26th November 2012

How Big is a big society?

Big?

Big?

Big?

Big?

or

Big?

In practise Mr Cameron's big society is so small that it is no longer visible, it has disappeared.

Now this is a shame because a) it means that the rationale for this blog has all but disappeared and b) what was, possibly, the one half decent idea to emerge from the think tanks of opposition, now needs to be recovered.

My society suddenly became smaller today because my iphone stopped working.

It wouldn't download the body of the emails that I received, only the headings. This was doubly frustrating because it allowed you to see that x an interesting correspondent from Spain had sent what looked like an interesting email only to not then enable you to read the message.

However there was little point in shooting the messenger, i.e. throwing said iphone against the nearest wall, which in my younger days ............. Oh well, still with the help of an excellent adviser from my phone company I was able to reset my phone and now it is working perfectly well.

If Mr Cameron wants to reset his big society app. he first needs to go to settings and then scroll down until he finds reset and then he needs to enter the scary world of wizardry where he needs expert guidance to help him find his way.

Of course most of the information I needed was already loaded on the 'cloud' but sadly some of what the big society claimed to be about appears to have been downloaded from cloud cuckoo land.

As the indoor critic commented after a recent stay in a hotel, 'whatever he (Mr Cameron) says, people still see the wheelchair and not the person sitting in it' and she should know.

The paralympics, if anything seemed to give some people the idea that disabled people could do any amount of startling and heroic activities almost because of rather than despite their disability, doubtless some of that positive role modelling will find its way into the minds of those responsible for assessing peoples suitability or capability for work?

A truly big society is surely one where there is respect and support for individuals achievements and contributions however big or small they might be.

A truly big society is one where there is some degree of relationship between the earnings of the many and those who to paraphrase John Lennon's words, are the toppermost of the poppermost.

In a truly big society there can be no justification for a CEO claiming a salary that is hundred times greater than that paid to the average worker in the business he runs.

It becomes clear why the big society has been set quietly on the back burner, as an idea it was perhaps a little too radical for the party that rejoices in the name conservative.

The world has changed so dramatically with wage and benefit cuts for the poorest and astronomical pay hikes for the wealthiest that it going to take some radical action to get the genie back in the bottle, but that is undoubtedly what needs to happen.

On Saturday the indoor critic and I went to see Rodriguez aka sugarman.

A seventy year old from Detroit whose album Cold Fact disappeared without trace in the US but became a huge, sleeper hit in South Africa, where it was considered to be one of the powerful influences to bring down Apartheid.

Rodriguez, thought by many to have died, stopped recording and playing and earned his living as a demolition worker in his native Detroit until a documentary film was made chronicling the journey of two South African fans to discover what became of the greatest rock idol who never was.

Sitting in The Sage, Gateshead, I had a sense of a big society when a man so committed to peace and justice could continue to sing his songs and perform with a huge sense of humility and hope, it was interesting to compare our experience with that of the folk who paid hundreds to watch the Rolling Stones at the O2 Arena and as one fan shouted out when Rodriguez performed a brilliant version of Blue Suede Shoes, 'hey Elvis can you do a Rodriguez cover?'

As Rodriguez respond, you need to be a great musician to successfully perform a cover.

Just as you need to be a great politician to successfully introduce a

big

big

big

bigger

biggest (that should of course read fairest)

society.

20th November 2012

I was born and grew up in Manchester.

My mother shopped mainly in two shops.

The first was a little corner shop run by the owner who lived on the premises.

I was often sent down with a note and some loose change to buy essentials, bread, milk, potatoes.

The other was a fairly large Co-op Store on the main Hyde Road which ran through the centre of Gorton.

Here our weekly necessities were purchased along with occasional luxuries.

I was always struck by the amazing overhead vacuum system that sent the money off with a whistle, the change arriving by return whistle, from some mysterious office hidden in the bowels or the attics of the store.

I was also made to commit the share number to memory in order to ensure that my Mother received her 'divi', the annual payout which reflected her share of the profits of the business of which she was an owner/member.

I suppose in the dull, grey, post-war, rationing, austerity days of the 1950's every little helped.

Now that phrase has been adopted by another large supermarket chain and austerity has returned with a vengeance.

