"Aspirational waffle designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable." This was how the Archbishop of Canterbury described David Cameron's flagship Big Society project back in 2010. Two years on, and I imagine most people would completely agree with the view held by Rowan Williams.
At best, The Big Society sought to take us back to a pre-war era when charitable causes were set up by incredibly wealthy individuals and institutions (there are inevitable questions about whether these people accrued their wealth through ethical means!) and a community's poor were expected to feel grateful for these acts of charity. But the wisdom of hindsight has shown us that all too often these unregulated, unaccountable organisations set up to help the disadvantaged, harboured a host of dirty secrets such as the wholesale abuse of innocent children.
At worst, The Big Society's mission has been to deliberately starve established worthy causes of funding, so that today's obscenely rich can sweep in and exploit the poor, the disabled and the unemployed for their own selfish financial gains.
It's as if Cameron has become so obsessed with gratifying his obscenely wealthy friends, he's lost the ability to be rational. He's becoming quite kamikaze in fact (watch any recent PMQs) and ultimately that lack of rationale is likely to bring about a downfall as dramatic as Mrs Thatcher's in 1990.
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