Green Heroes Filling the Void

We don’t hear much about “The Big Society” these days. The Big Freeze has frozen out everything else; austerity is the order of the day, and the cutting is now well underway - “ahead of schedule”, in fact.

These cuts have already had a massive impact on the capacity of both local government and civil society to deliver Big Society solutions – as everybody told both David Cameron and Eric Pickles that they would. No doubt they describe these impacts as “unintended consequences”.

As the Vice President of BTCV, I’ve seen some of that impact at first hand. A huge chunk of their funding that they used to get from both central and local government has been axed over the last 18 months, with huge knock-on consequences for BTCV’s projects on the ground all over the country.

So it was hugely reassuring to take part in last week’s Green Heroes Awards ceremony in central London.

It was just amazing to hear the Heroes’ stories. Eight people giving practical, dedicated service to their communities in extraordinarily inspiring ways. They’re all amazing stories (http://www2.btcv.org.uk/display/greenheroes2011), but I was particularly taken with a project in Haringey (“Living Under One Sun”) that just rippled with multi-ethnic diversity, energy and empathy, and with Michael Rogerson, a young man who has been deaf from birth and who got horribly depressed from being unemployed for years before he started volunteering for BTCV. Very moving.

It was a great occasion, made all the more impactful for me by cycling to the venue past St Pauls and through the city. Huge numbers of police on the streets, on full alert for further “Occupy the City” outbreaks.

No doubt George Osborne sees all these irritating dissidents as just another unintended consequence. How inconvenient for him that they are now supported by growing numbers of people – if not quite 99% of society – who no longer buy the dogma that debt-driven, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism is necessarily the only (let alone the best) version of capitalism available to us.

Deprive young people of the opportunity to play a gainful role in society (paid or voluntary), and we will all pay the consequences. Regrettably, the paid work is going to be in very short supply for young people over the next few years, as unemployment levels for young people all around the world so painfully demonstrate.

So you might think that any government, focussed on avoiding increasingly painful consequences, would make absolutely certain that it got the voluntary stuff sorted out, including making the best possible use of brilliant organisations like BTCV.

You might think that. You might even think that’s what the Big Society is all about.

On the other hand, you might have already worked out what this Government is really all about: maintaining the interests of the kleptocratic 1% elite in society at the expense of all the rest of us, young and old.

The 7 billionth human being arrives on Monday October 31st!
Not a disaster in itself, but another tiny step along the road to certain disaster – unless we start to get our act together on family planning and reproductive healthcare. See the full version of my article published in The Independent on Thursday 27th October.