The Big Society is us!
It seems that as far as David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ is concerned, our own Tendring District is at the very centre of things. Harwich and North Essex MP Bernard Jenkins is chairing a House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee which wants to separate the government’s programme of cuts in public services, from the idea of The Big Society. Perhaps I have misread the Clacton Gazette’s report but it seems that Mr Jenkins and the Committee he is chairing are not too sure themselves what The Big Society is all about. And it is to us – well to Mr Neil Stock, leader of our district council – that they are turning for enlightenment.
The Gazette reports that Mr Stock, ‘has responded to a call from MP Bernard Jenkins for an inquiry into what the concept (of the Big Society) means’. Mr Stock was, of course, pleased to oblige. He says modestly that, ‘While we don’t claim to have all the answers, I do believe that ‘we get it’ and I would welcome the opportunity to talk to the Select Committee. We in Tendring are well ahead of the game in respect of understanding the potential of how ‘Big Society – Small Government’ can improve the quality of life of our residents. It could well help the committee with its inquiry and I look forward to speaking with them’.
Mr Jenkin announced the setting up of the inquiry during Prime Minister’s Questions where it was welcomed by David Cameron (the Big Society was David Cameron’s idea. Surely he knows what it is all about!) Mr Jenkins clearly doesn’t. He told the House of Commons that, ‘It would be helpful for us to discuss the issue with a Council which has already stepped forward to embrace the Big Society in such a positive way.
One of Mr Neil Stock’s close colleagues on Tendring Council, Councillor Peter Halliday, seems to have no doubt of the Big Society’s purpose; it is to get free of charge services to the public that the Council has previously had to pay for, eventually (though I doubt if he thinks that far ahead) making the Council itself redundant.
A picture in the Clacton Gazette shows Mr Halliday congratulating public spirited Mrs Margaret Henderson of William Drive, Clacton on collecting litter from the Martello Beach three times a week, a task that she has been carrying out since her retirement three years ago. She sorts out what she collects and disposes it in the recycling bins by the Hastings Avenue Lifeboat Station.
Mrs Henderson, who is in her early seventies, is beginning to find bending over to pick up litter a bit too much for her. Veolia, the council’s cleansing contractors, have already given her a pair of protective gloves and the council have now given her a ‘litter picker’, one of those gadgets (I’ve got one myself) that can be used to pick up objects without bending right over. It is very good of them both, though it is of course, their job to keep the beach clean, not just to help someone who is doing their job for them.
I think that Mrs Henderson deserves everybody’s thanks. If more people behaved as she has, the world would be a happier – and much cleaner! – place. Sadly most people either can’t or won’t. That is why we elect district councils and pay our taxes for them to do these jobs for us. They should keep our beaches clean and prosecute those who litter them, not appeal for volunteers to do the work for them for nothing.
Councillor Halliday was also recently reported in the Clacton Gazette as urging stores and pubs to open their loos to the public – thereby reducing, and perhaps ultimately eliminating, the need for the Council to provide and maintain public conveniences. I have a great deal of sympathy with Ms. Eileen Murphy of Jaywick Lane who has written to the Gazette urging Mr Halliday to ‘stop and think for a change. Publicans and restaurant owners have these facilities for their patrons only. They pay staff to keep them clean and up-to-date. Is the council going to pay towards this facility, or do they expect the service for free? She adds, ‘a woman on her own would not go into a pub toilet. How awful that would that feel!’
I think that Ms. Murphy has made a couple of very valid points. Someone has to pay for the provision and maintenance of those pub and restaurant toilets. If the council wants them to be available to the public then the council should contribute. I quite agree too that no woman, unaccompanied, would want to enter a strange pub, ask for directions to the ladies’ toilet and then make her way there, possibly through a crowd of drinkers!
When my wife and I were on camping holidays we would occasionally use pub toilet facilities. Always though, we went in together. And we would never dream of using those facilities without my ordering at least a fruit juice for my wife (a life-long teetotaller) and half a pint of something a little stronger for myself.
I reckon that if and when Councillor Neil Stock faces Mr Jenkin’s Westminster Committee, he won’t be far wrong if he says that, in Tendring at least, the Big Society is an attempt to get services for free that they have previously always had to pay for. Perhaps they’ll succeed – and will demonstrate that such pieces of folk wisdom as, 'there is no such a thing as a free lunch' or, as they say in Suffolk, ‘Yew doant git nawth’n f’r nawth’n – and not-a-lot f’r a tanner*’ simply aren’t true!
*a tanner – slang expression for sixpence (old coinage). In today’s terms 2.5p.
