BRITISH PRIME minister David Cameron has attempted once more to launch his plans for a “Big Society”, despite fears, even among Conservative MPs, that it is seen by the public as a cloak for multibillion-pound spending cuts.
Mr Cameron has repeatedly failed to explain the idea, one where the public and voluntary organisations take responsibility for delivering social services in communities, despite it being one of the tenets of his election campaign last year.
Mr Cameron, in London yesterday, said: “I think it’s a different way of governing, a different way of going about trying to change our country for the better, and it’s going to get every bit of my passion and attention over the five years of this government.”
He went on: “Too many people have stopped taking responsibility for their lives and for the people around them. Why? Now I don’t think this has happened because we’ve somehow become bad people. I think at its core, it’s the consequence of years and years of big government.
“As the state got bigger and more powerful, it took away from people more and more things that they should and could be doing for themselves, for their families and their neighbours. It’s the culture of rules, targets, laws, tick boxes and perverse signals that pay people to sit on the sofa rather than go to work,” he said.
The proposal, which puts forward a mixture of more day-to-day involvement in communities by the public, less state control and more philanthropy, has been constantly criticised as vague, poorly constructed and a justification for spending cuts.
Despite weekend suggestions that he was about to back away from his plans, Mr Cameron said the Big Society was his political passion. He was only imposing billions of cuts “out of a sense of duty”, though he acknowledged that this would make him unpopular.
Taking questions about these spending cuts after his speech at Somerset House, he said: “It is not possible to make those cuts without cutting some things that are important. That’s the situation we are in as a country.”
He insisted that the Big Society was not “a cover for anything”. However, some Conservative MPs now privately agree that the plans, as Labour leader Ed Miliband said in recent days, is “recontaminating the Tory brand”.
“I mean, I’ve been talking about this for the last five years as leader of the Conservative Party, I was talking about it when public spending was going up, I will be talking about it when public spending is flat and I will talk about it when public spending is going down.
“Whether it’s broken families or whether it’s some communities breaking down or whether it’s the level of crime, the level of gang membership, whether it’s problems of people stuck on welfare unable to work, whether it’s the sense that some of our public services don’t work for us, we do need a social recovery to mend the broken society and to me that is what the Big Society is all about,” he said.
Plans to train 5,000 community organisers are to be announced later this week, partly funded by £200 million (€238m) from a bank levy imposed last week.