Problems with the big society #8129

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 .

reasons why I hate Michael Gove

He looks like a girl.

      His whole notion of what it means to educate our young people is based on an antiquated notion of knowing as many facts as possible on past battles of history; as if knowing having the ability to memorise Plantagenet’s is all you need in today’s“globalised economy”.

     He talks at you rather than to you.

      His abolition of the EMA, a cost effective benefit to help ease the financial burdens of attending college, at an age where students are expected to contribute to a household income, is a smart move if social mobility is something you don’t care about, and your aim is to make it an uneven playing field in favour of the better off in society.

      He’s looks like he would be the head boy at the worst kind of school...

 He speaks passionately and you can tell when you hear him that reforming our education system is something that he cares passionately about. His forthrightness almost belongs to a bygone era when men were men and politicians were noble. Parliament could do with more of his sort. Shame then that his principles are utterly wrong.  

      He decided that 16 year olds didn’t have enough criteria to fill, so they needed yet another qualification, the English Baccalaureate. A qualification that is instantly set against poorer students who are more likely to take up vocational subjects;  thereby insuring that another generation of young people who may not feel inferior at the moment will do by the time he is finished with them.

           He thinks he’s better than you.

      His brand of paternalist conservatism which calls itself  deigns progressive is the worst kind of conservatism; difficult to attack as it appears rational, yet robustly right wing, as we are all finding out at the moment.