Glad to see Liverpool City Council has the guts to blow the lid on this insubstantial idea. Big Society was launched without any insight into how the voluntary sector works and the costs involved. Good-hearted people might be willing to work for nothing for the benefit of society but they certainly won’t want to incur costs to do so. As government inspired council cuts start to take their toll on the voluntary sector the delivery mechanisms for the Big Society will struggle and many will disappear. I wish CABE Space, GreenSpace and park managers had the bottle to come out and say unequivocally that the cuts are going to be a disaster for public parks and green spaces instead of meekly dancing to the government’s tune by arranging conferences to help manage decline. This is not a rant: there are hugely damaging cuts being imposed on parks and staff are being laid off all over the place.
I am already hearing of large-scale job cuts amongst parks staff. First they will be thrown on the dole and then the government will force them to do litter-picking and gardening for nothing. They’ll probably end up doing their old jobs – for dole money instead of wages. You couldn’t make it up, it’s so disgraceful.
My good friend makes these excellent points in a forthcoming article in The London Gardener and I thought they deserved some head space in advance of the cuts on Wednesday. I hoped I’d become too old to see another savage assault on local democracy, on parks and the good people who work in them but that is for sure what we are going to get. The thought that this lot are going to pick up from where they left off last time is chilling and all the hard work of the last 15 years in getting parks back into use is going to go down the Swanney. Big Society my arse. Norman overlords more like.
“I am exasperated at the Orwellian manoeuvres through which the Government and the media established, within a matter of weeks of the election, a consensus that the real issue was the public sector, not the banks; not the unfettered free market, but local government and its huge burden of services. The way in which a whispering campaign subtly shifted the focus from the private sector to the public sector as the chief source of all our woes – the feather-bedded working conditions of teachers, nurses, firemen and park-staff, their enormous pensions, their general fecklessness – is breath-taking in its affrontery.
I am depressed that the government’s assumption that rolling news would quickly cauterise the public memory of the workings of the casino-banks has proved correct. Their calculation that binmen, speeding charges and local council help-lines would be a popular as well as an easier target has also proved correct. It’s easy to sell shrinking the state on that basis.
I am enraged at the apparent success of their rhetoric.
“The ‘Big Society’ will, it seems, hand over key services to the voluntary and charitable sector, who will inevitably turn to the private sector to actually deliver those services. A Friends group may indeed agree to take over the running of a park, with a budget or endowment from the Council, but will soon find that the cost of running the park exceeds the allowance from the Council. It’s bound to because the Council itself would struggle to maintain the park on the money which is likely to be available, and there is no extra. So they will either bow out or be encouraged to turn to private contractors to deliver.
Those contractors will comprise directors on huge salaries and then hundreds of workers on the minimum-wage, on impossibly tight schedules, working to reduce maintenance to the bare minimum; just like Compulsory Competitive Tendering in the eighties. Whoever runs the park, the money required to do so well remains the same – shifting the bill to volunteers or trusts will not change that irreducible fact. The wisdom of one commentator who pointed out that effective voluntary involvement takes more civic leadership not less has been drowned out.”
We all understand that there must be savage spending cuts in public services in order to maintain the living standards of bankers, chief executives, directors and so on and that the needs of the community will be uppermost in deciding future provision. One of the things that people in densely populated urban areas need most is more car-parking. As many of our parks are located in just these areas, and as they are bound to become unattractive through staff and funding cuts, surely it makes sense to concrete these big under-used areas for car-parks. This would be just what the doctor ordered to avoid the stress and rage caused by fighting for on-street parking spaces and I’m sure people would not mind paying for a parking space. The revenue raised could be used to keep the remainder of the park in the tip-top condition we have become accustomed to. These park car parks could be turned over by local authorities to be managed by the private sector who would be responsible for issuing parking tickets, clamping transgressors’ vehicles and towing them away – and the wardens could look after the park in their spare time too. This would be a great example of the Big Society in action. Social provision allied to profit to give the community what it really needs. Every one’s a winner. We could maybe build shops, cafes and old people’s homes around the edges of these car parks to give people something to do while waiting to die.
