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.