It would be unfair to call Cameron’s Big Society a “total bollocks”, as one senior Conservative did during the election campaign because it was too vague to mean anything.   Cameron himself would have us believe it is a project, to be launched in November, to harness the power of online social networking via a new Your Square Mile website to turn sceptical citizens into enthusiastic community organisers.   After the Thatcher decade lionised individuals and rolled back the State, the Big Society provides the positive counterfoil of joining individuals together to take community action.   Or does it? What will it actually do?   The only concrete answers to emerge so far are that it will include the practical like a babysitting network or helping a neighbour struggling with groceries, and the administrative like providing cheap insurance (but who pays?) or streamlined criminal record checks for local events!   Shades of John Major’s Cones Hotline.

Of course it’s easy to see the Big Society as a farcical figleaf to cover up the gaps left by huge spending cuts.   But the concept is more insidious than that.   It is fundamentally a shift away from the whole idea of collective action and shared responsibility that underpins social democracy.    Recruiting goodwill among small oases of civil society wherever they happens to spring up (however estimable within those localities) is no antidote to the rampant poverty and powerlessness thrown up by a market economy with a highly centralised power structure.

There’s also the small matter of expertise, aptitude and time.   People on low wages (say less than £18,000 a year) often have long hours and physically draining activities at work to contend with, and particularly if they have large family responsibilities don’t have either the inclination or the time for social networking.

There can be no doubt – as Eric Pickles admitted “this is about getting more services for less money” – that this is partly about replacing paid labour by unpaid labour.   But there is no way that the fundamental conditions of a fair and opportunity-for-all social democratic society – housing support, sports and recreation, child care, out-of-work income support, high-quality healthcare, and free and potential-unlocking education – can be guaranteed by voluntary local networks.   At best they can offer a marginal supplement to the foundation of good public services.

The ‘Big Society’ idea may sometimes provide a useful helping hand in some local communities where it takes root, where it should be welcomed rather than scorned, but the idea that it offers a new ideology or dominant social template to deal with the deep social and economic problems of an extremely unequal market economy is risible.   Not only will it scarcely brush the surface of  healing the social injustices and profound inequalities of modern society, it will actually exacerbate them.   For if the State is pruned back so drastically that it is not big enough or strong enough to deal with people’s basic needs,  it will produce an attenuated society, not a bigger one.

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