Big Society: principled protest or vested interest?

The default position in much of the larger charity sector seems to veer between falsely claiming it has always and forever championed local unpaid community action, or a visceral resentment that there is no longer any money to be had as preferred arms length contractors of the state.

As we all know now, that particular gravy train has left the station and won't be coming back anytime soon.

I've been surprised by how many smaller groups have been saying good riddance in the face of the demise of their larger peers. And this is precisely because there is a serious lack of humility and reflection on how well the voluntary sector shared its wealth, and pushed power downwards, when at the time time it had plenty of it. Likewise there is often a lack of planning for cuts that any and every government would make, regardless of party ideology

These are horrible times for public and voluntary sector folk alike as the redundancies come in waves of misery. But by protesting about the unexpected scale of the cuts we may be missing the point not only about the internal voluntary sector monoploy but the wider global one.

At a recent talk by Danny Dorling at CABE he made the memorable comment that we could get rid of the deficit in many ways if we had a mind to; simply taxing the thousand richest people in our country more proportionately would go a long way. I'd add that closer attention to money laundering, which accounts for 5% global financial transactions, might be an idea, along with closure of the most gratuitous off shore banks and tax avidance industries, rather than encouragement of what amounts to little more than white collar crime. (Peter Mandelson: New Labour is deeply relaxed about people being filthy rich).

We need a radically different set of economic arrangements and this is what we should be puttign our energies into. The Better Banking Coalition shines a light on an aspect of this; what we need is the social movemetn across society to demand change, which would mean a new set of behaviours from our sector beyond beign organisationally predatory, mimicking the more unhealthy aspects of private sector practice

Some of us have always been political; others may have to go on a crash course of activism. And not only the activism by formula brands government is now turning to but hard won experience that comes from fighting in a much wider inclusive way.

For years the old school community workers saw any kind of politics stripped out, and were labelled as dinosaurs. The bland market and management models packaged as community capacity building were sold to the sector and then rejected by community groups who didn't see the point.

There has been a massive failure of inappropriate top down voluntary sector infrastructure - we need to own that before we think about complaining about cuts. Credit to the great work that has taken place, by many small, medium and occasionally large outfits, but in the scheme of things, most local groups, most of the time will tell a different story about how little support was on offer and where the money actually went.

Sadly the local support and development will inevitably becomes even less and is worth fighting for but if we are to fight and win, we need to know exactly where we have reached, and know when we are strong ground, and we are weak.

All of society would benefit, including the Big Soceity, from a confident, determined and united voluntary and community sector, but such a force would need to be far more reflective, innovative and equitable in its dealings with itself and others