I understand that tomorrow's Sunday Times will publish a letter signed by 'social entrepreneurs and others from the voluntary and community sector in supporting the role of civil society', by which they mean, the Big Society version of it. After a bit of rumouring during the week, the letter was published yesterday by Social Enterprise (quickly picked up by David Wilcox).
It's pretty disappointing. It deals with some objections to which the authors (I don't mean the signatories necessarily; it's not hard to see where the text originated) feel they can respond, which are well within the comfort zone.
The letter states that campaigners have been taken aback by the opposition in the press and elsewhere to the role citizens can play in our country, partly generated by pre-election discussions on such areas as the ‘Big Society’.
How could anyone disagree with the need for a healthy civil society? But some less straightforward questions have been raised here and there, which don't get any kind of recognition or response in the letter. We're invited to vote for motherhood and apple pie.
Having got it slightly wrong first go (eg unashamedly top-down, too closely associated with a political party, too detached from the political reality of community action) the folk behind BS needed to take a step back. There are (or at least there were, up until now) plenty of people ready to help them with their thinking, out of goodwill or perhaps self-interest. But with this letter they may just be compounding their problems. There's no need to defend civil society guys, it's not under attack: it's the Big Society that people wanted to ask about. Come on out.
Publishing this a few days before the election will simply confirm people in their distrust of the close association with the Conservative party. Leaking the letter to test the reaction, gosh there's a new trick, compounds the sense that it's not quite sincere.
And it doesn't take a major effort of recollection to reflect on the very serious and painful struggles that many people in the community sector (not civil society volunteers nor social entrepreneurs in their own terms, but local people with dirt under their fingernails) went through under the last tory administration.
Previously:
Let's hear it for neighbourhood groups: Conservative party launch of the Big Society
