Small is Beautiful, Big is Better, but Both is best of all

The thing is, we did use to have the Big Society, well, sort of. I remember, growing up in the 1950s and 60s in East Hull, our community did look out for each other and - yes, cliche or not - you could always leave your door open and neighbours were always popping round for a cuppa.

In that scenario, you could never imagine, for instance, a vulnerable pensioner dying on her own of hypothermia and lying there for weeks before being discovered, because somebody would have noticed she was missing from her daily round, hadn't seen her in the corner shop recently, and would have stepped in with a hot meal, a blanket and/or a bag of coal.

Now, that kind of Big Society would be worth aspiring to. The kind of society where people band together and see each other through, behaving altruistically without any notion of payment or reward. The only problem with it is, though, that it's actually the Small Society. It works at a micro level, street by street. You can't scale it up to a national level, though it would be nice to get back to a society which was more caring, more respectful, less self-centred and - frankly - venal in its aspirations, since we seem to be descending more and more into "White Van Man Bigot Britain", encouraged by "dog whistle" pronouncements on things like benefits and immigration.

I say "get back to", because of course the communities that nourished and nurtured the "Small Society" are long gone - the fishing community of Hull being an example, the mining communities of the coalfields, the steelworks or the shipyards in those areas of the country where they were strong, and the docks in places like Liverpool and the East End. And not only have the communities, vanished, the ideas which held them together have vanished too - ever since Margaret Thatcher gave the green light to sheer naked greed for money as the motivating force in society, basically the country was set off down a route where it was apparently OK to climb over anyone's face on your way to the acquisition of wealth and goods, and everything has to make a profit, a philosophy that ultimately leads to your mum invoicing you for cooking your breakfast, or outsourcing the job to a chef in Mumbai.

There are some things that are necessary to be organised on a macro scale and which will never make a profit. Health care, education, prisons and the justice system, defence, transport, the postal system, things like that. The reason that the Big Society is falling apart at the seams is that the Tories, deep down, know this, but they are ideologically attached to the idea that everything must make a profit. This inherent contradiction at the heart of the policy is killing it stone dead.

If they could but bring themselves to abandon that shibboleth, and fund the idea like it needs to be funded, then the Big Society could work. But of course, with Eric Pickles in charge of the budgets, that is about as likely as me lapping Usain Bolt in the 100m at the next Olympics. Not going to happen.

So, as it is, we are left with an empty, vacuous fart of an idea, a trumped-up initiative which relies on wish fulfilment and fairy dust for its success. The idea that you can cut public services to the bone and beyond, remove funding left right and centre, throw thousands of people on to the dole and somehow, magically, the economy is going to pick up and create a lot of wealth that will somehow get given to charities by altruistic donors to pick up the slack. I don't think so. There goes Usain Bolt again.

It's not as if they really mean it, though. Cameron is using the Big Society as an attempt to speak over the heads of most people to those who would like Britain to return to a sepia-tinted era with cricket on the green and spinsters cycling to matins, but the reality is a savage attack on the public service ethos (because the Tories truly think everything can be reduced to a balance sheet) and passing the blame on to councils and charities for not picking up the pieces, when in fact, the Tories have stolen the dustpan and the brush!

I no longer differentiate between Tories and Lib Dims, these days they are all just Tories to me, but I do wonder sometimes how the Lib Dims, traditionally the party of local government, volunteering, and local activism, square their support for this dismal claptrap with their professed stance of caring about communities. And how they sleep at night.