It's time to drag our failing financiers and technocrats into the 21st century

One thing about the big (cuts) society - it has generated much more press about the community sector than ever before - normally charities, community groups, local government, all of that, is a news free zone

Increasingly we have analysis flying around - from Newsnight, the Today Programme, even TV news. Most of it is naff and wrong headed because the media is incredibly lazy in its research and when it is not recycling news from others it sensationalises and trivilises. But for now, the voluntary and community sector is news worthy if only because Dave Cameron has made it so and by extension, because the banking crisis has made it so

Got no money for social programmes? Who you gonna call on? Those mugs who don't have proper jobs in the City or Town Hall - no brainer for aspiring govts in a bit of hole

But of course the distaste for the voluntary and community sector inevitably comes out as witness this article by Chris Blackhurst in last weeks Evening Standard

It is especially instructive in spelling out the following:

A contempt of people who volunteer. A disparagement of all things charitable. A privileging of money, the pursuit thereof, as a superior way of being. A desire to see government thrash the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) into shape and a belief that the VCS must change and become more like the private sector

The following comes to mind by way of rebuttal

There is a reason why the VCS isn't all about money - its because there is already a private sector to do that. Along with the state and the market most people feel we need something else that exists outside of these things - we can't all be bureaucrats or money men and we might come to vlaue community as a good in itself? Likewise following the casino capitalism of recent years and MPs expenses are we really wanting to invoke the brilliance of finance as the way for our charities to go? Inviting crack dealers to trade outside the school gate might have a fractionally better social outcome

So why the presumption that charities be dragged into the 21st century? Well some people are just used to giving orders and some charities are used to following them. Its actually quite rare for many charity heads to have independent thought processes, so embedded in the reflex to follow the money hence the rebranding now underway aka the big society preferred contractor beauty contest

Blackhurst talks about the word 'profit' but seems not to notice the world of social entreprise or the changes that have already taken place in the VCS.

The real point is that most of the VCS is a small group with no money and the kind of support they need is non judgemental encouragement bespoke to their own agenda not something fresh from MBA land. The thing about volunteers and community groups is that they vote with their feet so its time our failing financiers, politicans, technocrats and shoot-from-the-hip columnists got real and stopped talking down to the millions of people who dedicate their lives to helping one another without expoectation of reward, cash or otherwise

Big Society, the RSA, and those pesky dysfunctional small community groups who just won't work together

At a recent Green Alliance event on the Big Society at which both minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, and RSA CEO Matthew Taylor spoke at, we had a rare moment of candour, albeit a deeply disturbing and partial tone was struck, as reported here


There are at least two immediate concerns, that make the work of those who want to see the community sector thrive, just that bit harder

Firstly - what exactly gives Matthew Taylor the right to lable small groups 'dysfunctional'? And what are the implications of shooting from the hip in this way

Secondly - whilst Nick Hurd is right that there are 'hundreds and thosands of civil society organisations that don't rely on statutory income at all'. It does not follow that they do not need funding or the support that funding gives - quite the reverse

This was in fact a central point of CSC's 'Unleashing the Potential' call to arms before the general election, which we put to Nick Hurd, the Big Society Network and many others, in order to underline the added value and the need to support that part of the sector - hence our 5 asks.

http://www.communitysectorcoalition.org.uk/policy

Taken together it is an impressive double whammy - on the one hand groups are run by tyrants who fall out with each other (people in glass houses etc) and on the other hand, a lot of these small groups do it for nothing, so bring on the cuts, they won't notice...

Where to begin with such destructive and willful misunderstandings of our sector?

On the first salvo, aimed at casting the sector in the role of hopeless self saboteurs, of course dyfunctionality does break out. The crooked timber of humanity never ran smooth. But hardly more so than the dynamics elsewhere in society; indeed I would argue much less. The egalitarian and non hierarchical principles of real community work and grassroots endeavour, where people don't hide behind status and are not allowed to give themselves airs and graces, is a welcome relief from some of the public and private sector cultures.

In passing, we might want to note what comes to mind when thinking about dysfunctional behaviours - might it extend to irresponsible banking practice, MPs expenses, tax avoidance on a massive scale and how this might offset a significant part of the public sector cuts as per recent Newsnight reports (I won't do the link because Paxman turned the air blue, what is it with the BBC these days...)

