A Better Society Not A Bigger Society

David Cameron’s calls for a bigger society are complete nonsense. It was his party that killed British society. Thatcher even proudly declared, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”.

One of Cameron’s plans is for a kind of voluntary National Service where young people do work in their neighbourhoods. He thinks it will get kids off the streets and away from petty crime and drugs. The simple fact of the matter is that the kids who will volunteer are not the ones we need to target. The kids who volunteer will be the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts. It will be the kids from white and blue collar families whose Mum and Dad will drop them off in the car. The teenagers who hang about outside my local Co-op drinking cider won’t volunteer. The smack-heads who commit 90% of the burglaries where I live won’t volunteer. The kids who are constantly in trouble at school won’t volunteer; it will be the well behaved kids.

I know I’ve got a cynical attitude and I wish I could more positive about it but I live in a run-down Northern town with high unemployment and high crime rates. I see what is going on with my own eyes. A 17 year old boy was stabbed to death yesterday on a road less than a 5min drive from my house. I don’t want to harp on about his privileged background but Cameron has absolutely no idea about what it is like in the real world. The big society plan will not solve the problems in the huge, run down and crime ridden council estates where I live. It will not solve problems in the inner-cities.

The only way to tackle the social problems in Britain is to tackle the poverty in Britain. It has been proven time and again that if you reduce poverty you reduce crime. The places with the highest crime rates are almost always the places with the highest unemployment rates. The schools with the worst attendance records and lowest exam results are also almost always in the areas with high unemployment rates.

We can improve our society by ensuring we give young people some hope. We need to show them that there are rewards for hard work and good qualifications. We need to show them that they can expect more than a life of unemployment, crime and gangs. We need to invest in their future and we can do this by increasing taxes for the rich, forcing non-doms to pay tax and introducing the Robin-Hood tax on the banks. We should then pump the money into job creation and improve wages for nurses, teachers, the police and fire fighters. Show young people that the jobs that benefit society the most are the best paid because they are the most important.

We don’t need a bigger society. We need a better society. Get people out of poverty and into fairly paid work and we will get the better society we seek.