Hey, Dave: our society’s bigger than yours

We have an uprising that's far bigger and more social than Cameron could have imagined.

The words “big society” will be written on the tombstone of this Conservative government. They were written on the side of the Treasury – which is, in effect, the same thing – in angry spray-can letters during the riots in December. The people of this country will not mutely acquiesce to the mortgaging of civic society to pay off the debts of the super-rich. A new social spirit is on the move, but it is not the one that the Tories envisage.

As vital public services are being dismantled, people are occupying their local libraries instead of volunteering to staff them. Instead of wealthy parents setting up academies, there are education activists running free schools for all-comers in empty mansions in Fitzrovia. David Cameron’s big society branding platform imagined us “taking responsibility for the people around us”. He didn’t imagine that we’d be doing it by standing together on picket lines.

The Tory rhetoric around the big society is breathtakingly patronising. It’s not just the awful name, which makes it sound suspiciously as though our politics were now a slick children’s television show, fronted by puppets. It’s not just the glib way in which the parties in government are slashing training programmes at a time when youth unemployment is nearing a million, while holding lavish fund-raising balls where millionaire donors can bid for top City internships for their sons and daughters.

And it’s not just the way they declare that we can no longer afford to care for our sick and disabled, while they somehow find spare cash for tens of billions of pounds in tax breaks for banks. It’s that they have the gall to do all of this and then to suggest that it is ordinary voters who have lost their sense of social responsibility.

Guess what? Enforced hardship makes people band together and now we have an uprising that’s far bigger and more social than Cameron could have imagined. Who are the authors of this revolution? Check your mirror.

The real deal

It’s true that there are career activists and romantic student adventurers leading the charge. But the real revolt taking place in Britain involves every one of us, whether we like it or not. It’s about whether you and I are willing to let our society be broken apart and sold to unelected global financiers or whether we have the courage to stake our claim.

The sort of dissent that petrifies the powerful has an everyday face. It’s the 12-year-old who organises a picket of the Prime Minister’s constituency office to save his youth centre. It’s the woman with progressive multiple sclerosis who builds an online resistance network to fight the cuts to disability benefits. It’s the striking call-centre worker. It’s the 16-year-old with no hope of affording university who misses class to protest in front of the Houses of Parliament and the teacher who lets her go.

“David Cameron, can’t you see? We’re the big society!” chanted members of the protest group UK Uncut at a recent demonstration against corporate tax avoidance. Cameron is about to meet the real big society and he’s about to discover that it’s more than a branding exercise. It’s about real people standing together to fight real injustice. It’s called socialism.