of their funding from individual donations (65%). Other sources include investment (17%), other voluntary sector organisations (12%), government (4%) and the private sector (2%).

The important figure to note here is the 4% from government. Contrast this with the grand charities - Oxfam got £159.8m from various statutory sources in 2012, over 55% of its income and the same story can be told for Barnardos, for The Children's Society and many other big charities. Without grants and fees from government the 'voluntary' sector would be a whole lot smaller.

The government in its various guises provides around 35% of the income for the voluntary sector and, as we can see here, this overwhelmingly goes to large organisations. Partly this reflects the way in which the sector has developed over the years and especially the changes that took place after the election of the 1997 Labour government. That government set about transforming the role of the voluntary sector - or at least the larger organisations within that sector - from independent charities to agents of government policy.

So when the idea of the Big Society arrived the leadership of the voluntary sector saw immediately that the idea of voluntary social action threatened their control of the idea of 'voluntarism'. Rather than voluntary action being seen as the initiative of the volunteers, the sector's leadership preferred to see voluntary action as something to be managed by paid professionals. And this leadership sought out allies within the organisations that fund the big voluntary sector organisations - local councils, the agencies of the lottery, the Arts Council and elements in Whitehall and academia. A coalition of resistance to new voluntary initiatives was created and this set about demonising the idea of Big Society - 'just a cover for cuts', 'neoliberalism' was the cry as the paid professionals in the voluntary sector protected their interests.

The continued existence and success of the 'community' sector is a reminder of how out-of-touch that voluntary sector leadership has become - by focusing almost entirely on protecting state income and advocacy for the larger organisations that dominate the sectors lobbying the professional leadership of the voluntary sector has, in effect, allowed smaller organisations that make up most of the sector to sink or swim. These groups and organisations don't know about the conferences, the workshops and the action groups, they aren't connected to the networks of consultants, managers and directors that dominate the discussion about the work of voluntary action and their voice is lost in special pleading or calls for more funding.

The Big Society was the chance to put these groups centre stage, to celebrate the everyday voluntary action that sticks communities together. It may be that recession and the struggle to make the national budget's sums add up rather meant government took its eye off the ball but, at the same time, the professional leadership of the voluntary sector chose to be agents of the state rather than champions of the volunteer. In short that leadership failed the sector by campaigning to kill the Big Society.

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6

How Third Sector Professionals killed Big Society...and the idea of voluntary initiative

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A few years ago I attended an event organised by Julian Dobson and others that was, or rather purported to be, connected in some way with the government's Big Society idea. And, as a fan of the idea, I toddled along in what turned out to be a vain expectation of enthusiasm for thinking about civil society and the way in which voluntary social action plays a part in transforming society for the better.

What I experienced (and this was repeated again and again in my peregrinations round the voluntary sector) was quite different. Instead of people engaged in voluntary social action what we have in this visible part of the 'voluntary' sector are two sorts of people - political activists (almost exclusively from the left of politics) and what we might call 'sector professionals'. I was struck, as I am always struck at these sorts of occasion, by the almost complete absence of any genuine volunteers - people who have got up off their backside and done something for their community.

Today, various of the 'usual culprits' in "The Sector" have rounded on the Big Lottery and Cabinet Office over the manner in which they have funded a couple of organisations closely linked to the Big Society agenda. It is, we are told by these people who made it their mission to distance "The Sector" from Big Society, a terrible scandal requiring investigations and probably executions.

Yet these people - so self-righteous in their condemnation - are the very same people that spent the first year of this government undermining the idea of Big Society. They came up with different versions of it - one's untainted by the dread association. With the result that the winners in the game were new organisations - bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for sure but inexperienced and with ideas that needed work. But where were the experts? All those people from NCVO and ACEVO, all the parasitical consultants upon the multi-billion pound state funding of the 'voluntary' sector?

These self-appointed sector leaders set out to make sure Big Society failed. And they did so for one reason alone - it was an initiative from a Conservative prime minister. To these "sector professionals" (a surprising number having close links with the Labour Party) no Tory could possibly understand "The Sector" and therefore the initiative was either a smokescreen to cover up the evil neoliberal agenda of the Coalition or else a trojan horse aimed at smuggling in cackling Tory businessmen to take over voluntary action.