The issue of dynfunctionality must be seen in a 360 degree way. In particular the work of Erving Goffman is highly pertinent:

Erv puts his finger on an inconvenient truth - large organsations have a strong tendency to adopt overtly oppressive operational behaviours that damage people. Note this is large organisations, and not small community groups.

There is a vested interest in a large organisation bemoaning the shortcomings and unfortunate psyche of the great unwashed. The trouble is, if we start using cod psychology terms like 'dysfunctionality' we end up arriving at terms like 'displacement' or 'projection', and the whole thing gets a bit silly. We should not be making moral and or ill informed psychological judgements in the first place.

If it becomes necessary to challenge oppressive behaviour within communities, and this is something community and youth workers have long experience doing, disparaging homilies tends not to cut it. You'd have to demonstrate real commitment to listening and working the problem through

Finally, it is so easy to knock the more informal parts of the sector and many people have made a good living out of doing so. Those pesky small groups, they are not skilled, they need their capacity built (for a fee), their governance, polices and procedures are inadequate etc etc. Ignoring the fact that small groups work best when fleet of foot and rightly choose not to mimic the bureaucratic behaviours of larger VCS and other bodies (something Nick Hurd identifies but then does not go on to develop re the need for some kind of support and investment).

Segway to Nick Hurd, who does a good line in playing off competing wings of the sector, not without some validity, but with a not-so-hidden agenda of amelorirating the brutalism of cuts

The problem with Nick's comment at Green Alliance is that it seems to suggest that just because these smaller community groups are unfunded, they wil be unaffected by what is going on, notably by the slash and burn of existing VCS infrastructure. In fact the plight of these small unfunded groups will now be harder, because, whilst it might be true that sometimes funded VCS groups didn't reach into the community, it is also true that there are many examples of strong support that now won't be there, hence unfunded civil society action, as supported by funded VCS groups just got that bit harder, at a time when Big Society was hoping to see more people volunteering

If we look at what is actually likely to happen: there may well be less people volunteering and less small groups or civil society organisations. This is because the sector is an ecosystem (aka Nat Wei) which is on the receiving end of some pretty toxic treatment - note the council cuts to the VCS, all too often wildly disproportionate and short term. If these small batallions of community groups can't take advantage of the 'new markets' government is keen to open up - assets, libraries, personalisation of services etc - well people like SERCO and lean mean highly 'functional' brands in the charity world will make an intervention.

At the same time something called civil society will get smaller and poorer as a result. This doesn't have to happen but it is increasingly likely - not least when small groups are pathologised or seemingly not prioritised any level of funding support (to repeat for the benefit of those with selective politically nuanced hearing): the fact that many groups don't rely on statutory income does not mean they would not benefit from it

Rather than blame small community groups, and sharpen the next round of excuses for why the policy didn't work this time, for the good of all in society, we should put aside the mentality that says it didn't work because 'they' were 'dyfunctional' and instead accentuate the positives of what small groups do, get behind it, support it and resource it. What part of 'we're all in it together' and localism / decentralisation are we not yet grasping?

For once, let's create our own civil culture (and not mimic the US charitable giving)

A beguiling headline from that anodyne electonic news purveyor that is 'Civil Society' caught my eye t'other day: It read 'calls for UK to mimic US charitable culture'

http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/fundraising/news/content/8094/calls_for_uk_to_mimic_us

My gut response was Biblical, along the lines of go forth and multiply, and take your specious market ideology with you

My mature reflection: oh for goodness sake, if someone wanted to set the sector back not just decades but into the Victorian era they could not do better - why do we allow such banal and self defeating immiseration dressed up as a 'new' and 'big' idea?

With that in mind I posted the following below the article:

The idea that the UK should mimic US charitable culture is already well embedded. We borrow so much of their terminology that we are very much the 51st state

The deeper issue is not so much that we should 'carry on mimicing' but that we should question whether this is a 'good thing'.

I'm one of those who think it isn't.

