Tory Bear, blogger and makeshift homophone of a certain flush ex-PM, today seemed to confuse Dave’s “Big Society” idea for that ancient thingamebobby they call “democracy”. The Conservative cuddly tweeted earlier today that David Miliband and Tessa Jowell’s proposals for a mutual cooperative BBC made them subscribers to the PM’s big idea. Posting a link to the above mentioned Paul Waugh blog in the ES, TB tweeted:
“So David Miliband is fully paid up member of the Big Society….intriguing…”
Now, Dave and Tessa’s proposals are participatory, they do involve public engagement and they do have resonances of member-consumer rhetoric, a little bit like the Big Society, but also a bit like John Lewis. However, essentially the plan is just to inject a bit of much-needed democracy into Beeb proceedings, rather than get it to be run for free by members of the public. There is a fundamental failure in SW1 to understand the meaning of the crowdsourcing idea at the heart of Big Soc rhetoric, and how democracy is just a small part, as Douglas Carswell recently pointed out.…
