Tag Archives: Government

We, the Web Kids

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Occasionally, I read a piece of writing that sums up my thoughts so well, so exactly, that I sit and try to blog something comparable and just fail.  Try as I might, I can’t outdo the original.  I’m not sure what Pastebin.com’s retention policy is, so just in case, here it is in full:

We, the Web Kids

by Piotr Czerski (translated by Marta Szrede)

There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as ‘generation’. I once tried to count the ‘generations’ that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about the so-called ‘Generation Nothing’; I believe there were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changed during the past fifteen years.

We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.

Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be able to talk about us at all.

1.
We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something – the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of ‘Estonia’, or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high – we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.

To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.

2.
Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use. From the ocean of cultural events we pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we review them, we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give us suggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films, series or videos we watch together with colleagues or with friends from around the world; our appreciation of some is only shared by a small group of people that perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is why we feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need free access to it.

This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have decided to defend their obsolete ways.

One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of our childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in the external memory network these are simply memories. Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of ‘Casablanca’ is to you. We find online the films that we watched as children and we show them to our children, just as you told us the story about the Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either.

3.
We are used to our bills being paid automatically, as long as our account balance allows for it; we know that starting a bank account or changing the mobile network is just the question of filling in a single form online and signing an agreement delivered by a courier; that even a trip to the other side of Europe with a short sightseeing of another city on the way can be organised in two hours. Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasingly annoyed by its archaic interface. We do not understand why tax act takes several forms to complete, the main of which has more than a hundred questions. We do not understand why we are required to formally confirm moving out of one permanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not communicate with each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity to have a permanent address is itself absurd enough.)

There is not a trace in us of that humble acceptance displayed by our parents, who were convinced that administrative issues were of utmost importance and who considered interaction with the state as something to be celebrated. We do not feel that respect, rooted in the distance between the lonely citizen and the majestic heights where the ruling class reside, barely visible through the clouds. Our view of the social structure is different from yours: society is a network, not a hierarchy. We are used to being able to start a dialogue with anyone, be it a professor or a pop star, and we do not need any special qualifications related to social status. The success of the interaction depends solely on whether the content of our message will be regarded as important and worthy of reply. And if, thanks to cooperation, continuous dispute, defending our arguments against critique, we have a feeling that our opinions on many matters are simply better, why would we not expect a serious dialogue with the government?

We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see ‘institutions of democracy’ as a monument for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities.

What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.

Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware of it, but I guess what we want is real, genuine democracy. Democracy that, perhaps, is more than is dreamt of in your journalism.

“My, dzieci sieci” (“We, the web kids”) by Piotr Czerski (translated by Marta Szrede) is licensed under a Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Na tych samych warunkach 3.0 Unported License
Originally posted at: http://pastebin.com/0xXV8k7k
Contact the author: piotr[at]czerski.art.pl

Progressiveness and the Tribe

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As a former supporter of the Liberal Democrats, I found my support leaning toward Labour due to the Lib Dems’ ongoing disastrous coalition with the Conservative party.  But in truth, the Labour party are just a convenient political marker for some of my opinions on economic and social policy.  What I really care about, I suppose, is progress – changing things that are broken, trying new ideas until we discover something that makes the country work better.

But all three main parties now label themselves as “Progressive”. (I suppose “regressive” isn’t much of a vote-winner.)  The minor parties mostly have limited agendas that make it impossible to support them to the exclusion of all others.  Who, then, do I vote for? The truth is probably that none of the UK’s political parties are as progressive as I would like, but more than that — a politician being progressive on my behalf isn’t really what I want at all.

I want to design the future.

Then I want to engineer the future.

Then I want to sit back and think “bloody hell, we made that.”

That’s what gets me out of bed and halfway across the county five mornings a week, what keeps me sketching interfaces and gets me through design meetings, what keeps me coding and soldering and getting covered in grease and salt-spray.

