The ConDem Hollow Men

While Slasher Cameron is on holiday George Osborne and Nick Clegg are on the charm offensive.

The cartoonists are having a field day with Clegg - a short-trousered school-boy sitting at his Daddie’s big desk, a budgie in a cage . . . Aren’t you reminded of the Spitting Image puppets of David Steele and David Owen . . . (If you haven’t seen them - look them up, it’ll be time well spent.) Self-serving Clegg deserves all the vitriolic ridicule that comes his way.

The joint ConDem messages from Clegg and Osborne are interesting in as much as they have so little substance.

Clegg is desperate to convince us that Society will be so much better after the ConDem financial butchery. He offers us the comfort that the cuts in the economic review aren’t just for this year but for five years . . . The fear that I find around me in many different sectors is not just short term then? To shift the metaphor - the sword of Damocles will be there, but swinging for at least five years. Some comfort!

Osborne’s arguments are just as hollow. He is following Cameron’s lead and still uttering promises with no back up, and policies which face both ways. He says that a fairer society will come from their health and education reforms; but omits to say how this will come about. He wants all young people to be given equal access to education - but seems unaware that the number of young people with good grades unable to get into university is rising.

He states that their welfare reforms with get people out of the trap of poverty and into work; but he declines to explain how the changes are to be afforded or how these people will get into work when employment starts to rise. Osborne hopes that the private sector will pick up many of the public sector jobs being lost; they’ll do this by reducing wages and increasing profits. Does Mr We’re-All-In-This-Together Osborne realise who’ll suffer in this one?

But then, I suppose, the ConDems can change the meanings of Equal and Fair; to change the language to fit the policies may be a cost effective way of being radical.

Slasher Cameron's now pinching policy ideas from The Archers

Did you catch the latest Big Society big idea from Slasher Cameron?

He wants community groups to take over the civic gardens from local authorities. Another cosy idea for Cameron supporters. But this one appears to be plucked from The Archers. In one storyline, Linda Snell, headmistress of Ambridge, and Elizabeth Pargetter (Archer), went out secretly at night to sort out the flower beds around the village green.

But Cameron’s Archer’s policy isn’t quite so cosy. What will happen here is that low paid gardeners from wealthy LAs will be sacked so that middle-class amateur gardeners, with time on their hands, can take over their jobs unpaid (because they can afford to work unpaid.)

This is a specific example of what I was outlining in a previous blog about the Volunteer Society.

Nothing cosy, clandestine nor fictional about this, is there?

Can you afford to volunteer?

David Cameron wants a lot of the slack created in his new Big Society taken up by volunteers – he wants to create a volunteer culture. Sounds OK in front of a nice audience or when you hear it on the television; it sounds wholesome, doesn’t it.. But let’s unpick it just a little bit.

One concern (although not really the one I’m going to follow up, here) is that he wants to remove many jobs from the public sector – we know this. ‘Public sector, bad; private sector, good (presumably with worse terms and conditions)’ is an Old Tory mantra and one well rehearsed. But Cameron appears to be going further than this; he seems to want the jobs to be taken up by volunteers. In other words, get the work done for nothing. Fine policy when you’re a millionaire, I suppose.

But the aspect I’d like to follow up is ‘Who is going to do the volunteering?’ To be a volunteer you need the time to be a volunteer. When trying to answer this it’s easy to pick out people who run a scout group or a youth group. Valuable people, doing valuable work.

But I’m thinking about running schools, or managing big projects ‘in my community’ – whatever that means. Big complex projects take up lots of time; and only certain groups of people have the time to do it.

I’m not knocking the idea of volunteering – I’m a member of a Board of two regional arts organisations as a volunteer, one of the Boards meets at 3 o’clock. I’m a self-employed worker, so I can organise my diary to be free when needed. But only certain types of worker can be free in the middle of the afternoon.

I used to be on the Independent Monitoring Board of a prison near me; in many ways one of the most important things I’ve done. I felt it was important, anyway. But it required almost the equivalent of one day a week, and every now and again a duty week came up. On your duty week you needed to be in the prison a lot, as near to each day as you could; and you were also on call. If there were any sort of emergency you had to drop whatever you were doing and speed to the prison.

Only a certain type of person (retired, senior managerial, non-working partner) can commit to this. Eventually I had to give it up; as a self-employed person, I simply couldn’t afford to give the time, free. The spirit was willing the but mortgage and utility bills weren’t.

Hence, the aspect of our Big Society Volunteer Culture is that we shall be increasingly run by a small group of volunteers taken from an increasingly small section (social, financial, racial) of society. This is not healthy.