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.)