Thirteen years after the Labour Party of Tony Blair swept into power in 1997 with a landslide majority of 179, a coalition government was formed in May 2010, the first one to officially run the country since May 1945. The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition is headed by David Cameron who argued before the General Election that what Britain needed was the end of what he called Labour’s “Big Government”. During a seminal speech at the Hugo Young lecture in 2009, the future Prime Minister had blamed the Labour Party for having increased the size of the State and failed to solve some key social issues, while destroying personal responsibility. The answer lay, according to David Cameron, in creating a more equal, more responsible society where power would be redistributed away from the centre. This vision of an alternative society to the one Labour had fostered was encapsulated in the term “The Big Society”.
Although the concept behind the expression has never been fully grasped by the British...