My mission in this blog is to offer a wry look at the big society.

However, like much of the Tories pre-election commitment, remember vote blue, go green? the promise has proved to be very elusive now that power has been grasped through the cobbling together of the con-dem coalition.

Now that we are half way through the first term, with even the Bank of England warning of a triple dip recession ahead, it is hard to imagine any of these commitments being honoured.

There is no evidence that we are all in it together, plenty of evidence that some (a few) are doing better than others (the majority) and that it is going to take years to get out of the mess.

The model we are being offered is, we are told, the only possible model?

Well no, not really.

Tonight I am off to a meeting of the co-op Area Committee and interestingly this morning I received my share of the profits.

Admittedly lower than in previous years, doubtless because as the notice said, trading conditions are poor, but welcome nevertheless.

These are not customer rewards like in some businesses, the vouchers represent my share of the profits in a business of which I am an owner.

The democracy that runs the business is like most democracies flawed in so many small ways, but it works in the one big way that means that through public meetings and elections it is possible for a staff member or a customer who shops regularly in their local co-op an opportunity to stand for election first to an Area Committee and then to a Regional Committee and ultimately onto the Group Board.

So there is an alternative to retrenchment, cuts in public services and austerity.

The co-operative model offers a way forward and can be extended and applied to so many other areas of life and, given the highly successful co-op funeral service, death.

The key to all this does come down to one question, who owns the business?

Private ownership makes the answer to that question clear.

Owners directly, or shareholders, own the business and receive their share of the profits.

In a co-op the members own the business and whilst the current membership card might look like a loyalty card issued by a number of other supermarket chains it is in fact much more than that.

The recent Co-ops United event in Manchester made it clear that co-operation as a business model is extendable across a wide range of areas, from energy, to telephony, to holidays, to financial services.

There were seven principles established at the beginning that continue to serve the co-operative business model:

Open membership.
Democratic control.
Distribution of surplus in proportion to trade.
Payment of limited interest on capital.
Political and religious neutrality.
Cash trading.
Promotion of education.

From time to time these principles are reviewed and modernised but at heart they remain as the central core of what differentiates a co-op from any other form of business.

It seems to me that the co-op is a big society, itself, in its own right, without qualification. It is interesting that the winner in the recent Corby by-election was the Labour/Co-op candidate.

More attention has been paid to the 'success' of UKIP in coming third raising a question about whether the Tories will ditch the lib-dems and seek to form a coalition with UKIP in order to remain in office after the next election.

One of the key aspects of the event in Manchester was its international aspect with co-ops across the world, including of course Europe, reminding us that in a global economy national independence is not the way forward

Co-ops United was held in the former railway station from which I used to catch my train home after school, I can only hope that the Co-operation train which left the Station last month can catch both the public and political imagination and point to a better and more co-operative way for Great Britain plc to do its business in the future.

14th November 2012

Tomorrow we are invited to elect a police and crime commissioner.

I want to make the bizzies busier

I'm the police and crime commissioner

My aim in life is to ensure that in time

The punishments fit the crime

I want to make the bizzies busier

I want to keep the police on their toes

Ensure that everyone knows

That I've done my job not just on paper

So everyone feels that bit safer

I want to make the bizzies busier

It's not the crime the general public fear

It's the fear of crime getting nearer

I'm not just here to give the police a job

I'm here to find openings for every yob

I want to make the bizzies busier

After all no one needs to fear

I must show I'm earning my £85k a year

But look at my title more closely

Sure I'll work with the police mostly

But I'm also here to commission crime

So how best to use my time

Keeping the bizzies busy and keen

Like the famous Dixon of Dock Green                  

Not enough to do lads no one to arrest

Well funny you say maybe it's best

I want to make the bizzies busier

I've arranged a little taking and driving away

That should keep you busy today

Then tomorrow I've commissioned

A victimless crime I’m on a mission

I want to make the bizzies busier

For the PM who feels misquoted

I wasn't elected 'cos no one voted

But I won't let that stop me making the bizzies busier

I'm the commissioner for police and crime

So now I've started let me do my time

14th November 2012

This month the indoor critic and I will have been married for 44 years.

Reflecting on this I find myself wondering where the time and the money went.

