Big society requires big culture shift to succeed
New report calls for British people to reframe their relationships with each other and the State to open up our 'hidden wealth'
The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) has published a new report examining the potential and impact of the big society concept.
'Beyond the Big Society' examines the public perception of this much talked about policy since it was launched by David Cameron in 2009, exploring attittudes, barriers and making reccommendations that it feels will enable the Big Society to suceed.
Key findings include a failure by the Government to adequately articulate the big society to the wider public in a way that is is easy to understand, and a lack of progress in partcipation despite major Government backed initiatives.
The report highlights a major challenge faced by the British people to revaluate the relationship that it has with fellow citizens and the State and that in order to suceed, the big society needs to make more of the country's 'hidden wealth', that is 'the human relationships that drive and sustain the forms of participation needed to make society more productive and at ease with itself.'
To achieve this the country needs to move beyond its tendancy to 'be fearful of strangers and invest our ability to get along and make care-based exchanges, both of which are strong drivers of economic growth and
national wellbeing.'
The RSA is also calling for more informal and formal adult education to promote and challenge perceptions of community engagement.
To access the full report download it here.
More “education”…? In what from would this be, and who would deliver it?
No doubt, yet more Orwellian “re-education” the kind that magically solves everything with flip chart, marker pen, and some “blue sky” thinking, and delivered by rose coloured spectacle wearing, politically correct, woolly idealists, who cannot see that actually the nub of the problem is a failed social engineering experiment, that has so fragmented and ghettoised people of all races, colours, class and creeds, that it is now irreparable in respect of creating “The Big Society”, other than again painting over the cracks, and/or applying a thin veneer of “we are all in it together”, with accompanying chocolate box imagery of nostalgic “Happier Days” and Mr Cameron’s deluded vision of getting back to “Christian values” (Whatever they are?), and of course, all of which will invariably crack and warp at the first signs of stress, subsequently exposing the rotten wood of disenfranchisement and disillusion beneath.
Or put it another way, if you break a tea pot into a thousand tiny pieces; you can attempt to glue it back together, but the reality is that it’s never going to be as it was; however much you desire it to be so, as such; objectively one has to ask, is the answer to buy yet more glue, and ignore the missing pieces, chips and cracks?
Examining the public’s perception, rather than the sector’s- after all, the public are the ones the government wants to get on-board - offers some interesting ideas.
Revaluate our relationship with fellow citizens? Move beyond our embedded fearful tendencies? Explain the Big Society in ways the wider public can understand? I wonder if Dave thought it would be this much work when he conceived the idea...how hard can it be?