The Big Lunch is just a small Tea Party

In a fascinating piece in yesterdays Guardian ("A legend in its lunchtime" 17/7) Joe Moran threw cold water over the Big Lunch idea that street parties and sharing samosas will actually help us "rebuild communities" and somehow overcome the fragmentation caused by free market globalisation. On the contrary, David Cameron's Big Society (of which the Big Lunch notion is just a small course) is actually a cover for unleashing yet further privatisations and free market fragmentation.

Big Society is the Tories way of using "the community" (including voluntary and community organisations) to dismantle the welfare state. It achieves this directly by getting Third Sector organisations to join the private sector feeding frenzy as the NHS and public services are forced to sell themselves off to the lowest bidder. Almost as bad as this is how we in the third sector are simultaneously being used as a smoke screen to make it look like this is a cuddly and humane process rather than a selfish and destructive pillaging of the real social capital that we stand to lose - our welfare state.

The Big Society is nothing more than a rather polite (very English) version of the Tea Party that is sweeping the US. It starts from exactly the same basis Private = Good, Public = Bad. It believes that we can only be free if we are in competition with each other in a free market and therefore all regulation is inherently bad ("socialism"). Far from being a Big Society this is a recipe for an eventual war of all against all. A dreadful Hobbesian dystopia - and they would prefer it without even gun control. This kind of Big Lunch is so poisoned we should steer well clear of it in case its seductive nostalgia leads us ever closer to complete madness.

As for all those street parties and Big Lunches, the notion that a society in the middle of being blown apart by huge market forces can be put back together by "a bit of shared quiche and a few games of pavement Twister" is just a silly conjuring trick to amuse (bemuse) the revellers even further. Bread and circuses for the 21st Century.
The last word to Joe Moran:
"It is heartening to observe at close quarters all this feverish and largely thankless activity, most of it done by women, to hire ice-dream vans or hang homemade decorations from lampposts. And then on Sunday evening it will all have to be cleared away - leaving, perhaps a more convivial neighbourhood, but with no guarantees or firm evidence. There is something touching about so much time and effort being spent in search of the ephemeral and the intangible; a moment of togetherness which, like an incantation, hopes to become true by announcing itself"