TORY leader Cameron yesterday delivered his speech on the ‘Big Society’ but had a problem defining what he meant.
He said: ‘You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.’
It is basically, however, to do with ‘Robbery’ – about providing a propaganda mask for smashing jobs and services without which there cannot be society.
Cameron says that it is ‘about a huge culture change . . . where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighbourhoods, in their workplace . . . don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face . . .’
However, he is not talking about a social revolution to overthrow the capitalist state, he is talking about absolving governments from providing the services that people require. The Big Society is ‘about people setting up great new schools. Businesses helping people getting trained for work. Charities working to rehabilitate offenders. It’s about liberation – the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.’
Why not abolish the elite and the ruling class that stands behind it completely?
The answer is that Cameron’s Big Society’ is a return to the old, hated pre-Welfare State society, so beloved by the ruling class, where looking after the poor and the oppressed was a job for conscience-ridden philanthropists.
However, he reveals that he is not just relying on the ‘liberating power of the people’. He says: ‘The truth is that we need a government that actually helps to build up the Big Society. This means a whole new approach to government and governing.’
This approach is, in fact, dictatorship. Ensuring that the House of Commons cannot be dissolved unless 66 per cent of MPs vote for it, and rushing through parliament bills that illegally smash up the civil service redundancy scheme, and forcing through Academy schools is dictatorial. This same approach will now be used to try and smash the public sector.
Cameron reveals ‘the three big strands of the Big Society agenda.’ The first is philanthropy, the second is public sector reform, and freedom to ‘open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need.’
The third strand is ‘community empowerment’. This is to do with power. ‘We must push power away from central government to local government – and we shouldn’t stop there. We should drive it down even further to communities, to neighbourhoods and individuals.’ Who is to hold the individual power in neighbourhoods? No doubt it will be the elected police chief.
Also: ‘We will create a Big Society Bank to help finance social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups through intermediaries.’ Social enterprises are private companies that along with charities are to take the place of the public sector.
Immediately, ‘Eden Valley in Cumbria, Windsor and Maidenhead, Sutton and here in Liverpool . . . These four vanguard communities will be the great training grounds of this change.’ This turns out to mean that in Liverpool volunteers will run the museums, and in the rest, volunteers will take over the local transport services and other local assets.
This is not ‘Liberation’, this is reducing society to a level where only the rich count, as in the days before the Welfare State. Liberation is a fine word, however misused it is by the cynical Cameron.
We call on the working class to exercise its right to revolution to liberate society from capitalism. We urge workers and the trade unions to form councils of action to take over the control of entire areas to stop the closure of the public services. We call for a general strike, with millions rising up to liberate society from the capitalists and bankers and to establish workers power and socialism.
