A brief history of the Big Society

UK NEWS by Nick Tolson.

With the Coalition’s first anniversary around the corner and Britain only just starting to feel the true pain of the cuts, Prime Minister David Cameron was forced into a vigorous defence of his ‘Big Society’ idea in the House of Commons this morning, insisting that it was ‘part of a great ideological lineage’ that always ‘cherished progress’.

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With many more demonstrations on the way as communities vent their frustrations, Mr Cameron said that people should ‘give the Big Society concept a chance’ and denied yet again that it was ‘a cynical ploy’ to dress up the savage attacks on frontline public services as ‘an opportunity’.

Presenting a slide show entitled A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BIG SOCIETY, the Prime Minister beamed as he showed off ‘newly discovered’ posters found by a junior assistant at Conservative Central Office – which confirmed the long intellectual and patriotic history of the project, rather than it being sketched out on beer mats during a conference knees-up in 2008.

Pointing at the pictures, the Prime Minister said: “Without grand projects like the Big Society, we would never have pulled together to defeat the Nazi menace not once, but twice – during The Blitz and in the First World War. America would never have gone to the Moon. Stalin would never have been able to implement his grand five year economic plan.”

“I visited the Middle East recently, where much of the populus is revolting. I told the new military council in Egypt for example how much I was impressed by their own Big Society project thousands of years ago.”

“Imagine – if you will – that the Pharaohs had not encouraged the local population to collectively dust themselves down, pull their socks up and roll up their sleeves. We wouldn’t have the pyramids at Giza, the beautiful Sphinx, or the temples at Karnak and Luxor.’

‘In effect, we wouldn’t have the great pieces of architecture that wealth-generating westerners can afford to visit today. And that society is precisely the kind of ‘can do’ society that I want in the UK.’”