Certainly raising a family of four, spending six months in the USA with a young family, and just the general business of getting through life, usually meant that in most months there was more of the month left after the money ended.

Usury played its part.

Not that I was a usurer but the introduction of debt cards, AKA Credit Cards, around about the time we got married, seemed to offer the impossible dream of unlimited funds with no pain, wrong of course, but that's usury for you.

Still it's not been a bad 44 years, the usual mix of tears and joy, with a few arguments and a few shared jokes and some very fine moments of which the finest was probably four years ago when we invited our children, their partners and their families to lunch to celebrate our Ruby wedding.

It was a great occasion, one we remember with great satisfaction.

November is also the month when my mother was born and when she died.

Born in 1917 she was 63 years of age when she died in 1980, the year that our youngest child was born.

It was only when we had the photographs taken at his christening developed and enlarged that we realised how ill she had looked, even though at that time she was still working, commuting daily to an office in the centre of Manchester.

Her premature death came as a direct consequence of a wrongly diagnosed breast cancer in her late forties.

So what has any of this to do with the big society?

I guess its because we can only ever view the big society through the lens of how it impacts on our own lives.

If the big society is real and capable of doing what the Prime Minister claims it can do for society then we have to ask what difference will it make to my life, my family, my community?

And the answer usually amounts to a j'accuse against governments and society at large.

It never occurred to me to read Barrack Obama's book, but I stumbled across it by accident on a web-site, read the first 44 pages, was hooked and immediately went out and bought the paper back from Oxfam.

It is a fascinating, intriguing, shocking and compelling story.

As I was reading I noticed that George Osborne had an article in my Newspaper comparing the Tory led coalition with the Democrats under Obama.

No, not really, there is no comparison,, Osborne's specious, self serving comments, bear no comparison with the vision set out in the Obama book.

This Tory Led coalition, with the equally self serving motives of the Liberal's led by Clegg, is in the business of keeping things as they are, not changing anything, keeping the poorest in their place, not giving them a stake in the democratic process, ensuring that the only voices heard in the public square, speak with their accents.

I try to keep things as light as possible in this blog.

It aims to offer a wry look at the big society.

It is as easy to blame the coalition for so much of what is wrong as it is for the coalition to blame the last Labour Government, but that would be equally untrue.

Over our 44 years, over the life of my parents, party politics has failed us equally.

As a youngster in Stoke on Trent in 1964, I campaigned as an Anarchist with the slogan Politics Out, that was the year when the Conservatives lost to Labour led by Harold Wilson.

I can claim no credit for the outcome, because it was also the year, despite the hopes and aspirations of supporters of the Labour Party, when the Millenium was postponed indefinitely and politics were most definitely in.

The current crises facing the coalition with the great estates of the Media, the BBC, Parliament itself being subject to increased scrutiny and public disquiet, with Banking and Financial services equal under critical scrutiny, with MP's choosing to abandon their constituents for a quieter life, still being found with their hands in the till of mysterious expense claims or appearing with other self proclaimed celebrities in a jungle near you, it is hard to discover where common sense has gone.

As a friend of mine would doubtless observe they're all barking.

Just as the USA is seeking to de-politicise its policing and its public services, we are electing political Commissioners for Police and Crime and firing Civil Servants in an attempt to create more biddable departments who will carry out more directly the wishes of ministers.

George Osborne and David Cameron's principal aim is to be re-elected.

I would so much prefer it to be to serve the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

After 44 years the indoor critic and I have reached a stage of companionable silence and so we set our sights lower, simply to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.

9th November 2012

So a new Archbishop is announced.

On the face of it a good appointment, clearly a man who has been fast tracked through the system, and why not?

Having spent most of my career elevating the concept of biting the hand that feeds to a fine art, I can't complain that I was cul de sac'ed rather than fast tracked, but at least I wasn't sacked, at least not by the church.

Interesting that for a man with a reputation for getting his way in negotiations his opening gambit: Yes to Women Bishop's; No to gay marriages, seems like a pretty clear statement of the who, when and what ...... that will shape and possibly continue to vex his time in office.

I was a curate in Bolton in 1972 when the campaign to Ordain women to the priesthood began to gather force.

My Vicar at the time was vehemently opposed, but he was also a company man, so he voted for.

