Tag Archives: big society

Opinion: What do the Lib Dems and the Big Society have in common?

By Joe Jordan | Published 16th December 2011 - 4:00 pm

Being a student, I am lucky enough to have very flexible working hours, and I’ve put these to good use this autumn helping with Brian Paddick’s campaign to become the first Lib Dem Mayor of London.

Something I’ve noticed with creeping inevitability about the campaign is the similarities between myself and the other people turning up on Fridays – the vast majority of whom are male and pale like me.

This is symptomatic of a wider problem with volunteer organisations in general, and cuts to the heart of a political philosophical gulf between us and the tories: volunteers are people in a position to volunteer.

While conservatives were perfectly at …

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Liberal Democrat setting for Prime Ministerial grilling

By Paul Walter | Published 10th November 2011 - 9:53 am

Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) is often criticised as a bad advert for Parliament. It is confrontational and glib. – That particularly applies to the portion which is shown mostly on news programmes.

Anyone who is concerned about this should watch, or read the record of, the House of Commons Liaison Committee. Each quarter, it questions the Prime Minister for an hour and a half. The sessions are thoughtful, thorough and comprehensive. It is all very polite and earnest.

One could criticise the sessions for going to the other extreme of the style of PMQs. A good replacement for Horlicks, in other …

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What is the Lib Dem position on ‘The Big Society’?

By Stephen Tall | Published 20th September 2011 - 3:25 pm

I was called by a colleague I know through my day-job last week: ‘What is the Lib Dem position on charitable giving?’ she asked. Beyond a bland ‘We’re in favour of it,’ I found myself a bit stuck for an answer.

Initially I put it down to my ignorance, and decided I should do some research, call a few people up, and find out something a bit more helpful, a bit more substantive. But coincidentally that day I happened to read this article — How can charities exert an influence on Lib Dem policies? — in Third Sector.

And it …

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Opinion: the big society broken record

By Mike Dean | Published 16th August 2011 - 10:07 am

Our society really is big. And it suffers from no lack of definition. It’s a big society. It’s a broken society. It’s a big and broken society. The big society needs to save our broken society. There is such a thing as society, but it’s not the same as the state. And once, there was no such thing as society at all. There’s as good a choice of societies as you’d find at a student freshers’ fair.

Cameron’s election campaign was fought on his two favourite societies – the big one and …

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The Independent View: What is Big Society Capital – big, new or just Big Society nonsense?

By Tim Groves | Published 3rd August 2011 - 4:23 pm

In its first transaction, the £600m fund has invested £1m in Private Equity Foundation, an organisation helping disadvantaged teenagers find jobs when they leave school; £400m of the fund will be unclaimed assets left dormant in bank accounts for more than 15 years, with the rest coming from HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland.

- The Independent, 29/07/2011.

The Indie report then goes on to tell about the first “social impact bond” project, which is an “investment” in measures to reduce re-offending in Peterborough.

So The much vaunted “Big Society Bank” – sorry – …

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Modernising community politics: creating communities

By Mark Pack | Published 24th June 2011 - 8:43 am

At the recent Social Liberal Forum conference, I took part in the panel on the Big Society and community politics. Regular readers won’t be surprised about the views I expressed on either of them (see for example here and here), but one point that I’ve not talked about for a while came out in discussion following a very pertinent question from Hackney’s Mark Smulian.

Mark rightly pointed out that the concept of community in the area where he lives, with a large transient population, was very different from what worked when community politics was first being created. Mark if …

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Our lost phrase: community politics

By Mark Pack | Published 11th June 2011 - 12:28 pm

On a hunch, earlier this year I did a little research ahead of writing a blog post for Liberal Democrat Voice: how often is the phrase “community politics” used by the party’s national spokespeople since the May 2010 election?

The answer was far worse than I’d feared. Looking through all of Nick Clegg’s major speeches, all the news release from him and also all those from others issued via the Liberal Democrat press team, I could only find one use of “community politics” – by Paul Burstow. Andrew Stunell deserves an honourable mention for using it in an LGA pamphlet …

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The Independent View: The public does support the Big Society

By Matt Boyes | Published 6th June 2011 - 9:53 am

David Cameron’s “re-launch” of the Big Society last week didn’t generate the revival of enthusiasm for the scheme that some had hoped for. Many people still claim not to understand the term “Big Society”, with critics continuing to suggest it’s little more than PR spin for budget cuts.