I’m not pretending that I could engineer the future of this country by myself, or that I should have any more of a say than the other sixty million of us, but I’d like to at least have some input besides a simple vote.  As far as I’m aware, there exist only two ways of having this kind of input — sell your soul for a career in politics, or be ignored on e-petitions.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that having our voice heard and our experience utilised on our own terms is not something that a nation state can offer its citizens.  Our voices are heard and our experience utilised by our families and friends; at our places of work — tribes of a few hundred people at most — but not on a national scale

Is there some useful way for citizens to help engineer their future at the state level, or are we relegated to having that kind of influence only in our hundred-strong social tribes?  Are there any countries that are significantly better at this than ours, countries that progress with heavy citizen involvement?  Am I dreaming of an impossible society, and most importantly of all, should I go to bed and sleep it off instead of filling the internet with my ranting?

When Science met Big Society

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Yesterday’s announcement that the Arts and Humanities Research Council will, on pain of losing funding, devote a “significant” amount of time to studying the notion of “Big Society” is frankly shocking. If it is indeed true, it smacks of incredible egotism on the part of the government.

The government’s money is the people’s money — if we’re not going to leave the job of deciding what to research to the actual researchers, why should the government’s whims be involved? If there were a referendum on it now, what proportion of the tax-paying public would label the Big Society as a steaming pile of shite that we shouldn’t be throwing any more money at?

Conversely, how many of the government’s other sweeping changes — the programme of cuts (Warning: least impartial summary ever) that we are now subject to, for example — have been the subject of such hopefully-independent research?

A future UKIP government promises to ban global warming research, and apart from the climate change deniers, I’m confident the public would not support that particular aspect of governmental meddling in research. So why are we putting up with this?

(And on a related note, does anyone else think it’s a little odd to commission research on a policy after committing to it?)

tl,dr: Hands off mah science, government.

“Meh” to AV

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There are four months left before Britain goes to the polls to decide whether to adopt the Alternative Vote system, and already the #yes2av and #no2av campaigns are hotting up on Twitter.

Barely a year ago, I would have shouted “yes” with all my might — the Labour incumbents were more into spin and surveillance than the redistribution of wealth, and the opposition Conservatives appealed even less. But AV would have helped the Lib Dems immensely, maybe giving them a shot at power. As the party of the young, in my eyes maybe more a party of the Left than Labour was, I was all for the Lib Dems having as much of a chance as possible to win seats in the House of Commons.

What a difference a year can make.

The Tories are decimating the public sector and somehow still believe that charity and the free market will make it all better. The Lib Dems are complicit and must be on course for breaking the majority of their election pledges. Labour have a new leader who doesn’t seem to do anything apart from offer the occasional doomful prediction about the coalition’s cuts.

The Greens would have me out of a job, UKIP are crazy, the BNP are evil, and I can’t bring myself to run as a Pirate Party candidate because I believe in far more than an end to abuse of copyright.

Who would I vote for if a general election were called tomorrow? Nobody.

In fact, the current political climate has almost brought me full circle on the subject of the Alternative Vote. Under a system like AV, smaller parties are likely to do better. But with a three-(major-)party system, it’s unlikely to be the case that we’ll see a Labour-Pirate or a Conservative-UKIP coalition or anything interesting — it’s still going to be Convervative-Lib Dem or Labour-Lib Dem, even with AV. And all that does is continue the last 13 years’ rush for the centre ground.

The Tories are rushing for it so fast that they’re alienating half their party. The Lib Dems, in theory, define the centre, and despite electing the younger Miliband, the Labour party has yet to decide if and how it’s going to stop its New Labour love affair with ‘Middle England’.

What we absolutely don’t need, for the sake of the next generation’s interest in politics, is an unending succession of coalitions, each one indistinguishable from the last.

So if it could happen, bring on the Labour-Pirate coalition and the Conservative-UKIP coalition. Anything to keep things interesting. But if it can’t — and unless the Lib Dems utterly toast their popularity, it can’t — then let’s have the next generation of Maggie Thatcher and Michael Foot, let’s have some people with real ideological differences fighting it out in the Commons.