Unanswered questions
There are aspects of the current financial crisis that puzzle me: The Government insists, and it is obvious from readers’ letters in the popular press that many people accept it as self-evident, that the current economic situation can be blamed on the profligacy and incompetence of Mr Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister. How then is it that the Irish Republic, the USA and a number of mainland European countries are in much the same, or an even worse, situation? Surely, it isn’t suggested that Mr Brown was the leader of an international conspiracy to undermine the world’s monetary system?
When the Governor of the Bank of England, who might have been thought to be the man in England most familiar with the situation, addressed the Trades Union Conference a few months ago, he didn’t blame Mr Brown. He put the blame fairly and squarely on ‘the bankers’, people like himself. He made the point again, even more strongly, just a few days ago. But, of course, ‘the bankers’ are among the largest contributors to the funds of the major partner in the coalition government. It might be wiser not to make too much fuss about their role in the creaton of the current situation!
Come to think of it, the profligacy of Mr Brown’s government can hardly have even approached that of the wartime government between 1939 and 1945. That was a time of desperate emergency when every pound that we possessed, or could borrow, was spent on guns, tanks, ammunition, aircraft, warships and on the pay and equipment of servicemen and women. No one grudged a penny of it. That was expenditure to which we owe our national survival – but it was also negative expenditure on a previously unheard of scale. Compared with that, the prodigality of the New-Labour Government must surely have been just ‘petty cash’.
The immediate post-war years were a time of austerity (I lived through them which is more than many – if any – members of the House of Commons can claim!) There was still wartime rationing and there were still shortages of consumer goods. Thousands had been bombed out of homes, which could only then, with the war over, begin to be replaced.
Those years were also though, as I well remember, a time of hope for the future, a time of rebuilding, reconstruction and regeneration. Many of Britain’s major cities, flattened by air raids, were rebuilt as were ruined infrastructures. Factories that had been devoted to the manufacture of weapons of war, were c
onverted back to peacetime use. Jobs, in the construction industries and in the run-down public services, were found for the thousands of returning servicemen and women. Homes, temporary (remember the prefabs, people were glad enough to have them at the time!) and permanent, were found for the tens of thousands of the homeless and badly housed. By 1951, with much remaining to be done, we felt sufficiently confident to celebrate our achievements in The Festival of Britain!Autumn, 1945. Heather and I, planning our wedding, are caught on camera strolling along Charing Cross Road.
I don’t remember those years as being a time of increasing austerity and cuts in public services, blamed by the politicians of that time on the previous coalition government. Nowadays the Spirit of the Blitz is regularly invoked (though rarely by people who actually remember the Blitz!) as an example that we should try to emulate. I’d rather we recovered something of the Spirit of post-war Britain, when many of us (Heather and I among them) really believed that we were on our way to building in Britain, and as an example to the world, a true commonwealth (common wealth!) of liberty, fraternity and equality – the new ‘Jerusalem’ of William Blake’s poem, (now the anthem of the Women’s Institute).
Bring me my bow of burning gold.
Bring me my arrows of desire.
Bring me my sword, O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I shall not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till I have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
Over sixty years later, we’re further away from that goal than we have ever been!
Prudent Tendring Council could save a half-million pounds!
Perhaps! The thought was evoked by a report in the Clacton Gazette about the hesitation of a local charity to apply for help from the Council’s much-vaunted £500,000 Big Society fund. Andrew Mowle, Chairman of the Green Team (a very small local charity that looks after Jaywick’s community gardens and organises an annual ‘front gardens’ competition there) says: ‘We would have to make a case that we are saving the council money by doing what we do. But they don’t spend any money on the gardens so how can we make a case? I don’t think David Cameron had this in mind’.
Who knows what David Cameron had in mind? It is very clear to me though that this criterion would render almost every local charity ineligible for a grant. How much money, for example, does the Council currently spend on practical help for the elderly and disabled, as do Family Support Groups throughout the district, or on providing respite-care for carers as does Cross Roads based in Thorpe-le-Soken, or on taking vulnerable people out weekly for a meal as does St. Osyth’s Dumont Lunch Club, or providing a little extra care and comfort to the sick and dying as do Hospital and Hospice local support groups?
The whole purpose and reason for existence of a local charity is to provide a service to members of the public that the Council either cannot or will not provide.
If the Council adheres strictly to the criterion that charity grant seekers must prove that their activities save the council money, they stand to save their £500,000. If, of course, they do find charities that will save them money (is there perhaps a Support for Hard-up Councillors charity?) they’ll recover it! It is a ‘heads we win, tails you lose’ situation for the Council – though not, I fear, for the community they are supposed to be serving.
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