America is one of the most unequal and divided (over)developed countries on the planet - see the spirit level for further issues that arise from strcutral long term income inequality and how it corrodes society

http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resource/the-spirit-level?gclid=CNjX74SHyaYCFYpO4Qod10b5HQ

Also (if you have time) have a look at Polly Toynbee's book on 'unjust rewards'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/sep/14/1

Where in the final chapetrs she describes the abject way in which charities have to special plead to super rich philnathropists, that they are the deserving poor - it is extremely unwholsome, this bragging about giving money made off the back of primarily irresponsible financial trading and tax avoidance

Etherington and Hughes Hallet probably wouldn't consider this an issue as it may suit their ideological predilection for big business but for the rest of society this is not the panacea for cuts that government would have us believe. It has the potential for limited public good, but by limited I mean drop in the ocean in comaparision with the cuts in the public sector and VCS AND it also has the tendency to be incredibly insensitive and patronising

In his book 'just another emperor' micheal edwards explodes some of these myths about philanthrocapitalism and calls for a critical and honest debate.

http://www.nonprofitquarterly.org/images/fbfiles/files/Just_Another_Emperor.pdf

This is what we need. Not platitudes from the great and the good in the VCS, Govt and Private Sectors whilst the community sector gets quietly wiped out due to disproportionate cuts

For the kind of community sector and new funding settlement CSC would like to see, have a look at:

http://www.communitysectorcoalition.org.uk/policy

Rock on

Broken localism: the politics of empty slogans

We know that devolving power from central to local government, and to individuals and communities below them, or localism as it is sometimes known, can offset the impersonal forces of globalisation which corrodes community ties and leaves people isolated and vulnerable. There should be no doubt that we need to protect and build up the local, to enhance social resilience in these times of austerity. We need to promote homespun prosperity. We do need to be ‘all in it together’ as the government mantra would have it. So although it commanded little press interest the new Localism Bill, presented to Parliament on 13 December 2010, matters a great deal. The Bill was heralded by government as a devolution of powers to councils and neighbourhoods. What we got was piecemeal legislation, a few minor changes here and there, no spectacular surprises, and certainly nothing to warrant the rhetorical claim of turning the relationship of citizen and state on its head. Rather than big bang localism the Bill is surprisingly timid, especially when set next to the vigour with which the wider cuts agenda has been pursued.

Tip O’Neill former speaker of the House in the US Congress famously once said, ‘all politics is local’. But what happens when the local is all politics? Specifically what happens when it is the politics of central government that uses localism to consolidate its own position? In this country, unlike most others across Europe, Scandinavia and America, all local politics are subservient to the politics of central government. The slogans go one way, the monopoly of power in another.
The Bill presents a battery of measures. There is a predictable clearing out: the Standards Board regime, Home Improvement Packs, Regional Spatial Strategies, the Infrastructure Planning Commission and the Tenant Services Authority are all going. The replacement options for these shibboleths are minimal rather than visionary. More control appears to be given to councils via a new ‘general power of competence’ which enables them to carry out any lawful activity on behalf of the community. However we would do well to remember that central government, via Parliament and the court system, gets to decide what ‘lawful activity’ means. Elsewhere in the Bill a handful of areas will be able to hold referendums for directly elected mayors; it is as if government couldn’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to push ahead with older reforms or invent its own ones. When it comes to local residents the Bill wants to direct their energies towards service delivery rather than give them an entirely free rein. Local people are to be given the power to instigate local referendums in the hope that they might be persuaded to save local facilities threatened with closure and run them themselves – a poisoned chalice if ever there was one. Social housing tenants have a similar dilemma: their more flexible tenure gives them a greater ability to move to different areas, yet local authorities can now limit who can apply for social housing within their areas.

The Olympics get a mention, as does the defunct London Development Agency, business rate relief and a community infrastructure levy. Not that these last two items do anything to address the uneven contest between councils and communities on the one hand and unscrupulous developers on the other. Faced with a Bill like this we are beset with minutiae, a cacophony of planning technicalities, and left to puzzle how the mechanics of how a referendum might actually work. Policy officers up and down the land, in the few remaining jobs in local government and the voluntary sector, will be looking for crumbs of comfort. Somewhere there is a sentence or two amidst the verbiage that can be relied on to make the case for whatever local agenda might profit from having government license. That is the first option, to make lemonade out of lemons, and it is well under way. Or, having absorbed the detail, we might consider the Bill and ask how much it really changes anything? Beyond the fizz and froth, this non-event of a Bill poses further questions: what would real devolution look like? Why is the localism agenda so consistently overhyped? What would it take to make localism happen?