What these "sector professionals" and their new found activist friends fail to appreciate is that they are the problem rather than Big Society, the Coalition government or evil Tory neoliberals. It is the transforming of voluntary organisations of all sorts - whether working with a particular group people, in a particular place or on a particular issue - from organisations doing voluntary work into sub-contractors to the state that represents the single greatest wound to our civil society.

What these "sector professionals" presided over, and it accelerated under the Blair/Brown Labour government, was the de facto nationalisation of voluntary action. We got to a situation where nothing was deemed possible without government funding and without the employing of these "sector professionals". And just as importantly those professionals were recruited on the basis of their ability to attract funds fron the Labour government, from QUANGOs led by Labour supporters and regional agencies padded with Labour councillors.

So organisations - just like their funders - got stuffed full with Labour supporters. And, when the change of government arrived and with it the Big Society idea, these people were faced with two options - suck up to the evil Tory neoliberals or do what the Labour Party wanted and undermine the policy. Sadly, for the idea of volunteering and of the voluntary society, the sector's leadership chose to dismiss Big Society and campaign instead for the continuation and extension of a role for "The Sector" as sub-contractors to state agencies.

The latest round of attacks on Big Society confirms to me everything that is wrong with those "sector professionals". I see a group of well-paid, middle-class folk protecting their interests and crafting a language of entitlement to do so. Links into government at professional or operational level - along with ministerial fear of upsetting "The Sector" - has maintained the current system of funding more or less intact. New places to broker influence arose - Clinical Commissioning Groups being a fine example - and the idea of people doing something simply because they care becomes ever more distant.

Thankfully there's a whole load of voluntary action still going on and plenty of people loving the place they live and the people who live there. But these people have absolutely no connection to or links with the entitled grant-farmers that dominate the national discourse about the voluntary sector.

It saddens me that an idea such as the Big Society was killed off by a self-interested group more concerned with protecting state-funding and state contracts than with the idea of promoting and encouraging voluntary action. The idea of the state stepping out of the way and letting people do it themselves has been sacrificed so a bunch of well-connected lefties can carry on lecturing us while living off government grants.

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Cullingworth Village Hall - a tale from the Big Society

Back in the early 1970s, the villagers of Cullingworth laid their hands on the redundant Salvation Army Citadel in Keighley and moved it, every last screw and post, to the village where it has served as the village hall since 1973. Not bad for a second-hand wooden hut!

Today, the hall is showing the wear and tear of time. All those plays, play groups, pensioner lunches, parties and parish council meetings have left their toll, the roofline sags, the wooden structure doesn't quite stand up straight and the running costs don't get any lower. The management committee - led by Bryan Hobson (the new younger chairman at a mere 80 years old - replacing Ken Batchelor, who'll be 90 this August) - have decided a new hall is needed.

Which rather explains why I was at the Hall this morning along with people from Bradford Council's Estates Management to talk about how this might happen and how the Council (which owns the land) can help us along. It's early days yet but we've opened up a dialogue and now face not just the challenge of planning, land swaps and sundry bureaucracies but the need to raise around £500,000 to actually build the new hall! Any help is, of course, welcome!

Afterwards, stood in the car park in the glorious sunshine, we spoke to the couple who look after the garden at the hall. Ken mentioned that they'd not really contributed much beyond a few Marks & Spencer's vouchers to the efforts in making the Hall's flower beds look great - and they do. Yet again, a couple of neighbours have been willing to put their own time, their own money and their own care into making our village look good.

Somebody once asked what the "Big Society" was - well this it it really. Ordinary folk caring for the place where they live and for the neighbours they live by - not for money or medals but because it's what we do. Long may it continue.

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In which I try to explain truth and reality to an archbishop

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I am worried. I appreciate that some may not see it my way but I really do prefer my bishops – when they comment on the political world – to have at least some connection to truth and reality. Sadly the Archbishop of Canterbury has lost this connection somewhere in his beard.

"With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted," he writes. "At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context."

There are two ways to respond – the first one is to point out that, in our electoral system we vote for people not policies.  But I suppose that might get the riposte – “why do political parties have manifestos then?”  So there is a second response which is to ask – “so tell me, Your Grace, what policies did people vote for then?”

The Archbishop cites some policies – such as education:

"[T]he comprehensive reworking of the Education Act 1944 that is now going forward might well be regarded as a proper matter for open probing in the context of election debates."

