July 2010 Archives

In David Cameron's vision of a Big Society, we can all make a difference. We can all help make the decisions which will make Britain a better place.

Nice idea, great ideal - it's just a shame that actions speak louder than words, and a temporary return to the limelight for Lord Ashcroft this week proved that when it comes to making a difference, money still talks.

Little has been said of Lord Ashcroft since the election. His millions pumped into marginal constituencies across the country didn't deliver the desired result - and in the end it was Nick Clegg's desperation for a sniff of power which took Cameron into Number 10, not pricey postal orders from Belize.

Quite why Lord Ashcroft's work with the marginal constituencies didn't work is a mystery, although I suspect it might have something to do with the evasive way the Tories dealt with questions about the Lord's non-dom status. After all, a man who only pays tax on part of his income in the UK playing a central role in a general election campaign is always going to cause a stink.

SO, who believes in Big Society now? Or perhaps the question should be: Who understands what the Big Society is?

David Cameron's speech in Liverpool on Monday was certainly evangelical - but will anyone respond?

The unions did - they called it the Big Cop Out. They smell a rat, unsurprisingly, and it doesn't take a genus (although the unions will probably consider that's what needed, along with several health and safety officers for a pre-genius assessment) to work out that jobs may go as a result.

But as a result of what? The message at the moment appears to be little more than encouragement for people to come forward snd say they'd like to run as a volunteer group. If there is a hitlist of services the government says it wants run by the voluntary sector, then it's not been made public yet.

And who is going to volunteer to do something such as cleaning the streets, or delivering meals on wheels for the council for as long as the public sector offers the service?

Michael Gove, the education secretary, spent most of last week saying sorry and, like the big man he is, accepting responsibility for the errors on the Building Schools for the Future list.

It was, as I think we all can agree, a monumental blunder in terms of his credibility, compounded by the fact that the Department for Education is now leaking like a sieve as civil servants dash to make sure everyone knows Gove ignored their advice and pushed on regardless.

We now have an education minister who has lost the confidence his department, whose judgement is being questioned at schools across the country and whose own party have been strangley quiet in terms of coming to his aid.

Tom Watson might have apologised for calling education secretary Michael Gove "a miserable pipsqueak of a man" but in the heat of the moment, the truth often comes out.

Since arriving at the Department for Children, Schools and Families in mid May, and promptly spent a small fortune renaming it before lecturing everyone who'd listen on the need for cutbacks, Gove has done little to impress.

As I've covered on this blog before, he scrapped some quangos which covered things such as maintaining teaching standards and the regulation of qualifications without actually coming up with a plan for who'd do the work in the future.

He hid behind the line that 'teachers should be allowed to teach.' The fact we learnt this week that headteachers tend not to refer bad teacher to the local council for review but instead ship them on to other schools suggests that regulation is required.

Then we had his flaky idea around free schools, so a small band of parents in Notting Hill who think schools aren't run well could come up with their own schools, and be paid to do so. Forget making existing schools more attractive to all parents, just hand over millions to create state-funded middle class ghettos.

Up next was the idea around academies. Some 900 school dashed to apply, desperate it would seem for the freedom to break away from local authority control, even if the extra money they'd get as a result would probably have to go back to the council as they were the only ones who provide the services schools need.

I'm sure I wasn't alone in not understanding David Cameron's obsession with the 'big society' ahead of the general election.

At a time when Cameron was clearly struggling to get his points around the economy across, his half-painted images of how society could work better seemed to just got lost on the public and confused voters.

And I suspect it got lost on some of his closest circle of ministers too. After all, why would health secretary Andrew Lansley have a go at one of the few celebrities who was being 'big society' before it got its catchy name in a focus group somewhere.

There was a rumour shortly after the general election that Jeremy Hunt, who had been the shadow culture minister, was in line for a much bigger job in government.

Some touted him as the new home secretary, ousting the obvious candidate Chris Grayling, whose open-mouth-and-let-everything-fall-out style of conversation ultimately cost him that job.

Others suggested he'd go straight in at the Treasury, replacing George Osborne, who, some said, had upset David Cameron by devising an election strategy which resulted in the Lib Dems climbing into the Number 10 bed.

Neither proved to be true - if either were likely, I suspect it would have been the first scenario, not the latter.

And he certainly shares a trait which seems to have been essential for the Home Office in the past - the ability to put in mouth.