7/100: The Big Society
As David Cameron oversees a rapid dismantling of the Welfare State, that bastard child of Capitalism which won the Cold War but never got any credit for it, he must be hoping that something else will fill the void. Something else must, as Welfare State held the western societies together and its absence may mean a world full of despair, breakdown of social life and crimes and drugs and all the things noir. Cameron's big idea was to fill the void with 'Big Society', a sort of third sector utopia where the voluntary citizen organizations and social enterprises step in to fill the void, create opportunities and spread the word for self-reliance and creative thinking. The problem is - it is not working. The reason it is not working, and it may not work in future, is because it is so utopian. There may be a lot of lament about the disappearance of community, but this is one thing that capitalism does: Removes the social markets. We would love to see things in pretty boxes: Socie...