Strangely enough Your Grace, by this very statement you have undermined your own argument. The idea of ‘free schools’ was in the Conservative Manifesto as was the need to do something to support schools in maintaining discipline and to make changes to the national curriculum. As to the continuing academy programme – that was legislation passed by the previous Labour Government, of course.

While the “we didn’t vote for this” line can be argued, the Archbishop’s comments on education policies are simply wrong. The proposed changes were probed “in the context of election debates”. For example here between “experts” and here between politicians. So you’re talking rubbish, Archbishop.

And then welfare. Here the Archbishop simply invents a straw man and attacks it with vigour:

Williams also launches a sustained attack on the government's welfare reforms, complaining of a "quiet resurgence of the seductive language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor". In comments aimed at the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, the Archbishop criticises "the steady pressure" to increase "punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system"

I admit to listening closely to the debate about welfare – after all, welfare reforms are very popular:

A new YouGov poll for Channel 4 News yesterday found strong public support for many of the government’s planned cuts to benefits. 73% of respondents supported the idea of making the long term unemployed do compulsory work placements or risk losing benefits, 66% supported withdrawing jobseekers allowance from people who turn down job offers or interviews, 69% supported more stringent testing of people claiming disability living allowance and 68% supported capping housing benefit at £400 a week, “even if this means people are forced to move house if they live in an area where the rent is high”. In all these cases the policies weren’t just popular amongst Conservative and Liberal Democrat supporters, they were also backed by a majority of Labour voters.

I appreciate that popular doesn’t equate to right but that polling – whatever you think of opinion research – does indicate something of a popular mandate for the policies being pursued. And making up opinions for Iain Duncan Smith (who I’m sure can arrive at an opinion without ecclesiastical assistance) simply doesn't look well on a bishop.

Finally, there’s the “Big Society”:

The Archbishop also questions David Cameron's "big society" agenda, a phrase which he describes as "painfully stale". He writes that the policy is viewed with "widespread suspicion" as an "opportunistic" cover for spending cuts, adding that is not credible for ministers to blame the last Labour government for Britain's problems.

Yet again we see the bishop simply parading his ignorance. Perhaps this is because he wasn’t listening when David Cameron first talked of the “Big Society”. However, the Archbishop has changed his tune just a little. Last September he had this to say on Newsnight:

"The positive side of the big society agenda in the present Government's language is I think not just about saving money or cutting corners - it's about some kind of effort to get hold of a strong sense of civic responsibility".

Maybe also the Archbishop spends too much time with the great and good rather than among ordinary people. On Tuesday evening I was at a Neighbourhood Forum in Denholme witnessing the big society:

·         The Town Council were recruiting volunteers to run the library – not just taking over from the Council but extending the hours and the services

·         A call was made for more volunteer drivers for the community transport scheme – taking the infirm, disabled and isolated to appointments, shopping and to the hospitals

·         The Community Association briefed the meeting about plans – at an early stage – to take over running the Mechanics Institute from the Council

This, dear Archbishop, is the ‘Big Society’ – it really is that simple. Perhaps you should get out of Lambeth Palace and into the real world once in a while – you might just learn something about people. 

It seems to me that the Archbishop should check his facts and try to adopt a logical approach to argument.  Or maybe just stick to god-bothering and marrying princes.

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Take the King's shilling and you dance to the King's tune

The Directory of Social Change are in a funk about the conditions attached to contracts for the Office for Civil Society's 'Strategic Partners":

Jay Kennedy, head of policy at the DSC, told Third Sector that terms relating to the £8.2m strategic partner transition fund appeared to reward charities for promoting government policy rather than providing impartial advice.

Clauses in the application guidance sent to prospective bidders say partners must "contribute to the development of the big society agenda" and "help to support and deliver strategic policy of OCS".

 "The DSC does not believe that this should be the purpose of government funding for charities. If the OCS is going to pay for strategic partners it should be for them to give critical, constructive advice rather than to deliver policies that come down from the top."

Everywhere charities are taking government funding and "delivering" the government's agenda. That's the deal - there isn't any difference between these 'strategic partners' agreeing to support Big Society and other 'third sector' organisations twisting their values so as to land contracts from DWP, DFID or a host of local councils.

