The ‘Big Society’ demographic train crash

By Leonie Cooper

I’m a good example of what Cameron talks about when he rants on about the ‘Big Society’ – except that I don’t need him to blather on to persuade me to do it. I drive a minibus for our local project for older people, preventing isolation at home, I attend local community and resident association meetings, I roll up my sleeves and help steward our local summer festival, I attend our Safer Neighbourhood Team public and panel meetings, I’ve been a school governor for over 10 years. Just recently, I compered a dog show on our local common – and of course, before that I was involved in campaigns to avoid the common being built over, or covered in floodlights. Yes, I’m a model Big Society participating citizen.

Except of course I’m a long-standing member of the Labour Party – and indeed, a Labour Councillor, in a minority Group on one of the most rabidly Tory councils in the country. We have no debt (£300 million on deposit earning interest) and our Housing Revenue Account is in surplus (we paid £21 million to central government last year) and we make healthy revenues from parking, so we should be in a good position to weather austerity storm – but our Tories have spotted the Big Society small print, and are well up for enacting the Small State. They foresee a golden age of cuts and hiked charges for a small rump of remaining services.

But looking at it from the point of view of a local Councillor, all I can see is a world where people will pay through the nose every time they access services – where services still exist – topped up by the expectation that other activities will be done for free by big society participators. But surely we are heading rapidly towards a situation where younger retired people are doing for free an ever-increasing number of things, for an ever-increasing number of older retired people?

It’s unlikely that younger people with jobs will be available – they’ll be working harder and harder just to make ends meet, as cost of living increases and pay awards are frozen or very slim. It’s also pretty unrealistic to expect people in their late 80s or 90s to take on a long list of activities on behalf of others. So it’s likely to be people in their 50s, 60s and early 70s who become another squeezed middle – and quite a few already have caring responsibilities of their own, either grandchildren or their parents or spouses. Will they be willing or able to take on looking after other older people, along with sweeping the pavements outside their house, litter-picking in their local park, running their local crèche and nursery, doing volunteer reading in schools…

It’s really hard to see where this as yet unseen army of participators will come from – and therefore hard to see the Big Society as anything other than a Big Con, designed to cover up their real intentions – a Small State.