Bring me someone I can believe in.

Until then, “meh” to AV.

Dystopia Fetishism and the Fall of #Solidarity

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Two weeks ago, I sat in this same warm office, looking out at the cold world outside. And this is what I saw. I saw Laurie Penny’s Spider Jerusalem-esque piece for the New Statesman, covering the student riots, and I saw Wikileaks preparing to dump 250,000 classified US Embassy cables on the world. It all felt like a sudden rush towards the horrid, glorious dystopia that as a British citizen I am required to fetishise. (c.f. H.G. Wells, George Orwell, John Wyndham et al.)

One of those retains the ability to stir up more trouble. The other, I fear, is now a lost cause.

Being approximately a socialist, and having voted for the Liberal Democrats as I felt they were the only almost-credible party of the Left, I was almost warmed by the scale of the protests — not only were the Lib Dems’s broken election promises not being taken lightly, but only six months in to a government of the centre-Right, we were already seeing the people up in arms.

The violence involved in some of those protests, of which I of course do not approve, was referred to in the media at the time as being the actions of a “hard core” of protesters intent on stirring up trouble. The reaction of the protesters to that was often along the lines of “no, we all feel that strongly!”.

I wonder if they’ll be saying that this morning.

Last night, as it became apparent that the protests were ineffective at convincing more than half of the Lib Dems to vote against the proposal, some protesters attacked a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. Naturally, this made the front page of every newspaper in the country (Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Mail, Sun, Mirror, nice paywall there, Times).

The Twitter hashtag #solidarity has been used by the protesters and their supporters for a while now — I do hope some of that solidarity remains. But aside from amongst students, schoolkids and twenty-somethings who still fondly remember their university days, I suspect that solidarity just took a massive hit.

The tabloid press was never going to be kind to student protests, but if they were quietly depriving them of column space before, by god they are not any more. The attack on Prince Charles’ car last night was one of the most impressive acts of shooting oneself in the foot I have ever seen.

My greatest fear over the whole matter, though, is the effect it has had on the young — the people whose education was at stake. What have they learned over the last few weeks?

That breaking into Millbank Tower, that lighting fires and putting bricks through windows, that spraypainting walls and breaking down doors, that being kettled by riot police and attacking the Royal Family, isn’t enough. It’s not changed the minds of more than a dozen people inside the House of Commons, maybe none at all.

So what’s left to do? Give up hope and abandon what meagre trust remains in our politicians, hoping that by the time the protesters reach middle age they’re electable and their opinions haven’t changed? Or protest harder, get kettled more viciously, dreaming of glorious revolution while all around the country turns against them?

Dystopia is a great thing to experience for two hours of a film or two hundred pages of a book. But when you have to live in it, two weeks is about the point at which it stops being fun.

Alright Government, Hands Off Our Internet

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And that is an ‘our’ that does not extend to those inside Westminster, because with a few notable exceptions, MPs have shown an almost complete lack of understanding of the internet and how it works.

Guess what’s back from the dead? Our old friend, the Intercept Modernisation Plan.

Between this crazy “log everything” scheme (in the name of combatting terrorism, naturally) and the barely-debated Digital Economy Act, the previous Labour government’s approach to technology and the internet was at best misguided. And though I’m generally left-leaning, I found some promise in the Tories’ and the Lib Dems’ pro-freedom, anti-surveillance agenda.

This makes it all the more sad that the new government has gone against its coalition agreement and chosen to resurrect the Intercept Modernisation Plan as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review. (Hey, at least I got my submarines.)