Real devolution of power would mean local government becoming formally independent from central government, both legally and financially. In this Bill councils are still subordinate to the centre. In 1986 the Widdicombe Commission bluntly asserted that, ‘local government has no right to exist’ because, ‘parliament is sovereign’. This remains the case. Perhaps more importantly, money flows from the centre. Currently around three quarters of all local authority money comes from central government. Until local government is freed up to raise the majority of its money locally, as happens in other comparable countries, it has no practical independence and will remain a creature of central government patronage.

Real devolution of power for communities would go beyond the opportunity to call for a referendum, deliver services or take over the running of a building. These achievements are only possible, if at all, after huge amounts of support by larger professional organisations. If localism were to happen from the grassroots upwards we would see a rich diversity of informal community action, which inevitably takes years and costs money. The more likely scenario is that local community action will continue to decline, as always happens at times of economic hardship because the rational choice is to use one’s time to seek paid work not to volunteer. The real danger is that this decline in social action will snowball because the kind of opportunities for community empowerment that government envisages are something local community groups could never realistically be expected to do on the scale the Bill has set out. The scale of cuts will mean plenty of empty public buildings and that service contracts can now be picked up by private sector bodies. Also a new brand of larger charity that is voluntary in name only, and that has little or no connection with the local community it purports to serve, will clean up. Having hollowed out the public sector, civil society itself becomes deracinated.
For years governments have overhyped localism, claiming to give back power to the people. In the forward to the 2008 Empowerment White Paper Hazel Blears spoke of The English Civil War, the Rochdale cooperative movement, Peterloo, the Chartists, the Suffragettes and those who fought fascism as part of, ‘the great struggles for democracy’. They certainly deserve to be remembered as such but implying that New Labour’s brand of localism stands in such a tradition is errant nonsense. Continuing this more recent custom of extreme overstatement, the minister for decentralisation, Greg Clarke, writing on this bill in the Guardian (13.12.10) insists, ‘there’s a new boss. You’.

It is attractive to be our own boss but state-sanctioned narcissism does not begin to tell the truth about how we are to live together. For citizens to rise up and take power, notwithstanding such partial measures as the ‘right to challenge’, the ability to bid for assets and deliver local services, they must have councils that are not cowed by central government. To balance a strong local state, citizens will also need a vibrant, well resourced civil society led by the collective action of voluntary and especially community groups. This kind of society doesn’t exist. The time, effort and resources it takes to support community action have been exhorted but not understood. The consequences of overhyping localism are that it becomes a discredited currency and more generally we lose trust in politics. In 2007, writing principally on New Labour (The Triumph of the Political Class), Peter Oborne described an era of post-democracy where a new brand of politician, increasingly detached from civil society, pumps out simplistic messages based on market research or borrowed from the advertising industry. He called it manipulative populism and drew a parallel with totalitarian countries. In pre-election speeches David Cameron appeared to understand the risks of such a debased political culture and made considerable political capital out of it, which makes the current Bill all the more disappointing.

Any steps taken towards a stronger civil society and deeper democratic practice would be a towering political achievement, whoever pulled it off. The only way it could be achieved is by reversing conventional political wisdom. Lord Wei, the government’s Big Society adviser has spoken of society as a three legged stool, implying the need for proportionate attention to the needs of both the public and private sectors along with the newly discovered civil society, formerly known by New Labour as the ‘third sector’. And yet the reason why we are seeing unprecedented cuts is because of private sector failings over above those of the state. Only a state so deeply obeisant to private sector values, a market state, could present it as radical and empowering. The government’s premise that bureaucratic government is both ineffective and undemocratic is correct as far as it goes, but when taken to extremes, and the scale of the cuts are extreme, a bit of bureaucracy can quickly appear preferable to little or no government at all.

For localism to work there would need to be real vision and courage to not only spread power more widely but for central government to have proportionately less of it. Our local government would need at least double the freedoms and powers it currently has to catch up with localism in comparable countries elsewhere in the world. And for civil society to play any kind of significant role, made up as it is of mainly of small community groups, there would need to be unprecedented levels of appropriate support, offered without strings attached. There is a reason why people volunteer and it has nothing to do with seeking to undercut the costs of state provision of local services. Services may benefit, savings may be made as a result of having a stronger civil society but this is a by product not a cheque that government can expect to cash any time soon.

Meanwhile power has stayed where it always was, at the centre of government, and now government has decided it can no longer afford former levels of support. This is presented as giving away power so people can do for themselves what government used to do, before the bank bailout. Picking up the bill for the banking crisis changes everything. Claiming that austerity is an opportunity for redistributing power to communities is as disingenuous as it is politically expedient. We are encouraged by ministers to view this as a radical shift of power away from central government – it isn’t. Without money and power localism is an empty slogan.

