More fun with the Big Society

Big Society, the gift that keeps giving:

"It could become the allegory of the "big society" age. The man appointed by the prime minister to kickstart a revolution in citizen activism is to scale back his hours after discovering that working for free three days a week is incompatible with "having a life".

Lord Wei of Shoreditch, who was given a Tory peerage last year and a desk in the Cabinet Office as the "big society tsar", is to reduce his hours on the project from three days a week to two, to allow him to see his family more and to take on other jobs to pay the bills...

The role is voluntary and Wei had to to give up jobs in the charitable sector when he was appointed to avoid a conflict of interest. Whitehall sources said that when he was invited to take the role he had expected it to be remunerated but was told only the night before that it was a voluntary post and there would be no salary."

Meanwhile, Lord Wei has decided to use some of his free time to concern troll lefties on his blog:

"There remain however risks ahead for this new consensus on society. First is Ballsonomics, that lingering belief that high spending and a big state in parts of Labour which has the potential to crush good society. The second is that in the move to decentralise power as part of the big society you simply recreate local versions of big government or other overweening institutions. The third is that Good Society ultimately becomes a cover for Big Government – direct (web-enabled and/or street-based) action that leads not to self help and mutual support but to a form of lobbying in which the assumption remains still that government should do everything."

Those wicked lefties, crushing the good society with their lingering belief that funding charities and community groups is preferable to taking away their funding! How dare the people come together to demand that councils keep libraries open rather than using the powers which we give them to do exactly what we want them to!