As the man says - you take the King's shilling and you dance to the King's tune. If charities want to be independent there's a simple answer - go out and shake those collecting boxes!

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Fred and the Big Society

Fred Smith works for a community organisation providing advocacy and “voice” for a certain community. Now Fred is well aware of how his role is political, how it challenges the established ways of providing communities with “voice” – electing local councillors for example.

Now Fred doesn’t live in the community he advocates for but in a nice little stone cottage about 20 miles away, his family are from a nice comfortable market town and have no connection to the place. But Fred is proud of his job, of the work he does every day. And especially the way he’s able to make a lot of noise about what he sees as important political issues.

Oh, I forgot, Fred’s wages are paid from a grant to the community organisation from the local council. The community doesn’t pay for Fred – except indirectly through their council taxes. Without that payment Fred doesn’t have a job. And, yes, in making savings this year Big City Council who give the grant decide to cut it by 25% - Fred’s out of a job.

Now here’s the Big Society bit. Rather than simply head off back to the cottage, Fred decides to try and find the money to keep his work going. Clutching a presentation, Fred knocks on the doors of local businesses, speaks to people in the local community, chases through a few contacts in the shiny central business district – and makes his case. Fred raises £25,000 – not a fortune but enough to carry on. More importantly there’s a collection of supporters and donors who really do care what Fred does, who want him to succeed and can be involved more.

Fred has replaced one distant council officer managing a grants budget with a larger number of private citizens, local business and others. Fred still has to struggle to get the cash but he isn’t simply standing there, ever so ‘umble, before the state looking for handouts. And because the “community” is now Fred’s paymaster, he’s even closer to them – to what they want. Fred isn’t walking a fine line between local council targets and what the community wants – he can focus exclusively on that community and is really their “voice”.

It’s not easy raising money – especially in poor places – but there are Fred’s out there, some full-time paid folk, some part-time, some volunteers. People who don’t look straight to government to provide the cash, who don’t expect anonymous taxpayers who’d rather their cash was spent on something else to pay for their activism and campaigning.

And these people like Fred – and the people who support them - are the Big Society.

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Self-interest not altruism, Jackie

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Now I wouldn't expect Jackie Ashley to understand but Big Society is about self-interest - shared self-interest - not patronising philanthropy. What doesn't happen under Big Society is Jackie's kind of Fabian social engineering.

The big society is too small to fill in the gaps. Since 1945 we have agreed to pay people out of general taxation to tend the sick, look after the old, teach and look out for children, and cope with the walking wounded any capitalist economy produces. The sums involved are huge, and the biggest political arguments are always going to revolve around those choices.

So, were Government to vanish overnight, would we stop wanting our illnesses tended for, would we suddenly care less about our elderly friends and relations, would we no longer want our children educated and would we not require transport? Of course we need all these things and - were there no government - we would seek to ensure we had them.

Saying Big Society is "too small" is to say that we cannot, as a wealthy nation, organise ourselves to deliver things we want without the beneficent hand of the state. Which is why we have state owned shops and factories, of course! But Jackie wants to take a step further - she wishes to suborn the Big Society, to suck it into socialist myth-making:

The big society is out there, a vague but powerful notion, related to our deep desire to help our neighbours and be part of something greater than our own payslips – but it is an idea that properly belongs to the centre-left, not to the right. 

No Jackie, Big Society isn't the new National Recovery Administration - it is not the vehicle for a British Blue Eagle. Big Society is about us - ordinary folk - reclaiming our right to our lives. Winning back our liberty from the failed experiment of the "centre-left".

But then, Jackie, that's why you don't understand Big Society.

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How the self-appointed enforcers of the big state are killing Big Society at birth

I want to agree with Julian Dobson. I really do.  For most of the time he understands what Big Society is about. But then he goes and spoils it:

We are already starting to see a big society gathering momentum in response to the cuts. It is coming from campaigns against library closures, to save schemes like Bookstart, to persuade giant corporations to pay their taxes.

This isn’t Big Society. This isn’t reclaiming the independence of communities. This isn’t progress towards a mutual, co-operative, voluntary society. It is instead a sad reminiscence – people campaigning for government from somewhere else, for others to pay for that government. It is almost a repeat of the squadristi enforcing the laws, running the trains and manning the tax offices – because “if the government won’t do it, then we will.”

