Martin Hannan: The Big Society on our doorstep

Published on Monday 24 January 2011 09:57

Amidst all the nonsense spouted by David Cameron, the one concept that causes most people to hoot in derision is his vow to build a Big Society.

More and more as Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber lead their coalition towards the destruction of the British economy, we will hear the Big Society trumpeted as Cameron's overarching idea to transform the fabric of the UK. It will serve as a distraction from the real issues, allowing Cam-Clegg to witter on in theoretical terms about a Big Society while our real society is crumbling due to their insane rush to cut the public sector.

As far as I understand it from the muddled messages which the Tories and Lie-dems send out, the Big Society is about the empowerment of communities through reducing central government control and using volunteer labour.

Yet again, politicians have come up with a top-down imposed idea that is doomed to failure because Cameron simply does not realise that such initiatives only work if the impetus comes from the people themselves. The Big Society is not even a new idea. Scotland has a long and honourable tradition of people giving their services voluntarily to their local community and helping to build organisations and associations. It has long been part of the fabric of our nation, and I just wonder if the Scottish part of David Cameron - his father Ian was born in Huntly - somehow remembered this and decided to repackage it as his invention.

If he really is serious about the Big Society, and it's not just a way of getting some public services on the cheap, then Cameron could do worse than look north for inspiration. For there is an outstanding Scottish example of a national volunteering charity which has been going for more than five years now.

Last week I attended the Voscars, the award ceremony of Project Scotland, and met young people whose lives had been transformed by the simple act of doing voluntary work at projects across Scotland. The youngsters had all emerged with more confidence and definitely more awareness of the values that Scottish society needs in its people. They had been empowered by volunteering, and were better people as a result.

I dare say Project Scotland's roots in the McConnell era have probably counted against it in some quarters, and sadly my own party, the SNP, seems to have been less than trustful of the organisation, despite its record of having secured more than 2.5 million hours of volunteering in Scotland.

With founder and chairman Julia Ogilvy and new chief executive Susan Watt in charge, Project Scotland is changing to becoming less dependent on grants, and that can only be a good thing for its future. I would go further and say that this national volunteers' charity should be given a much bigger role in future, not least because many of its initiatives are devised by the 16-25-year-olds themselves.

Project Scotland is one of many such "empowerment" activities across the world. Muhammad Ali, no less, has given his name and philosophy to an inspirational cultural and personal development centre in his home city of Louisville, Kentucky. I've been lucky enough to visit it, and it truly is an outstanding resource for the empowerment of all people, with Ali's own six core values at its heart - Respect, Confidence, Conviction, Dedication, Giving, and Spirituality. There's also a brave message emblazoned in the Center, as the American spelling has it: "To change the world, you first of all have to change yourself."

Project Scotland is doing just that for young people in this country. I only hope it can increase its work in years to come as strive to keep this big-hearted society of ours.

Burns fires up Scots

TONIGHT is Burns Night, and across the world, people will gather to celebrate the life and works of a true Scottish genius. In my far from humble opinion, the greatness of Burns lies as much in his years of collecting Scottish tunes and folk songs as it does in his own poetry. Working with the compilers of the Scots Musical Museum, Burns set out to preserve as much as he could of Scottish language and culture at a time when the ruling classes very much wanted English to be imposed on the populace.

Without Burns, we might well have seen Scottishness, for want of a better word, annihilated by an English-led "Britishness". There is still a tendency by some in the media to assume British means English. During Island Parish on BBC2 on Friday night, the presenter pointed out that the southerly isles of the Outer Hebrides had remained staunchly Roman Catholic because Henry VIII's Reformation hadn't reached those parts. Such arrogance, such ignorance - completely disregarding the Presybterian Reformation of John Knox and his colleagues, inspired by John Calvin rather than by Henry's need to produce a male heir. It's no wonder that the BBC is sometimes called the EBC.

With the mass media concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and with American films, TV and music now the dominant worldwide cultural forces, we need the example of Burns to inspire us more than ever to keep Scottishness thriving.