Robert Gillies: 'Big Society' must not be an excuse to cover up Bad Society

POWERFUL words have been voiced recently on "the Big Society". As I reflect on what is being said, my mind re-connects with a statement that former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, once made: "There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families."

What are we to make of this? One prime minister debunks society. Another commends it.

All this is part of a wider political agenda begun by Harold Macmillan, I suggest, who rightly, as we can see with hindsight, told us over 50 years ago that we had "never had it so good". On balance he was pretty accurate and for a while to come many in society will still be able to draw upon a largely benevolent welfare state.

But things are to change. And the current Prime Minister David Cameron's "Big Society" speech signals that. In years to come it will be an historic speech, for at a secular level it marks the watershed when we pass from a society where there was enough wealth to pass around to enable most in Britain to benefit sufficiently from a welfare state, to one where we will increasingly have to support and care for one another more than we realise.

At one level I hope the "Big Society" speech signals the end of individualism. I hope too it ends the secularising and marginalising of faith into a "private" thing you do in your own time and only providing it does not impact on wider society.

I hope too it ends the trend whereby legislation refuses to allow conscience clauses to, for example, adoption agencies and those whom they consider as suitable adoptive parents. And, to express a personal gripe, I hope it signals the end of celebrity culture!

There is a huge risk that emphasis on the "Big Society" creates a camouflage for other things that go on beneath the surface. I'm especially thinking of the current movement towards getting people back to work. In many ways this is a good thing as it reverses the 1980's policy of moving people away from unemployment into invalidity benefit.

For many this may have been a more appropriate reflection of their circumstances but for others it has proved an escape route away from the responsibility to work. The 1980's trend is now being reversed and recent political decisions ensure escape routes will be closed off.

But for some, not least those suffering from various forms of mental illness, this will prove disastrous. Discreet or covert assessment tests are required to be carried out on people who may not know they are even being tested.

The tests are carried out without any recognition of a person's long-term clinical circumstances. The tests are rudimentary assessments of the capacity to carry out simple operations. Do they assess a person's capacity to assume responsibility, sustain a full, or part-time day's work? I fear not.

Do they take into account any variation of a person's emotions and how these might be affected in any given workplace? I fear not. Do they look at how a drugs regime might be maintained in such places? It is unlikely.

These changes are happening now. Politicians I have spoken to could offer no remedy as to how these changes and the issues that arise from them might be addressed. But they bore out my fear that "the Big Society" not only fails to address real-time concerns raised by these questions, but also my greater fear that emphasis on "the Big Society" actually camouflages them from view.

l The Rt Rev Dr Robert Gillies is Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney