Bottom Feeders

Daveybloke's Cuddly Conservatives have had a wizard wheeze about voluntary organisations. Daveybloke has been reiterating his claim (or "belief", as the journalistic telepath hath it) that the Conservatives can believe there is such a thing as society for long enough to win the next election: "when it comes to social reform and the role of the state ... there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state". Now that there is so little left to privatise, social reform is not the business of government; it's the business of bottom-up people who are socially responsible, like private companies and the profiteering faction of the charitable sector.

Under the forthcoming Daveybloke administration, charities will be able to make "substantial" profits from running public services, and will "compete to provide services on an equal footing with private firms"; the playing field having first been levelled by the charities' becoming private firms in all but name. The public will also be stimulated to rectify its "flagging levels of donations", so that the Daveybloke administration can claw back a bit more funding for the tax cuts; and Daveybloke himself will "ask the public sector to give their staff time off to carry out voluntary work" for the profit of the newly-profitable charitable organisations, since, as we all know, public sector workers don't have enough to do and private sector workers are too valuable to waste.