The worrying thing in all this isn’t the upsurge in activism – we should welcome that – but that this is activism in defence of the state. UK Uncut and others have become the self-appointed enforcers of big government – and are tearing down any hope of a ‘Big Society’ since that revolts against the over mighty state they support.

Liberating society from the constricting, suffocating comfort blanket of centralised state direction was never going to be easy. But advocates of local action like Julian – with their talk of moving “from a centralised, controlling big society to a distributed, cooperative society” – diverge from that objective when they speak of what government should do:

The message to government, meanwhile, is that it’s time to stop lecturing us about your vision of a big society and start engaging on our territory. Come and talk to the public servants who are being made redundant. Speak to the service users who are losing facilities they rely on. Listen to the people who are struggling to make ends meet, worrying about debt, who don’t know what future their children will have.

How will listening to groups who have the simple objective of stopping government withdrawing from provision so community can take over make a Big Society happen? Do people like Julian not appreciate that while community activists, charities and organisers bemoan the cuts, the private service sector – firms like SERCO, Carillion and A4e – are seeing opportunity?

Where are the groups talking to local government about how youth services can be transferred to voluntary sector provision, how community groups can manage libraries, how regulatory services like planning and pollution control can be delivered by social enterprise? Why are activists sitting in shops rather than taking over libraries? How are individual people – those who want something to happen in their street, their village, their back yard – being supported by experienced activists to get on and do that thing rather than being pointed at mere protest?

I am disappointed – cross that destruction from UK Uncut has pushed aside construction from Big Society. That the only solution activists can think of is to yell at government – to hold out the begging bowl, to tug a little harder at the benevolent trouser leg of the state and to tie ourselves ever more tightly to nanny’s apron strings.

There was a time when I hoped that Big Society would give these people the permission to act positively – to build societies fitted to localities, to take control of our places again and to grow out of the need for the grand schemes of centralised government.

It seems I was wrong. Activists want the central, controlling state – which means having the Big Society killed at its birth.

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Yes charities need a breather - but only so they can break away from the state's drip feed

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David Robinson, one of the founders of Community Links, has raised the concerns that many in the charity - if you must 'third' sector - have been raising over the past several months. These concerns are that, for all the Big Society rhetoric, the impact of spending cuts (and lets be honest the decision of places like Wakefield to cut the voluntary sector before cutting their own payroll) is causing a great deal of pain and upset - plus even a little bit of anger.

The Big Society should be this sector's moment - the coming of age for social enterprise and a reawakening of mutuals, co-operatives and social action. But David Robinson sets out the concerns well - adressing the Prime Minister he says:

You have described Community Links as “one of Britain’s most inspiring community organisations”. Over 1,500 volunteers helped deliver our services to more than 30,000 people  last year, supporting  staff who themselves often got to know us as service users or volunteers, and the majority of whom live locally. We are concerned about the future of our community here in East London, and we are concerned also about the future of our own organisation. Organisations like us are surely the bedrock of the Big Society, and we are wobbling.

Now on one level this is about special pleading from an organisation the relies too heavily on state funding - as David Robinson points out, the changes to the welfare system, the withdrawal of legal aid for benefits appeals and local government spending reductions all present problems for organisations like Community Links. Yet David Robinson makes the mistake - to my thinking - of giving succour to those who argue for the voluntary sector remaining essentially a government sub-contractor dependent on commissions and grants rather than leading on innovative social actions.

To make the change organisations like Community Links need support - support for that change not an injection of cash to keep them in the way to which they've become accustomed. And the change (and I hope government, local and national, understands this too) is to allow choices, decisions and initiatives to be made at the most local of levels. The great Christian charities of the 19th century - what became the Children's Society, Barnardo's and NCH - did not start on an assumption that government funding was there to support the organisation but on the basis that something needed to be done. Edward Rudolf, Tom Stephenson and Dr Barnardo didn't wait for government to hand over money before they started helping children they got on with the job at hand - raising money through churches and other sources to do the work needed.

Men like David Robinson come from that tradition and I hope that the plea in David's letter is for relief allowing voluntary organisations the chance to live again the reality of their name - voluntary, uncoerced, independent and radical. Please let it not be special pleading.

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Don't believe everything the "Community Sector Coalition" tell you - especially when its members don't do much community work!

