What a pleasure it was. Last night, I spent forty minutes in Westminster Great Hall
– one of London’s few remaining Romanesque buildings, the largest single vaulted wooden ceiling in the world and the judicial setting for the trial of Charles I. Why was I there?
Another failure of the big society, of course.
I had booked to attend a debate between the think tanks, Res Publica and Progress. Phillip Blond and Francis Maude were talking up the merits of the Big Society or big society (it wasn’t clear which); whilst Tessa Jowell and Stephen Twigg were speaking for the Good Society.
I wanted to hear the debate, intrigued to see if any of the speakers could define its terms. Trouble was that I wasn’t alone. A big society of likeminded people congregated outside the Grand Committee Room, which lies off the Great Hall, at the appointed time. The third party managing the event, ironically called Eventbrite: Events Made Easy, had overbooked by roughly a hundred people. There was so much chaos that Phillip Blond himself was nearly denied entry.
Ah, the eternal competence of the private sector. Naturally, the organisers had an unanswerable excuse: “elf and safety guv”. Apparently, allowing more people into the committee room would have posed a fire-risk. It probably would have done, but the same logic did not extend to leaving a hundred people on a staircase in a draughty hall with a wooden ceiling. God knows what incompetent organisations will do if the government finally tears up the health and safety manual? A bit of blue sky thinking will be needed to extricate them from tight corners of their own making.
Anyway, I can’t think of a better metaphor for the big society’s current shortcomings: human ineptitude, overbearing regulation and an ambition that exceeds the possible.
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