We don't like community groups much do we!

We don't like community groups much do we?

How else was it possible for the then third sector to grow 200% in 10 years under New Labour and yet small and medium sized charities ended up getting smaller at the same time?

This has to be a central concern for the Comunity Sector Coalition and all of its members - the continual failure to pass reources, voice and power down within the wider sector, let alone in society.

If the Voluntary & Community Sector (VCS) can't even set a good example why should government or anyone else take it remotely seriously

We also don't like community groups much because in the upper echelons of the VCS the great and the good keep trying to talk down to groups, suggesting interventions that are inappropriate and technocratic

Spot a community group, one that hasn't run away, and then lecture them about how poor their governance is, where's the business proposition, on and on with the sustained and continuous attack based on an assumption of superiority and then...

follow up by the inevitable sales pitch: why don't they pay money to go on a capacity building course to build up skills and confidence

Community groups are constantly faced by the assumption from above that they are are somehow not doing it properly and urgently need to have their skills boosted - where do you go with that?

The result would seem to be that they absent themselves from both government and those parts of the voluntary sector that seek to sweep into communities, grab contracts, do minimal consultation and exit

We'll see more of this predatory behaviour, if big society continues to lose its way because the only way larger nationals can now surive is to try to pick up work locally, which means a head on conflict of interest with indigenous groups

Community groups faced with a compact document that isn't about them, shun it.

Community groups faced with an LSP that meets privately in a hiden corner of the town hall ignore it.

Community groups basically are far too busy to be bothered with anything that is not immediately relevent

And what is it with this enterprise model all the time? Not every one is a failure if they haven't swallowed an MBA for breakfast

Instead of exhorting community groups to become Alan Sugar Apprentice clones (there is a very good reason why increasingly less people say they trust the voluntary sector after all) the winner takes all culture that dominated the ChangeUp capacitybuilders era needs to be seen for what it is - meaningless for most of the sector most of the time

Still we have the assumption of enterprise good; community sector bad - when surely it was a naive belief in enterprise that brough our banks to their knees and hence the enusing mess in the first place - why would we want to revisit that way of operating on our community groups? Perhaps they don't want to do a pyramid selling version of community assets thank you very much

Big Society and its ideologues understood the failure and venality of recent years which is why it is able to frame cuts in the following way - see page 7 below

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/426258/support-stronger-civil-society.pdf

But it is not entirely clear whether the new coalition has more regard for community groups than the previous lot.

Logically the focus on civil society organisations is all but identical. But the nascent localism bill fails to locate the sector last time I noticed and given that we've all been here before and seen big rhetoric fail to fire, the alarm bells are ringing rather loudly about the lack of substance behind how Big Society actually works, i.e. maybe it doesn't.

Big Society seems to have inherited New Labour's magical thinking about social enterprise, not noticing that social entreprenurs are every bit as grant dependent as their voluntary sector competitors (note that comunity groups never had much money anyway)

http://www.tsrc.ac.uk/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=MqmKeY9Ciss%3d&tabid=749

If you don't like community groups then the first thing you might want to do is change them into something you do like that reflects your ideological prejudices but by doing so mutual failure is guranteed.

For that reason CSC's call for a new settlement that puts the sector at the centre of the VCS via our unleashing the potential doc also on the website,

http://www.communitysectorcoalition.org.uk/policy/our-policy-position

is the way we think we need to go

Community groups first not last!

And strictly on their own terms otherwise why would they bother to show up at all?

Service Jam - Nat Wei has left the building

I joined in the service jam which brought global voices together to chat electronically about empowerment and related topics. There were a number of guest speakers, George Bush (I kid you not), Kevin Curley, Nat Wei, some functionary from NCVquo etc

I thought I'd check the Nat Wei debate only to find the following message (it is a classic):

Lord Wei has had to leave the Jam 0106 PM Oct 12, 2010

Hello All

Lord Wei had to depart the Jam to catch a train. I (disobdied non specific person) work in tehOffice for Civil Society within the Cabinet Office (part of the UK Government that works with Lord Wei) and will be repsonding to some of your points until 1:30 pm. Lord Wei may be able to drop in later today


Ho hum

Missed my deep and meaningful comment then, which I didn't get off before he'd left; for what it is worth I've included it below in response to Nat Wei's question about how we can make people feel big about having a big society (I paraphrase)


Title: We need collective community action 01:04 PM Oct 12, 2010 [0]

Hi Nat

We need a both / and approach; my hope for the big society is that it does not repeat previous government mistakes by becoming a state sanctioned ideology.

