A big fat nothing

Hello again.

Baffling Question of the Day which has prompted me to break my blogging silence is: why the hell are so many people taking 'the Big Society' so seriously?

From pretty much the first time I heard the phrase, it seemed blindingly obvious that it was nothing more than a fairly pathetic attempt to rebrand Thatcherism. You can almost see the Tory spinners sat in the pub, going "Maybe instead of talking about the 'small state', we should start talking about, I dunno, the 'big... society', or something", as they scribble 'big society?' on the back of a beermat. Sure, some vague policy ideas about devolving power and supporting voluntary organisations have been stuck on or sketched in since, but surely, at bottom, that's really all it is?

Yet working in the charity sector, I am constantly surprised by the number of people having entirely serious discussions about 'what the big society means for us'. Fairly understandably, this is mostly coming from charities involved in delivering services - and to be fair, most people seem to have a healthy cynicism about the contradiction between expecting them to take on the job of the state and cutting the very budgets that fund them. But the other day I swear I saw a discussion thread about the implications of the Big Society agenda for charitable campaigning, which just made me want to shout "NOTHING! THERE AREN'T ANY! The Emperor has no clothes - bloody obviously!"

Now, maybe I'm wrong. One of my pet peeves is political commentary that says 'Ha, you fools - if only you were as clever and enlightened as me' (see pretty much every socialist blogger on Lib Dem voters, although notably only *after* the coalition was formed). I think it's patronising, arrogant and unhelpful. So I really don't want to be one of those people. Also, it's entirely possible that the people having these discussions know more about this than me, rather than less. But I am genuinely baffled at how the voluntary sector seems to be treating the Big Society as a serious policy agenda worthy of consideration, rather than with the contempt it deserves. It seems to me that by doing so, they're giving what is basically Tory propaganda a credibility it doesn't warrant. Why is there such readiness to let them off the hook like that?