With the rise of faith-based organisations taking ownership of community services, and in light of Evan Harris’ warning about “proselytising on the public purse”, it’s clear that non-discriminatory, non-partisan, non-denominational and fair services are needed, both to support the more vulnerable members of the community, and to compensate for local council spending …

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Opinion: So what is this Community Politics all about then?

By Bill le Breton | Published 1st June 2011 - 10:25 am

Party President, Tim Farron recently published on this site a very well received piece reminding us that we have, close to hand, the greatest opportunity in the history of our party.

He also observed that, “our biggest collective failure recently – from the grassroots to the cabinet – has been that too many Lib Dems have drifted from the sort of community politics that we have prided ourselves on in the past, or else been too busy to practice”.

Community politics is a much misunderstood concept practiced by many as an electoral technique and belittled by others as ‘pavement politics’.

I hope the …

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Chris Rennard: Fill in the blanks of the Big Society

By Nick Thornsby | Published 29th May 2011 - 12:25 pm

Acevo’s Big Society Commission, chaired by Liberal Democrat peer Lord (Chris) Rennard, has now produced its final report into the subject, entitled ‘Powerful people, responsible society’. The report calls on the prime minister to “take the reins” of the policy to articulate a much clearer vision of what the concept means.

Interestingly, the Commission came up with the following vision of what the big society means to them:

Our own vision is a society in which power and responsibility have shifted: one in which, at every level in our national life, individuals and communities have more aspiration, power and capacity to take decisions

…

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The Big Society: the answer’s in the book

By Mark Pack | Published 1st May 2011 - 9:26 am

One of the curios of some library campaigners extolling the virtues of books whilst also mocking the Big Society for supposedly being incomprehensible or non-existent is that there is a short, clear and well-written book which lays out just what it is. Conservative MP Jesse Norman’s book, The Big Society, is certainly not uncontroversial, but it makes a sufficiently strong and clear case to have received favourable comments from across the political spectrum on its publication last autumn, including from Labour MP Jon Cruddas.

At times the book seems to have two, almost contradictory, purposes – to persuade traditional Conservatives …

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Opinion: Big society or big community?

By Emma Bagley | Published 16th April 2011 - 12:07 pm

We seem to be stuck in a warp of niceties at the moment. In the bad old days the Tory party was the nasty party. Thatcher flexed her muscles and in a previous downturn we all had to get on our bikes. Yet today we seem to get a different flavour of conservatism. It’s all big society, low interest rates and a penny off fuel duty. What is going on?

I’ll let you into a secret. The Lib Dems may have a little something to do with this. We seem …

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Lord Rennard on the Big Society: “It’s actually quite an old concept”

By Mark Pack | Published 15th April 2011 - 8:56 am

In February we carried the news that Liberal Democrat peer Lord (Chris) Rennard is chairing the Commission on the Big Society, set up by Acevo, the umbrella body for chief executives. Now he’s been interviewed by Civil Society about this work:

Q: I want to talk to you about your role not just chairing the Commission, but also as a Lib-Dem peer. We’ve heard a lot from the Prime Minister and the Conservative part of the coalition about the Big Society, we’re beginning to hear more from Labour, but we haven’t heard a huge amount from the Lib-Dem side of

…

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Chris White writes: Big Society’s meatless bones

By Chris White | Published 23rd February 2011 - 9:56 am

‘Little by little, and like a virus, the Big Society idea has lodged itself insidiously in my mind; so that now, everywhere I go, I start to see small things that actually could be done closer to the ground, by and for the people who know about them and need them’.

So wrote Matthew Parris in the Spectator last August, a passage approvingly quoted by Jesse Norman, the Big Society philosopher-in-chief in his book of the same name.

Parris’s summary tells us that the concept has gained a grip – and not only on the Right. Some Liberal Democrats are also …

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The Independent View: The Big Society – what do the people on the ground think?

By Terry Ryall | Published 21st February 2011 - 11:57 am

We at v believe that the idea of a Big Society is a good one. However it needs to be properly resourced.  Not just financially with the Big Society Bank, but with input and ideas from the people on the ground who will make it a reality.

What is really important to all charities and to the vision of the Big Society is having an active and growing base of volunteers.  We support the Big Society in principal but agree that it’s the implementation that needs to be developed.

At v, we are experts at inspiring and mobilising young people to take action.  …

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Posted in Op-eds, The Independent View | 19 Comments