Tag Archives: Cameron

The Meh Society

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Today, Ed Miliband gave his acceptance speech to the Labour party conference, and having watched it, I caught myself accidentally feeling cautiously optimistic. Have no fear, that feeling was quickly despatched and I remain my normal cynical self.

One particular term he used which grated horribly for me was “the good society”. The Good Society, really? Was the Tories’ equivalent not annoying enough already?

The thing about “the Big Society” and “the Good Society” is that they’re soundbites and they don’t mean anything, and that for some reason annoys me more than it ought to.

We’re just about coming to understand that Cameron‘s “Big Society” is about parents building schools and getting charities to pick up the bill for things the government can’t afford to fix. It seems to be a partial removal of the state’s abstraction layer: instead of wanting schools, paying taxes and letting someone qualified turn one into the other, you’re now encouraged to take on that overhead yourselves so that they can sack half the public sector workers.

Wait, this wasn’t supposed to be a rant about that Society.

No, the “Good Society” is even more nebulous, and I hope it doesn’t become a buzzword like its alter ego. What is it supposed to entail? Us being vaguely nice to each other and hoping it all works out?

For all the catchy phrases that politicians throw around, the majority of the public are committed members of the “Meh Society”. We want to pay taxes at a reasonable level, and get good public services as a result. And in the main we’re nice people, but we’re also pretty cynical about politics, and being declared part of “the Good Society” or “the Big Society” just doesn’t entrhrall us as much as those in parliament would like to believe.

My Contribution to Big Society

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Today, Prime Minister David Cameron launched his ‘Big Society’ initiative, aimed at empowering local communities to fix their own problems. On the surface it sounds to me like a nice idea, getting neighbours to work together to save their post office or whatever.

But of course, no-one really knows how it’s going to happen yet, or if there’s any money. And money will be needed. No independent community-built schools are going to spring up if the only people who can volunteer their time are housewives and a bunch of unemployed sales executives. People need training, and even after a bit of training, they’ll still not do the job as well as professionals. Apparently the government can’t afford to pay actual builders to build schools, so is this part of the ‘Big Society’ plan doing any more than investing in cheap, shoddy infrastructure that will fall to the community to maintain when it starts falling down?

It all seems based on the idea that no-one’s got much money but we’ve all somehow got a lot of spare time. Which, with unemployment threatening to rise even higher, is pretty much true. Unfortunately, all the people in this situation are spending all their spare time trying to get money again, by means of finding a job that actually pays them. ‘Big Society’ doesn’t dish out feel-good points that can be traded in at the food bank.

In an attempt to find some money for training and so that there is some financial incentive for these volunteers, Cameron also suggests “…announcing plans to use dormant bank accounts to fund projects.” Wait. Are you nationalising our bank accounts? How exactly does he propose to do that, and has anyone else done that in recent history besides Communist dictators? (Or, more likely, am I completely failing to grasp the actual plan here?)

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty good about my contribution to the Big Society. With all the websites asking what we should cut the hardest, with Conservative and Lib Dem manifestos falling by the wayside, and with the government washing their hands of community projects, I think I’ve found myself somewhere to volunteer.

In the deprived central London borough of Westminster, there are plenty of volunteers working in charity shops and soup kitchens — but where we’re really lacking, where we really need to come together and save our community, is in the area of policy-making. Since the government clearly isn’t keen on doing it themselves, I humbly propose myself as a volunteer here. I could spare a few hours after work each night to down a few pints in the Commons bar before heading to the Chamber and being an angry leftie at people until the government realises that we pay tax so that they fund these projects, not us.

When Mark met David

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After the recent visit of Mark “I’m the CEO… bitch” Zuckerberg to No. 10 Downing Street, Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for culture and media, tweeted:

Just met Mark Zuckerberg, Founder of Facebook. Really smart guy with some good ideas on improvement digital engagement in policy making.(Source)

Could I please be the 32768th person to say: “Aaaargh! We’re doomed!”

Now I’m sure there was nothing particularly sinister discussed at that meeting, but I can’t help the shivers down my spine when I discover that my government has been taking advice from Facebook.

From News Feeds to Beacon to Connections to the impossibility of quitting, Facebook’s privacy is continually worsening at a worrying rate. (danah boyd rant; scary employee interview.) And Zuckerberg’s famously cavalier attitude doesn’t help matters either. Facebook are about the only people I would trust less at the helm of the Labour party’s aborted Überdatabase less than the government themselves.

Though that said, perhaps Jacqui Smith needn’t have bothered trying to force the Database State on us after all — half the population (myself included) already signed up for a bigger, leakier, privately owned one.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pipe my net connection through an SSH tunnel so Jeremy Hunt can’t see how close I am to finishing building my stable.

