Jesse Norman

ConHome: Whatever happened to the Big Society? Jesse Norman: What it is – and why it matters

“Whatever happened to the Big Society?”  Having written a book on the subject a few years ago, I am sometimes asked that question.  It reminds me of that moment in Sunset Boulevard when the journalist says to Norma Desmond (the magnificent Gloria Swanson) “You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big,” only to receive the withering response “I AM big.  It’s the pictures that got small.”

In some ways, the same thing happened to the Big Society.  It’s a big, bold and brilliant political idea, and conservative to its core.  But, like Norma Desmond, it fell victim to being framed in ever-smaller ways. So: what happened, and why does it matter?

It’s sometimes said that the phrase “The Big Society” was coined by Samantha Cameron. 

Spectator book review: Thomas Paine: spendthrift, scrounger and polemicist of genius

‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Ronald Reagan made this most unconservative of lines a leitmotif of his 1980 presidential campaign, knowing its radicalism would highlight his energy, personal optimism and desire for change. As it duly did.

The astonishing power over words of its author, Thomas Paine, persists to this day. In a letter of 1805, the former president John Adams said of Paine that 

there can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief.

Yet even Adams was forced to confess:

I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the past 30 years than Thomas Paine … Call it then the Age of Paine.

By that time Paine had long been a household name on two continents, such was his notoriety and the power of his pen. The man himself was poorly educated and an early failure; in 1774, at the age of 37, he was sacked from his job at the excise, his second marriage disintegrated and his goods were sold at auction to pay off his debts.