The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams addresses the Charities Parliament, London, 23 July 2010. The launch of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society initiative this week may prove to be a “watershed” for British politics and the nation, the Archbishop of Canterbury said last night.
Dr Rowan Williams gave two cheers to the initiative for taking local level concerns seriously and seeking to build the Big Society around existing community relationships.
“The Big Society recognises that good society is not simply one with lots of convincing and impressive rules and programmes but a society where people feel confident that they all have something to give, that it will be received and that they will be able to receive from one another in the ‘gift exchange’,” he said.
The Big Society, launched on Monday, aims to get more people involved in making their communities a better place by volunteering their time and money to keep services afloat and starting new initiatives to improve the quality of life for all.
He said the starting point for the church’s response to the Big Society had to be an understanding of the inter-dependency of individuals and communities, and the notion that “it is everyone’s deprivation if one part of the body suffers”.
The additional half cheer, he said, was because it was too early to tell whether the Big Society was a “hand-washing or buck-passing exercise” made necessary by cuts in public funding.
He went on to say that an investment in people would be necessary if the Big Society was to work. Rather than pouring more money into statutory education, he said there was a need for “lateral thinking” about what educates within communities and how certain qualities like fairness, courage and social responsibility can be fostered and nourished in individuals.
“Some of the planning and envisioning for a big society is going to be trying to create the conditions that nourish certain kinds of people,” the Archbishop said.
“At the heart of it all is the conviction that for a society to change, people need to change.
“Society will change not by lots of individuals becoming nicer but by people recognising more and more deeply how much they depend on each other and how much they are impoverished by the poverty of their neighbour.