I asked why?

Oh, he responded, by the time it happens, I'll be retired.

Well now that I'm retired I guess I share that kind of reflection not so much about the Ordination of Women of which I have generally been in favour or of the Ordination of Women as Bishop's which seems logical or indeed the the offering of a sacramental blessing to people in same sex relationships which seems to be an expression of love and justice, which is surely the churches stock in trade?

After all it is part of the big society that we were promised and have never quite glimpsed.

No, my sense of get me out of here, I'm retired, is about the larger question of quite where the Church is heading?

Congregations continue to age and it comes to something when, as pensioners, the indoor critic and I can actually lower the demographic in a congregation when we attend (at least some, but more than before) churches.

So where is it all heading and where will it head under the leadership of a new Archbishop?

My suspicion is that sadly, despite Alpha Courses and the new West Kensington, Evangelical fervour that is gripping the Metropolitan Church, the decline of the church will continue and the curve will stretch into the future as a form of euclidean space in which there will be discontinuity with the past because the story is no longer compelling, a convergence of opinion that the story is no longer true and a profound sense that the story is no longer of value in understanding the human condition.

So the new Archbishop, like the boy in the poem, will be left to stand on the burning deck, hoping against hope that the wind changes direction.

Or maybe he will find himself reciting Matthew Arnold's Poem: Dover Beach:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
and naked shingles of the world.

Meanwhile I can only hope that the Church Commissioners continue to invest their pension funds wisely.

6th November 2012

In 1985 I spent a semester in Cambridge Massachusetts. 

It was my year of Undoing Theology in Red Sneakers.

The project was a major undertaking, relocating six people from the NE of England to the NE of the United States, finding schools for the children, settling into a new apartment and choosing which courses to pursue.

We arrived in January when it was, quite literally, breathtakingly cold and lived the dream through to the summer when it was beginning to feel extremely warm, then we returned home to Newcastle to pick up our old life where we had left.

Whilst we were in the States one of our children changed her name, to Chelsea Wilde but within hours of our return she had defaulted back to her given name.

I spent the next two years trying to find a job in order to make our stay permanent but gave up after coming second one too many times.

On reflection, with four children to guide through University and the indoor critic's increasing disability it seems that we made the right decision.

Education, Health Care and now in Retirement pensions, all point to the benefits of publicly provided support in the form of a welfare state understood in its broadest terms.

The current election taking place in the US appears to reflect this choice.

The Romney ticket appears to wish to undo much of what Obama has achieved and to return to the policies of the Bush era, which as Laurel and Hardy might observe, got the USA into this mess in the first place.

Tax cuts for the rich, no trickle down benefits for the poorest and expensive and unbudgeted wars.

The suprising thing about Mitt Romney is that whilst Governor of Massachusetts he appeared to be something of a Liberal, but the Republican Party has shifted pretty firmly to the Right following the success of the Tea Party Movement.

To gain the nomination and secure the Republican vote Romney had to adopt a much more right wing, even reactionary stance than he presented whilst in office.

Obama on the other hand, inherited a huge mess.

The economy was in free fall, housing, healthcare, pensions and the defence budget meant that his room for manoeuvre was extremely limited and opposition in the Senate from the Republicans meant that every inch of progress was only achieved at a high cost.

But there has been real achievement in Health Care, in Foreign Policy and in public investment which has secured economic growth, wages and jobs.

The emotional investment in an Obama victory in the UK is extremely high.

The special relationship, reinforced by pictures of Cameron flipping burgers on the White House lawn and Romney's cavalier comments about the Olympics mean that even the Conservatives appear to be hoping for Obama to win.

Even William Hague, whilst obviously not as appealing to Hilary Clinton as David Milliband, has managed to appear statesmanlike.

Of course we have no say in the matter.

We have no vote.

But on the BBC News, Hugh Edwards went in search of his Welsh relatives, all of whom appeared to be voting for Romney, to give us a first hand experience of what being caught  up in a presidential election debate might feel like.

I imagine that I will sleep well enough whilst the votes are being counted, I hope that their will be no repeat of the hanging chads debacle which cost the Democrats dearly three terms ago, but when I wake up to the news I have a sense that the world may be the same or that it might just have become a slightly more dangerous place.