I can see you like the community organising model and social entreprise but I don't hear you talking about the 20,000 UK CD workers, nor about the value not just of exhorting individuals to do more, but about the 'ecosystem' of actually existing community groups and their collective not individual action.

The coalition government has talked a lot about cuts to the public and voluntary sector but if you want to make people feel big you need to start with where they are at

In terms of the voluntary / community sector this means you need to acknowledge that most community groups never had any money in the first place, or indeed, much support from larger voluntary sector charities, councils or social enterprises.

I'd like the big society to make people feel big by talking about what actually exists on the ground - which is not organisers and social enterprise ready to deliver public services (govt ideologues)and which can easily make people feel very small

From reading your speeches, blogs etc I gather you focus a lot on the individual and less on the collective agency of community groups. I think this works agaisnt the big society because it skews the picture and lessens the chances of success. Remember Alinsky's rule #2 'never go beyond the experience of your own people' - the experience of active civil society is of working in groups, not merely as individuals feeling big but through collective agency, even collective struggle

The three legged stool of state, market and civil society needs fixing - you are right about that, so when it comes to the civil society side of the equation lets start start with community groups not ideology and build from there.

Recomend you read or re-read Paulo Freire's 'pedagogy of the oppressed' for new ideas and reach out into the community development field and wider informal sector. This approach would have worked in a way the town hall tours were not able to

Freire understood that people feel big or bigger when they have been listened to as equals and find their destiny in collective acts - anything else he termed 'false charity' destined to fail. Well worth exploring viz. the big society

All best

Waiting for the Spending Review

Crazy times for the sector - the rhetoric is cranked up really loud re 'giving power' to local people. And yet the localism bill shows every sign of mimicing the usual bodged local government acts of yesteryear - legislation by formula. Ditto the refreshed compact

No civil servant can say anything before 20th October (annoucement of spending review) about anything - the waiting has a soporific and dangerous feel. Daily announcements of support for the big society ring out from the upper echelons of the sector with a reminder to please to talk to us (about a small matter of delivery and how to be contractor) , and yet most of the wider sector according to recent polls believes big society is a smokescreen for cuts, bs in shorthand.

There is a lot of capturing and reflecting back of ideas going on. Govt presents big society as being about:

social action (individual)
community empowerment (together)
public service reform (state)

and about decentralisation, transparency and sorting out funding for the VCS

(As a semi competent policy person myself I took note earlier this week - my thnaks to DCLG...)

But note the semi mystical caveat as Francis Maude recently said, there isn't actually a plan

http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/News/DailyBulletin/1033203/Minister-admits-big-society-will-chaotic/2368133AE5887580BFA110ACC20A8A81/

Something is very odd about all of this. Unlike many in the sector my analysis of the previous rounds of state led community empowerment and third sector modernisation is very critical - I believe it divided the sector between winners (sub contractors) and losers (community associations) so for me a big society that talks about an independent civil realm made up of little batallions of commmunity groups has something going for it, that can and should be explored. Note that for New Labour community empowerment = local government (end of story) see Sir Simon Milton's comment in DCLG's 2007 Action Plan for Community Empowerment

But all of this does need some connection with reality, some urgent action otherwise it won't happen. I'm not seeing or feeling the big society move onto practical engagement with grassroots people - the cancelation of the town hall tours is a bad sign, we need raw open encounters, if people are angry that is better than being passive or cynical. How could they not be angry under the circumestances and how could anyone think that would not happen

I get the feeling that big society must be about deflecting the public gaze from cuts, because that is what any politican would do under the circumstances and a whole lot of others in our sector too

That is an issue that needs some truth telling, but we will judge people on what they do not what they say.

Are they going to actually listen to community groups, share their pain, take the time to attend their events, work with their agenda rather than impose the virtues of self help?

Will they retreat into disembodied (clever) media stunts, philanthropy with strings attached, and guilt tripping people into volunteering as part time organisers struggle to make quotas for signing up x number of new recruits?

And if all this means is that everything is on hold until the spending review that isn't good enough