My Adventures in the Big Society

I was invited to Somerset House on the Strand yesterday as part of the Big Society Network to watch David Cameron take questions for the best part of an hour on his pet subject. My organisation, New Deal of the Mind, has been helping deliver two welfare-to-work contracts since last year and, along with most people in what I have learned to call “the third sector” I am prepared to give this idea the benefit of the doubt. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly ideological about the Big Society, although Ed Miliband showed in his Independent on Sunday article at the weekend just how convenient a whipping boy this has become for Labour

You can’t blame Ed Miliband for his cynicism. The architects of the Big Society within government have not communicated their ideas well and David Cameron should certainly stop using examples from his Oxfordshire constituency to illustrate a concept that will only succeed if it transforms lives north of Witney.