"The Future of the Third Sector" Conference is taking place at Cumberland Lodge between 15th-17th June 2011
I write this as a companion blog to that by Peter Alcock which is being posted on the Cumberland Lodge web-site alongside it. I heard two stories today which tell us something of the society we are living in. My first tale is of a Somali refugee who arrived in England a few months ago, almost certainly by boat and lorry. His ordeal in getting here may not occlude the fact that he came here illegally. Earlier this week he was released from a detention centre, having jumped the first hurdle of settling in this country, i.e. he was not sent back to strife-ridden Somalia where his life would have been in danger. He was given the princely sum of £50, but no advice on where to go next. He spent one night in a hostel at a cost of £30 and hoped that the balance of his ‘pay-off’ would allow him to stay there a second night. He literally has no idea of what will happen after that, without money, friends, the right to work or a place to sleep. Presumably he will slip in to some netherworld of illegal anonymity, perhaps for the rest of his life. He has in effect been abandoned by society.
My second tale concerns HOST UK, an organisation begun in 1987 by the British Council and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It provides opportunities for students, who are studying in Britain from other countries, to visit British homes. For nearly twenty-five years it has been the arena whereby many foreign students came to understand our country a bit better. I was a governor of HOST when it began and I am certain that some of the students we first welcomed are now in leading professional and commercial positions in their own countries, warm in their recollections of what they experienced in the U.K. and therefore no doubt inclined to help the British economy when they can place an order. Yet the Chief Executive of HOST, Soosela Alemayehu, tells me that in the last year HOST has lost all its British Council and all its FCO funding.‘We are struggling to survive.’
My two stories would link up if someone were to set up a HOST-like network to catch the Somali (and so many other) rejects in our society, a family network that would take in bewildered foreign nationals who have literally not a penny to their names and provide them with a bed and some human comfort until the state re-absorbed them. Dream on. The tabloid press would have a field day condemning the ‘do-gooders’ who ran such an initiative, and besides, there would be no hope of any government money to support the basic administration it would require. We are exhorted all the time to think Big Society. Professor Alcock reminds us in his blog that since his own organisation, the Third Sector Research Centre, began its work, ‘there has been a change of government, and hence changes in policy, not least the introduction of a new drive to promote the Big Society and to place third sector organisations at the centre of this’. This is well and good, but if at the same time the state is heartless in its attitude to those who have nothing and denies funding of any kind to small organisations that are trying to co-ordinate a better and more welcoming spirit in our community, how can the Big Society prosper? It seems as though the Big Society is that which lies outside government, not embraced by it, like a family from which the mother and father have departed. We are all exhorted to be part of the Big Society, providing we don’t expect it to include the government. The squire remains in his manor house while his tenants fight to exist. Big Society, or Diminished Society?
Alastair Niven
Principal
Cumberland Lodge
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