The Best We Could Have Hoped For?

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I returned to my hotel at half past ten last night, having drunk just enough Kräuser to make Labskaus palatable, to find a Giant Smug Cameron Face grinning at me from a lectern outside 10 Downing Street. “The Queen has asked me to form a new government,” he began, and I started to wonder if I should have had more beer after all.

So we have a new Tory government. It plans to fight the deficit, but yet to raise the inheritance tax threshold to a million pounds. It promises an end to the National ID Card scheme and database, yet wants to crack down on immigration, especially those who have the audacity to not speak English very well. It promises to make the poor better off, but it seems to want to achieve this by paying people 150 quid to get married while they sell off what public services we have left.

It says “Britain is broken” and means, as all parties mean when they push that agenda, “Britain is changing, we don’t really understand how or why, and we’re a bit scared”.

But this Conservative government is a little special because, even at its heart, it is also a Liberal Democrat government. The two are in coalition for the first time in 60 years, and no-one’s really sure what will become of that. Do we dare hope for something good?

It’s quite telling that not only do we have a hung parliament, in which no party has been given an overall majority, but we don’t even have an easy coalition either.

Despite 13 years of dubious wars, expenses scandals, erosion of privacy and our worst recession since the 1930s, Labour still command nearly a third of the vote. Despite widespread fear and mistrust amongst the young, the Conservative party command over a third. And the Lib Dems are still a non-entity for a lot of people — not having been in power for over 70 years, we have no way of knowing if we can trust them or even if they’re competent.

Though there were campaigns asking people to vote tactically in order to deliberately produce a hung parliament, no-one seems happy with any of the options it’s produced. A Labour / Lib Dem coalition was unpopular as it could have meant another four years of the same PM, cabinet and policies. The Conservative / Lib Dem coalition that we now have was unpopular too, with many staunch Tories and Lib Dems accusing their party of turning traitor or selling out. And the alternative to these was a minority government, which would have been no different at all to a majority one except that we’d probably all go to the polls again much sooner.

But on the prospect of electoral reform, which all three parties have talked about and a good proportion of the electorate are in favour of, could we have asked for a better result? The Lib Dems have been pushing their agenda strongly, and at least a referendum seems to be on the cards. The Conservatives also seem to be coming around to the Lib Dems’ plan to increase the tax threshold to help those on low incomes, so perhaps the poor won’t be shafted after all.

I do worry about the next election, though. Labour has a tough job to ditch its reputation and win voters back. Even with Proportional Representation, the Lib Dems don’t have enough support to rule outright. And Cameron’s modernism and willingness to dish out cabinet seats to the Lib Dems could spark an all-out war in the Tory ranks. If we thought all the parties were pretty unappealing at this election, it could be a whole lot worse next time around. Who will we elect when we don’t trust anyone?

Let’s Win it for Britain?

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At 5pm sharp, my phone dinged to let me know that a new joyous missive had been received unto my inbox, from a doubtless fine fellow by the name of “David Cameron”.

That was… unexpected.

The Tories’ Prospective Parliamentary Candidate and Inevitable Next MP for Bournemouth West, Conor Burns, has my e-mail address — his all-caps subject lines are the price I pay for returning a questionnaire reassuring him that we disagree on virtually everything.

Apparently e-mail addresses harvested this way are passed on to the Conervatives’ central office / PR agency, which seems reasonable enough. But the tone of Cameron’s e-mail seems to suggest they think I’m actually supporting his Party:

Every leaflet you deliver, every pound you donate, every email you send, every friend you speak to – every extra little thing you do can make the decisive difference between winning and losing.

Good point! I’ll get leafleting for the Lib Dems right away.

Also, it doesn’t half exaggerate what’s essentially a non-issue:

After all the dithering, this unelected Prime Minister has been forced by the law of the land to call the election…

Whoa, I didn’t elect our current Prime Minister? That’d be because I don’t live in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. And the people that live there did vote for him. Just because Tony Blair had a cult of personality that made it feel like we voted for him rather than for Labour candidates doesn’t necessarily make it something that his successor should try to repeat.

The e-mail ends with an inspiring:

So let’s get out there and win it for Britain.

Win it for Britain? Well, I’ll certainly try. But somehow I don’t think my win condition — an abolition of political parties, removing politicians in favour of civil servants executing the will of the nation as established by a radical technology-driven Direct Democracy (pause for breath) — is quite what you had in mind, Mr Web Cameron.

But vote for the Conservatives? Nah, I’ll pass. I’ll vote Tory on the day Maggie Thatcher turns up at my door with the eight gallons of semi-skimmed she owes me. (Note to Tory HQ, just in case Bournemouth West ever becomes that marginal: I really will. That will be sufficiently amusing to swing my vote.)