Funny to think that empowering ordinary citizens was once a rallying cry of the left

17 April 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Just how much appetite is there for David Cameron’s Big Society? Not much, according to the chattering classes. One of the more bizarre sights on the day the Conservatives’ launched their manifesto was watching the liberal left poo-poo the notion that ordinary people could be ‘prised away from the telly’.

Jackie Ashley in the Guardian, for instance, had never heard of such a preposterous idea. ‘Modern life is so busy, with longer working hours, 24-hour TV, emails, blogging, tweeting and the rest, that I wonder how many people will find the time to go along and organise their local school or hospital or police force,’ she wrote.

Funny to think that empowering ordinary citizens was once a rallying cry of the Labour party. I expected journalists like Jackie Ashley to reject any attempt by the Tories to hijack workers’ co-operatives or free schools and stake out a claim to being the true custodians of progressive values. Instead, it’s as if the Guardian has swapped places with the Daily Telegraph. One of the main arguments advanced by the new Bufton Tuftons is that most Britons are completely unwilling to perform voluntary work. Randeep Ramesh, the Guardian’s social affairs editor, pointed out that the percentage of the population willing to do unpaid work to help ‘other people or the environment’ for at least one day a month has been stuck at 28 per cent for the past five years.

But surely it’s a mistake to imagine that more than 28 per cent of the population needs to be socially active to bring about a transference of power from the state to civil society? Take education. I’m currently leading the efforts of a group of parents in West London to set up a new taxpayer-funded secondary school. There are over 500 local parents who have signed up to the campaign, but only 12 of us who actually give up our time to attend meetings, write reports, and so on. If we succeed in setting up the school it won’t be because an army of people has been mobilised. It will be because 12 individuals thought they could do a better job than the state and set out to prove it.

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