Let’s rehash some old arguments:

  1. Überdatabases are expensive. Even if the effort of maintaining them is farmed out to ISPs rather than central government (and it will), the cost will be enormous. The ISPs will protest, and if they end up having to pass that cost on to their customers, we will protest too. It’s your Orwellian plot, if you’re going to introduce it, at least have the decency to pay for it.
  2. Who has access? That our ISPs can, to some extent, log our communications is something we sign up to in our service agreements. Who could ask for these logs under the Intercept Modernisation Plan? Police with a reasonable suspicion, fair enough — it’s no different from the circumstances under which they could get a search warrant for your house. But when it’s all digital, how do we ensure that ‘reasonable suspicion’ is never abused? And who else is allowed access? Government departments? Civil servants? Schools? Hospitals? None of this is rigidly defined, and it needs to be.
  3. Data Mining is Evil. Can the police, or whoever, request only specific data from specific times, or can they request all your data? All of several people’s data? At what point does it stop being a proper investigation and start being data mining for ‘crime prediction’?
  4. Ph34r t3h haxx0rz! The more data you put in one place, the more interesting a target it is. And in the real world, enough civil servants leave confidential material on trains already — they’re sure to download some of this data to a memory stick and lose it somewhere.
  5. Signal-to-Noise Ratio. This is the internet. According to one estimate, 97% of e-mail traffic is spam. And most of the rest must be from Zynga. How much of our Twitter bullshit and LiveJournal angst are you going to read? How much crap are you going to go through to find the super-secret terrorist plans, and at what point does applying Bayesian analysis to our web traffic start to fall under the “Data Mining is Evil” heading (protip: really quickly).
  6. Terrorists are Smarter than You. And so am I. So are most 14-year-old kids. We know all about SSL, PGP, proxies, VPN tunnelling, TOR, IPREDator, darknets and all the rest. And god forbid the terrorists do their business in real life, in a basement somewhere, rather than on Facebook. Because if they do (spoilers: they do), this whole plan is a giant money-pit that robs us of our privacy and achieves nothing.

So Cameron, Clegg et al, please just let this one die. It was a bad plan to begin with, that’s why you promised not to do it. And before you come up with the next plan to foil online terrorist collaboration, please learn what how the internet works and what is and isn’t sensible to do to it.

Learn Internet

For anyone who’d like to sign another petition against the Intercept Modernisation Plan, the Open Rights Group campaign is here.

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Child Benefit

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This morning, the Prime Minister used his BBC interview to let us know why, exactly, his proposed changes to the Child Benefit system take into account the income of a single family member rather than the household overall.

As loudly bemoaned in the media over the past few days, the Conservatives plan to scrap Child Benefit for higher rate tax payers, those earning over £44,000 a year. Because this is tied in to the tax situation for a single individual, it leads to wild inconsistencies in the family incomes that are affected. Under the scheme, a two-parent household where one parent earns £44,000 and the other does not work would lose their Child Benefit. However if both parents were to work and earn £43,000 each, for a total of £86,000, they would still receive the payments.

As someone who earns far less than £44,000 and who could still get by without Child Benefit if necessary, I have no problems with scrapping or reducing Child Benefit for those substantially more wealthy than myself. But couldn’t we at least make it fair?

David Cameron’s excuse for this unfairness is that to base it on household income rather than individual income would involve a whole new means-testing process, with all the added bureaucracy and money-wasting that involves.

Has Mr Cameron forgotten about Labour’s Child Tax Credit scheme, a bizarrely parallel yet unrelated programme under which working parents can claim more money. Child Tax Credits are means-tested based on household income in just the same way that the Prime Minister is claiming to be too much work. Would it not in fact reduce bureaucracy and wasted effort if both were to be combined into a single Child Benefit system that was means-tested on household income?

But no, apparently the decision is set in stone.

How do the Conservatives plan on trying to fix this unfairness? Apparently, it emerged this afternoon, with a married couples’ tax break. However, as the rumour heard by the BBC has it, this would only affect couples earning less than the £44,000 threshold — the household with one parent earning over £44,000 and one stay-at-home parent would not stand to benefit. It’s also reported as being introduced “before the 2015 election”, potentially leaving a four-year gap between then and now in which the unfairness of the Child Benefit change is not being adressed.