I stumbled across a bizarre critique of Big Society from something called the "Community Sector Coalition". For a moment I thought this might be a serious, thoughtful and considered analysis of the idea's weaknesses but instead it turns out to be another example of special pleading from a group of organisations that are what "third sector" folk refer to as "infrastructure" organisations.

These organisations adopt a representative, advocacy and advisory role for voluntary groups and organisations. Some - like those providing practical support on fundraising, finance, policies and HR - provide a pretty useful service which, frankly, voluntary groups should be prepared to pay for. But too many of these 'infrastructure' groups have got onto the merry-go-round of discussion, debate, analysis, pseudo-research and what the "sector" calls advocacy (but everyone else calls lobbying).

Now, I've nothing against any of this activity except to say that I do not see any reason at all why the government should pay grants to organisations so they can lobby the government to pay more grants to organisations that then lobby the government to pay more grants to...

...you get the gist?

Not surprisingly the "Community Sector Coalition" (none of whose members seem actually to do any community work) thinks the Big Society is a smokescreen for cuts. The "sector's" trade magazine - Third Sector - describes the meeting where this group discussed Big Society:

More than 30 organisations aired their concerns at the Community Sector Coalition meeting and made plans to tackle the "sham" of the big society initiative

More than 30!! Wow! Out of the tens or thousands of community groups only 30 want to have a pop at Big Society. And those 30 aren't really community groups at all but publicly funded 'networks', 'alliances', 'national associations', 'advisory services', 'institutes' and so forth. Not surprisingly such groups - as far removed from the Big Society as you can get - are worried that their cosy stipends paid with taxpayers' cash will disappear.

Big Society isn't about these groups but about not needing permission, 'infrastructure' or 'advocacy' to get on and do things - social action isn't about "the sector" it's about the rest of us. For all the great work done by voluntary groups, social enterprises and charities there are too many "Community Sector Coalitions" - too much talking, meeting and moaning and not enough doing, creating and having fun.

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What are we marching for?

There seems to have been a great deal of protesting going on recently. We have had a few thousand of Britain’s 2 million or so students meandering and (in a very few cases) marauding around London and, more recently, the somewhat strange activities of UK “uncut” in targeting retailers like Vodaphone and Top Shop - and I gather now Carphone Warehouse - because they don’t pay enough tax.

It seems to me that, while the idea of protest can be appealing, we should think through what we’re protesting about and why before we set about taking to the streets. And those who seek to give intellectual succour to the protesters must do likewise. Here’s the usually thoughtful Julian Dobson allowing the ‘spirit of ‘68’ to get the better of him:

The protestors don’t just exemplify civic engagement. They are also paragons of self-help. They get off their butts and get things done, using their time and resources for causes they care about. They share food and money. And while some of the slogans are tired, there are also examples of imagination and creativity.

But, Julian, what are they protesting about? And what exactly are they “getting done” – other than a temporary annoyance to the targeted business or those trying to go about their regular lives?

On the face of it the protests are pretty straightforward – you (insert name of chosen bloated plutocrat) must pay more tax so we (insert special interest group) can have whatever it is we are demanding provided for us by the Government - “free”.

These are the protests of the greedy against the greedy – groups of people who think it perfectly OK to club together so as to take more money off a particular group of people. People who don’t see that it’s just as much greed to argue for higher taxes to provide something you’ll benefit from as it is to seek to maximise profit and minimise tax (and probably of less social benefit).

However, there is something rather worse than the desire to take other people’s money for our own benefit. These protestors are campaigning for the right to be sheep – to continue being supplicants at the altar of the state. The campaigning students and occupying protestors are not agents of some greater liberty but servants of the big state – creatures of dependence not beacons of liberty. They want a bigger state, higher taxes and more regulation because they want the cuddly comfort zone that brings. The protestors don’t just want something for nothing, they want others fined to pay for that something and a state that rocks them gently in its cradle.

These protests are not the anger of the revolution – regardless of their chosen rhetoric – but the redoubt of those frightened by the prospect of liberty. Scared of self-service, caught in the bright headlights of personal responsibility. These protests are cries from those who fear losing their privileges and comforts.

These are not protests for freedom but the plaintive bleating of sheep trapped on the wrong side of the fence.

Not my fight.

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