Call to alms

IF David Cameron had a bushy moustache nestling on his upper lip, it would surely have bristled yesterday as he looked deep into the television camera and appealed to the British nation: “Your country needs you.”

When Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, stared out of a recruiting poster in 1914, two million men volunteered within two years. It is the most enduring and the most copied image of the First World War.

Will Mr Cameron’s version of it prove as effective in recruiting participants for his Big Society?

Wrapping up the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham yesterday, the Prime Minister tried to summon up the wartime spirit as, to mix metaphors and wars, he prepares to blitz public spending with cuts averaging 25 per cent per department.

“I know how anxious people are,” he said, staring Kitchener-like at the camera so that his eyes followed you around the room. “I wish there was another way. I wish there was an easier way.

“But I tell you: there is no other responsible way.”

Mr Cameron, the first Conservative Prime Minister of a coalition Government since Winston Churchill at the end of the Second World War, sought to show that he has an over-riding philosophy, called the “Big Society”, that will lead the nation through the cutbacks to a more prosperous future.

If nothing else, you have to admire him for sticking to his guns. The Big Society failed to enthuse voters during the General Election campaign, primarily because he was unable to convince that it would work in reality.

So he tried to explain again yesterday.

“The Big Society is not about creating cover for cuts,” he insisted. “It’s the spirit of activism, dynamism, people taking the initiative, working together to get things done.”

It was, he said, about “the spirit of social responsibility”, and he offered “more power for neighbourhoods to keep local pubs open, stop post offices from closing, to run local parks…”

As the state retreats, ordinary people take over.

Every time Mr Cameron talks about the Big Society, it gets bigger. Yesterday, it expanded to include the brave people who leave the security of a salary to start their own businesses – Mr Cameron referred to them as gogetting wealth-creators, others might regard them as recently-redundant public sector workers struggling to make ends meet.

Nevertheless, the Big Society gave Mr Cameron’s speech a backbone that Ed Miliband’s lacked the week before. It sought to give layers of meaning to the conference slogan “Together in the national interest”.

Indeed, the Conservatives’ big headlinegrabber of the week – the cut in child benefit for those earning more than £43,875 – was designed to show how we are all in this together with the richest suffering the first painful cut.

The principle of the rich paying their part is absolutely correct, but the cut has been proposed in such an obviously unfair way that Mr Cameron has come under heavy bombardment from all sides – including fierce friendly fire from right-wing newspapers.

Their most damaging accusation is that Mr Cameron has been out of touch in not realising the significance of the benefit to families.

He could sustain similar wounds over his determination to cling to his big idea.

Yesterday, the Big Society went further than just offering elected Police Commissioners to involve ordinary people in cutting crime. Mr Cameron raised the prospect of volunteers holding local bobbies to account with regular “neighbourhood beat meetings”.

No doubt these will be held in the community- saved pub with more volunteers behind the bar.

But again, Mr Cameron did not explain where all these volunteers, with time on their hands and enough money in the bank not to need to earn a wage, would come from to run a pub or to cut the grass in the park, nor where they would find the professional expertise to advise the police on the finer aspects of their crime reduction strategy.

Of course, it could be that Mr Cameron is not out of touch at all, merely ahead of his time. Tonight in Darlington, for instance, a public meeting is being held to discuss arts and leisure provision in the town once the cuts start to bite. This could be seen as the first stirrings of a Big Society, of people uniting to save what is precious to them.

‘WHEN we say ‘we are all in this together’ that is not a cry for help, but a call to arms,” said Mr Cameron, again invoking a wartime analogy.

“Society is not a spectator sport. This is your country... It’s time to step up and own it.”

Yesterday’s speech will not provide history with an enduring image of Britain in the autumn of 2010. Indeed, one wag on twitter suggested it would sink without trace like Lord Kitchener whose body was never recovered when the ship he was on was blown up by a German mine in 1916.

That is a little cruel, because this speech worked as piece of tub-thumping oratory that rallied the Tory troops ahead of the Comprehensive Spending Review on October 20 – the announcement that will provide the enduring image of the moment.

In it, Mr Cameron will make £82bn of cuts.

Given the bombardment he has received over a mere £1bn child benefit snip, it will be a major surprise if by then he isn’t wearing a tin hat – like the Tommies recruited by Kitchener.