It’s too optimistic, and not in a good way. Cameron wants us all to be more involved on
the frontline of our community. This sense of widespread altruism is fairly
hard to come by on the wrong side of the tracks, a place which is populated by what
you would call the ‘aspirational middle class’, intent on bettering themselves
and their families and with little time
to spend helping a community from which they are trying to escape.
Those that don’t fall into that stereotype fall into the
other one of being reliant on the state, a state which has failed to provide
jobs, one of if not the most fundamental job of any government, and now fails
to provide basic civic institutions like libraries or schools in areas where
there is high demand. In reaction to all
these failings people are supposed to be grateful for the government giving in
to that old cliché of getting the state of peoples’ back. If it did work, it
would be the equivalent of being grateful to the person who burgled you as now
you can get that new furniture you’ve always wanted.
It won’t work, not because it’s not a good thing to have
people become less reliant on the state but because when security is taken away
from people whose lives are being blighted by ever decreasing living standards
and job opportunities it can only lead to a sense of resentment. The big society
may form its own niche communities, but in places where there is feeling that
people have been abandoned these will run in contrary to mainstream. Weariness of
the state can be a good think, but it can also be a slippery slope to isolation
and ghettoisation .
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