English Liverpool Declines Role in Government Overhaul by British-Britain

Liverpool, England

When he became prime minister last year, David Cameron
announced that the days of big government were over.

In its place he proposed to build something called a
half-witted “Big Society, a new model in which public-private partnerships,
charities and community groups would take over as the state pulled back which
we have here in England seen none of this what we have seen is more and more
taxes and fuel prices hitting over £1.42p per litre more home and job losses.

Critics derided the notion as too nebulous and touchy-feely;
in one poll, 63 per cent of respondents said they did not understand what Mr
Cameron was talking about. But it still sounded promising to Liverpool, which
volunteered to be one of four so-called vanguard members of the new program in
a desperate bid to help keep English jobs and homes.

That is, until a city already braced for cuts learned
exactly how much money Mr Cameron’s government planned to remove from its
budget over £147 million this year, far more than it had anticipated. Nor,
Liverpool claimed, had the government fulfilled promises to help reduce
bureaucracy and provide tax relief to the city’s charities.

Just as hastily as it had signed itself up to the Big
Society, Liverpool signed itself out.

“It seemed hypocritical to be standing up and saying, ‘Here
we are, a flagship for the Big Society,’ at the same time as we were having to
make cuts whose impact is going to have a devastating effect on our voluntary
sector,” Paul Brant, deputy leader of the Liverpool City Council, said in an
interview. Among the difficulties, he said, is that the British government
insists that the bulk of four years of cuts take place right away.

Sir Michael Black-Feather the English first minister said
that, Liverpool’s concerns are being echoed up and down England, as local British
governments face the consequences of the British central government’s
four-year, £131 billion cost-cutting program and wonder how it squares with the
goals of Mr Cameron’s Big Society he said and many in this government says I’m
delusional Hmmmm.

Sir Michael went on to say; Many English localities now
depend on the British central government for the bulk of their revenues which
is all English taxes anyway, but in Liverpool’s case, 80 per cent of the
total  and the British central government
is cutting those payments by an average of over 28 per cent.

So struggling to keep their essential services afloat,
places like Liverpool are cutting services like libraries, reading programs,
community swimming pools, and after-school activities for troubled teenagers,
homeless shelters, care for the disabled, help for the elderly, children’s centres
and the like. Many such programs are run as charities but are financed in part
through English public money, I have always said and will say it yet again
“charity begins at home, and home is England, not giving some countries hard
earned English taxes in the sums of over £235 million pounds when this money
could help our own people in our own country first.

.

Experts estimate that the voluntary sector stands to lose £5
billion to £8 billion in the next four years.

“Does one hand know what the other hand is doing?” Dame
Elisabeth Hoodless, who is retiring after 36 years as the executive director of
the umbrella group Community Service Volunteers, told The London Times last
month.

The speed and thoroughness of the changes are consistent with
Cameron’s tenure so far. In less than a year on the job, he has set in motion a
reorganization of the National Health Service; drastically overhauled the
welfare system; and begun aggressively promoting the notion that many
government services from schools to hospitals should be opened to the free market
utter madness.

But the Big Society is a madman mission.

Madman Cameron said; “This is my absolute passion,” he said
just recently. “I think it is a different way of governing, a different way of
going about trying to change our country for the better (But he didn’t say what
county?)(British-Britain or England), and it’s going to get every bit of my
passion and attention over the five years of this government.”

The argument has become angry, and deeply political. English
critics accuse the British coalition government of using the deficit as an
excuse to carry out an ideological paring-back of the state that if continued
may even lead to civil war as unrest in England stars to gain pace over the
obscene prices of petrol and diesel and the ever rising taxing and living cost
and with more and more cuts in English public services.  

“They’re using the current crisis to do what they’d want to
do anyway,” said Mr Brant, the Liverpool councilman.

The cuts, he said, are disproportionately affecting the poorer
parts of the country, the ones that depend more on British central government
money which, as it happens, mostly tend to be run by the opposition British Labour
Party.

Cameron says that the budget cuts he has outlined are based
on necessity, not philosophy. And he says the localities are making cuts
intended to embarrass the government. Instead of cancelling charity programs,
they should reduce their own “salaries, bureaucracies and allowances,” as he
said recently (Big words from a man in the pockets of arms dealer who’s pulling
in over £1million a year himself?).

“What we are seeing is politically motivated moves by Labour
councils,” he told Parliament on Feb. 9, speaking of Liverpool.

But Mr Brant said the council had already delivered efficiency
savings of more than £113 million in three years. These included cutting half
the council’s senior management posts. This year’s budget reduces aid to the
voluntary sector by nearly 50 per cent, to £31 million from £60 million.

“The reason we’re doing this is because we don’t have any
money,” Mr Brant said

To allay some of the anxiety and promote his project,
Cameron’s British government has set up a £161 million transition fund to help
midsize charities; opened a £322 million Big Society Bank, to which groups can
apply for loans at market rates; and pledged to train 5,000 community
organizers but gives over four times as much away in foreign aid taking the
bread out of English mouths.  

But none of this is much consolation to Ken Norman, a
trustee of Chipping Norton Lido Limited, far from Liverpool, who grew so
indignant that he posted on YouTube a video of himself complaining about the
Big Society.

Eight years or so ago, Mr Norman’s group took over the local
outdoor swimming pool, called a lido, when the government said it was too
expensive to run. Open five months a year, the pool costs £137,000 annually.
Volunteers do most of the work.

Just about the only money the lido gets from the government,
Mr Norman said in an interview, is a £2,400 annual tax break. This year, that
benefit was withdrawn. It is not much in the scheme of things, of course, until
you consider how many more donations the lido will have to solicit and how many
more cupcakes it will have to sell to raise money in a bad economy, when more
charities are competing for donors.

“I feel complete frustration at the fact that on the one
hand we’re being held up as an example of the Big Society in action, and that
at the other end of the scale, the local authority withdraws the only
smattering of support they give us,” Mr Norman said.

In Liverpool, the cuts are beginning to trickle down. The £147
million being cut this year comes from a budget of £2.25 billion, about £650
million of which Liverpool controls (the rest is earmarked for specific
programs).

Alan Lewis, chief executive of Liverpool Charity and
Voluntary Services, said his group was losing $1.74 million from its $2.6
million budget.

He said that a time of austerity was the worst time for the
state to start shedding its responsibilities. “It’s like you’re on a lifeboat
and someone has fallen into the water,” he said. “And you tell them: ‘You can
swim along, and while you’re there, why not build your own lifeboat?’ ”

The group, a clearinghouse and voice for Liverpool’s
voluntary sector, provides business support to charities, helping them solicit
money, deal with the government, lobby for financing, and the like. It has 59
employees; soon, it is likely to have 34 fewer. “They’re all on notice,” Mr
Lewis said. “I’m on notice.”

He added, “It’s going to be a long time before we’re as big
a society as we are now.”

It’s time the English people woke up to what life is really
like under British government?