Big Society Deflates

According to the Guardian, the Tories have had to abandon a series of meetings to promote the "Big Society". Apparently, the first one they had was dominated by people complaining about all the spending cuts the new government has imposed. I can't feel very much sympathy for the Tories or their Liberal Democrat sidekicks here. They are really the victims of their own ideology that the public sector plays no useful role, whereas if they paid attention to how things work, they would know that actually the voluntary sector is often underpinned by all kinds of support from the public sector.

Ironically, the "Big Society Network" that the Con Dem government has set up appears to be an example of this. Five of its staff are civil servants on secondment, and they appear to use Department resources for communication. If the government resources are cut by 25%, that will feed into the supposedly separate voluntary groups, and David Cameron will end up undermining his own campaign.