Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Slow road to a Big Society

As David Cameron's Big Society is implemented, everyone finds cutting back to a "Big Society" difficult.

Liverpool Declines Role in Government Overhaul by Britain

When he became prime minister last year, David Cameron announced that the days of big government were over. In its place he proposed to build something called the Big Society, a new model in which public-private partnerships, charities and community groups would take over as the state pulled back…

[I]n one poll, 63 percent of respondents said they did not understand what Mr. Cameron was talking about. But it still sounded promising to Liverpool, which volunteered to be one of four so-called vanguard members of the new program.

That is, until a city already braced for cuts learned exactly how much money Mr. Cameron’s government planned to remove from its budget…

Just as hastily as it had signed itself up to the Big Society, Liverpool signed itself out…

Liverpool’s concerns are being echoed up and down the country, as local governments face the consequences of the central government’s four-year, $131 billion cost-cutting program and wonder how it squares with the goals of Mr. Cameron’s Big Society. Many localities depend on the central government for the bulk of their revenues — in Liverpool’s case, 80 percent of the total — and the central government is cutting those payments by an average of 28 percent.

Struggling to keep their essential services afloat, places like Liverpool are cutting services like libraries, reading programs, community swimming pools, after-school activities for troubled teenagers, homeless shelters, care for the disabled, help for the elderly, children’s centers and the like. Many such programs are run as charities but are financed in part through public money…

The cuts, he said, are disproportionately affecting the poorer parts of the country — the ones that depend more on central government money — which, as it happens, mostly tend to be run by the opposition Labour Party.

Mr. Cameron says that the budget cuts he has outlined are based on necessity, not philosophy. And he says the localities are making cuts intended to embarrass the government. Instead of canceling charity programs, they should reduce their own “salaries, bureaucracies and allowances,” as he said recently…