Thursday, July 21, 2011

When is the Big Society NOT the Big Society? (when it’s the co-op movement...)


The Big Society rumbles ever onwards, and there still seems to be widespread confusion about what it actually is. However, the Commission on Big Society have produced this handy definition, which has since been adopted by national sector bodies Locality and ACEVO (amongst others):



"A society in which power and responsibility have shifted: one in which, at every level in our national life, individuals and communities have more aspiration, power and capacity to take decisions and solve problems themselves, and where all of us take greater responsibility for ourselves, our communities and one another"

All sounds very noble, but it’s also a definition of the co-operative movement (you know, that things that’s also been rumbling along for a few centuries now!)

Let me illustrate by mapping the defining Co-operative values and principles against this definition:

"A society in which power and responsibility have shifted: one in which, at every level in our national life, individuals and communities have more aspiration, power and capacity to take decisions and solve problems themselves (self-help, democracy, equity), and where all of us take greater responsibility for ourselves (self-responsibility), our communities and one another (social responsibility, caring for others, concern for community)"

This apparent ‘hi-jacking’ of the co-op movement to support the Conservative Party’s ambitions doesn’t stop with defining it's Big Society. Remember when they also launched the Conservative Co-operative Movement, apparently oblivious to the pre-existence of the existing wider co-operative movement...?

So – when is the Big Society not the Big Society? When it’s a political attempt to claim credit for others hard work and efforts over the last few centuries... So is it time to reclaim the Big Society as the Co-operative Society yet?

Monday, July 11, 2011

are the creative industries actually the destructive industries?


I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a recent RSA/Future Artists/Potico unconference on enterprise and the creative industries, and through discussions and debate with particpants there am beginning to think that the creative industries are actually quite dangerous...

after all, creativity demands that we challange our accepted (and comfortable) norms, expectations, knowledge and wisdom - manifestations of work from within the creative industries often cause upset, shock and dislike and so are often dismissed out of hand and not seen to be of value;

and maybe that's why in the UK we don't embrace the creative industries as well as other nations do (and the associated limitations that we therefore place on our society and economy in doing so) - we keep them on the fringes of acceptability because they are so disruptive and (personally) challenging. But can't such destructive tendancy utimately a good thing?