memespring

I have a theory about this whole Big Society thingamajig. Actually I have a few, but there’s one specific one that’s less profanity-laced and (more importantly) is actually testable.

The premise of the Big Society thing, at least as reported in the media, seems to be this: number one – ‘the state is rubbish at running stuff’; number two – a combination of zero-cost communication/organisation and the most free-time society has ever had means ‘informal groups of people can now do what was previously the preserve of formal government’. (It’s never about helping people work with the government they elect you notice – the left need to get their collective hoops in gear and start articulating what that might look like).

Now, try and think of something that your local council actually runs that you really care about? As in directly employs people to do ‘stuff’. For me, most of the things that I might think “yep, I care about that, sign me up” have all been have been hived off to private companies long ago. Swimming pools, local bus services, markets, recycling …

So doesn’t the whole thing start to look less like community involvement and more like stripping councils of the last few things they are actually allowed to do? Isn’t it going to end up creating a yet larger democratic deficit with even less accountability on the occasions things fuck up?

Or is the plan to take the contracts away from the likes of Serco and either return them to the council or community groups? I can really see a Tory government rushing to do that. And what if a community wants something returned to council control so they can harang their local councillor about it safe in the knowledge they might have some actual control over it?

I’ve obviously only the experience of where I’ve lived, and admittedly don’t have a lot of inbuilt trust for the Conservatives. But it strikes me that – regardless of whether I’m right and most local services are being run by companies who are 1) screwing the public and 2) creating a democratic deficit since their interests are by definition profit rather than society driven; or the Conservatives are right and it’s actually the states fault that things don’t work – we need to know who currently runs stuff. That would be useful, right?

Without knowing what the current state of things we have no way of having a decent debate about it, and groups out there who might like to run stuff have no way of find out what’s up for grabs.

So how about (in the spirit of the Big Society) we try and crowd-source it? It shouldn’t be too hard. Here’s specifically what I’d like to know, but I’m sure other people can think of other things it would be useful to know. Say, for a fixed list of services (libraries, swimming pools, gym Services, local busses, allotments etc) we ask people to do a bit of detective work and then fill in some kind of structured wiki:

- Who runs it at the moment? Is it national government, the town hall, a private company, charity etc.
- How long is the contract for? (People need to know when it is due up so they can start lobbying to take it over).
- What is the budget? Is there a subsidy?