That very odd woman who stroked the cat and then, when she thought no-one was looking, dumped it in the bin puts me in mind of our new government. Stroke the people with reassurances about fairness and then wham! dump the poor in the bin. That mad woman said that people were making too much of a fuss – it was only a cat. The government said that the Institute of Fiscal Studies is making too much of a fuss – it’s only poor people. People on £16k a year will lose £820 a year – people on £100,000 a year lose about £1000. It all makes me go aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh! When are we going to wise up in this country and stop blaming the poor when people like Philip Green nets £1,200,000,000 in one year and evades the tax on it because his wife has all the shares in her name and lives in Monaco? £285 million in tax has gone down the Swanee – that’s half of the amount spent by HLF restoring parks over the last 14 years. Then he gets rewarded with a post advising the government which is hell bent on cutting public expenditure. Cheats and swindlers rule and we let it happen.
I’m glad the cat was saved.
When I started gardening 35 years ago, runner beans festooned my vines, hanging down in multiple trusses. Pollination ain’t what it used to be. Some time in the 1980s bees were noted going round the back of the bean flowers and making a hole to extract the nectar, thus not pollinating the flower. This seems to have caught on in a big way in the bee community so you are lucky to get one of two beans per flower spike. Obviously a case of the wrong bees rather than a shortage, as there were plenty of bees about – more on the borage than you could shake a stick at. . These thieving bastards either have short tongues or a bad attitude. I’d give them a Bee Minus. As the climbing French beans are unaffected I assume that French kissing still works for them. Couldn’t some of our brilliant plant breeders come up with a runner bean with a shorter trumpet to encourage these slackers to present themselves at the front door rather than climbing over the back fence?
What with an allotment to tend, chickens to feed and a bicycle to ride, not to mention earning a crust, I’m starting to wonder if there is any point to writing this blog. I haven’t the faintest idea if anybody reads it (apart from Ian Richardson) or is interested in the topics and rants. I think I might shut up, silenced at last by a beige cloud of apathy. On the other hand I might not, depends how worked up I get.
In another fine example of protecting the weakest members of our society, government Playbuilder grants have been frozen. These projects are community led and driven and, presumably, a good example of what a “Big Society” means. These grants were not an unnecessary vote-buying gesture but a much needed attempt to address the decline in play facilities across the country. Imagine the disappointment of those communities that have come together in good faith and worked hard to produce schemes that meet local needs only to have the funding snatched away at the last minute. The Big Society idea is just empty rhetoric – it will end up meaning that those who can afford to can do whatever they like to further improve their lives while people who need facilities most will have to go without. Welcome back Mrs Thatcher, goodbye society, Big or not. Apart from the hundreds of play projects now in jeopardy this will have a knock-on effect on bigger park renewal schemes as, in some cases, Playbuilder money was part of partnership funding packages for much bigger regeneration projects. Councils will find it very difficult to plug the funding gap that the loss of Playbuilder funds will create.
How cheering it was to see the piece on the EC1 New Deal for Communities programme in Islington (HW 13 August 2010). The before and after pictures show what a huge difference can be made to environmental quality with relatively little outlay. Every one of the snaps showed how neglected and ill-defined spaces can be transformed into pleasant and welcoming places and they all show how people respond – there they are in relaxed, happy mode. Well done Islington Council and everyone involved. Brilliant work.
Did anybody watch this documentary on BBC 4? If you missed it you can catch it at various times all week – tonight (Wednesday) at 8.00 pm. It briefly tells the story of Britain’s parks and includes some wonderful images and perceptive comments and is well worth watching. Although I helped the documentary team on this project I do have some criticisms (as my fans would expect). Why have a posh bloke like Dan Cruickshank presenting it? He looked as though he had never really used a public park in his life, something he proved in a toe-curling scene in which he demonstrated his inability to use a swing. His approach was typical top-down BBC – posh bloke peers at the pursuits of the hoi-polloi with benign bewilderment. They should have got Jarvis Cocker, Jo Brand or Billy Connolly to present it. And they spelt my name wrong in the credits. Hey ho. One bit I particularly liked was transposing a clip of Mrs Thatcher over scenes of ghastly park dereliction from the 1980s and early 1990s. Yes, we know who was responsible. It’s probably too much to hope that the present bunch of incumbents will have learnt a thing about the need to look after public assets.
