Little Man, What Now?

Kindness to children of the wog persuasion (or do the Afghans count as fuzzy-wuzzies? I'm always mixing up my uncivilised tribes) is by no means the only thing Daveybloke's Cuddly Coalition has learned from New Labour. Daveybloke's Cuddly Chancellor has had a bit of a wheeze about holding a Big Conversation too, so that all the little chaps in the Big Society can tell their Head Boys just exactly where they want their Big Government dispensed with. Government departments will be brought before the Beaks and ordered to justify their spending decisions against such priorities as whether their activity is essential to meet the Government's priority of not having any more government, and whether the activity can be carried out more cheaply by sacking a few more proles, and whether the activity is one of that select but still not sufficiently exclusive set which have yet to be privatised or handed over to the God squad. "We do need to look to Canada, and their experiences in the 1990s when they too faced a massive budget deficit", Daveybloke's Cuddly Chancellor told the Commons, in a refreshing variation on New Labour's obsession with emulating North America. "They engaged the public in the choices that had to be made and they took the whole country with them", except presumably the people who didn't count. Daveybloke's Cuddly Chancellor also intends to solicit ideas from "the private sector, charities and the public", doubtless in that order, concerning which functions currently carried out by the government could be better performed by other bodies. Naturally, nobody is going to be asked for their ideas about which functions could do with heading in the other direction. If your transport system has been privatised from under you and your children's school wants to teach creationism and rehabilitate the slave trade, or even if you just think it would be nice if the Government could refrain from laundering your tax money for rich crooks under the rubrics of law and order, preserving front-line NHS services and kindness to children of the fuzzy-wuzzy persuasion, you will probably have to try a bit harder before you can claim the privilege of being counted as part of the whole country.