Furthermore, while the proposed married couples’ tax break thankfully includes civil partnerships, it presumably does not include long-term partners who choose not to marry. I imagine that encouraging traditional values such as marriage is a vote-winner amongst certain groups of Tory voters, but should the government not stay well clear of these very private decisions? Should a poor couple who do not want to marry be pressured into it, however gently, by their financial situation?

New Labour: Gone, but not Forgotten

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“The era of New Labour has passed,” said Ed Miliband on Sunday, and boy was I happy to hear that.

I am, I suppose, of the New Labour generation — Tony Blair swept to power in 1997, just as I was turning 12 years old. I stayed up late to watch the votes roll in, more excited by the fact that I was simultaneously maths-geeking with half the population than I was knowledgeable about how a Labour or Tory win would affect me.

But from about that time, the dawn of my political awareness, Labour has been New Labour. Miners’ strikes and Poll Tax riots are creatures of the history books to me, and trade unions just aren’t things a 12-year-old cares about. Labour, to me, was about the cult of personality and of spin, Mandelson’s scandals and Blair’s toothy grin. They were about Middle England and unpopular wars and sacrificing our liberties at every turn for our protection from today’s terrorist organisation of choice.

After a while I turned 18, and like the good proto-Socialist that I was, I voted for what I perceived as the most Left-leaning party on the ballot sheet.

The Liberal Democrats.

Five years later, well, that alleigance didn’t work out so well.

But while I’m glad that Labour’s new leader has called the end of the Blairite regime, I’m a little saddened by how quickly the possibility of a “lurch to the Left” has been dismissed. Ed Miliband has said that he wants to “redefine” the political centre ground, but where does that leave our political landscape?

We have the Conservative party, on the centre-right. The Lib Dems, approximately at the centre. And now Ed Miliband’s Labour, redefining… the centre.

Centre, centre, centre. Should we be bracing ourselves for a continuing era of utter dullness in politics? If we discount the tiny Greens, the loony-fringe UKIP and the despicable BNP, and if post-New Labour continues Blair’s obsession with winning Middle England’s votes, everyone’s manifestos start looking suspiciously similar.

Time to just say “sod it” and run as a candidate for the Pirate Party or something?

(Sources for the Milliband quotes are the Financial Times’ website, which I’m not linking to because it’s got Murdoch cooties.)

Politics, meet Videogames. Everybody Loses.

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On Sunday, Britain’s Defence Secretary Liam Fox called for the upcoming Medal of Honor game to be banned by retailers (BBC). Apparently he finds it “hard to believe any citizen of our country would wish to buy such a thoroughly un-British game”, which shows quite a remarkable lack of understanding of the people he is supposed to represent. And since when has there been an expectation that American games should be “British” anyway?

Apparently it is “shocking that someone would think it acceptable to recreate the acts of the Taliban against British soldiers”. Well, in real life, maybe. But this is a game, and an 18-rated one at that, so it is played by adults that are fully capable of distinguishing between fiction and reality.

And yes, you can play as the Taliban. It’s called multiplayer. Would Mr Fox prefer that the multiplayer was Americans shooting Americans? Because that’s just as morally dubious, and also kind of dumb. No, one team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys. That’s the way these things work. I don’t recall politicians losing their shit about Counterstrike because zomg half the players are being terrorists! How many games have there been where you can play as a Nazi soldier in multiplayer?

I wonder if the Defence Secretary ever got the chance to play Cops and Robbers as a kid, because, you know it’s no different. One team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys, that’s how it works. Cops and Robbers doesn’t glorify violent crime, just as Medal of Honor doesn’t glorify the Afghan insurgency.

So Mr Fox, it would be appreciated if you could please go back to getting our real soldiers some MRAPs and some more helicopters and guns that work, and leave the rest of us to enjoy our videogames. Thank you!

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.