My blood ran cold. It's Cameron's Big Society.

Politics The Big Society is back in the news again today with David Cameron's speech this morning which seemed designed to clarify matters but from the reports I've read (here's one) just succeded to make it appear as nebulous and unfocused as when we first heard about it in the election campaign in such places as this party election broadcast:



Anyone who's watched the final episode of Adam Curtis's excellent series The Living Dead will recognise elements of what Cameron is saying. In that, Curtis demonstrates how Thatcher was attempting to manufacture in actuality the fictional version of Britain Churchill suggested in his speeches in order to create the partriotism required to win the second world war. Cameron's big society in many way is a slightly degraded facsmile, a third generation copy if you like. Except ...

... that's what I thought until I watched the BBC series The Amazing Mrs Pritchard a few months back. For the unititiated, this was the Capraesque story of a supermarket manager becoming prime minister and really rather good due to some sharp writing by Sally Wainright and nuanced central performance by Jane Horrocks (Carey Mulligan plays her daughter). The whole thing is on YouTube.

At the beginning of the second episode, after her Pink Alliance has won the election, she appears at Number 10 to give her first big speech. Keep in mind that she's entered government on a wave of discontentment with the Westminster system, a kind of popular political uprising within a democratic process. It starts at 4:16 below (or clip here to go straight there):



My blood ran cold. It's Cameron's Big Society. As she says late into the speech she's going "to put legislation in place to empower the citizen to have more control over their own lives ..." Luckily, the rest of the series is essentially about how this unworkable; too many voices with too many ideas. There's even a storyline which predicts the failure of initiatives like the ePetitions.

Nevertheless, ever since watching that, I've had the inescapable feeling that in fact Cameron's promoting something which was put down on paper at three in the morning by a desperate researcher with no ideas of their own but a long memory for the history of political drama, who might even have had a recording of the programme to hand.  Scarier things have happened.