Both organisations are members of OCS’s strategic partners scheme and as such are facing possible funding cuts.But as reported here on the Civil Society website, both claim that the merger is not being driven by cuts but by the genuine potential to combine skills and a strong existing base of partnership working  to create a stronger single body that can not only “support community organisations nationwide” but also “shape national and local policy”, according to DTA director, Steve Wylie.

In it Gosling analyses the potential risks the co-op and social enterprise movement faces in aligning itself with big public sector mutuals. He also recounts a fascinating snippet, David Davis overheard talking to an FT journalist:

“The corollary of the big society is the smaller state. If you talk about the small state, people think you’re Attila the Hun. If you talk about the big society, people think you’re Mother Teresa.” Mr Davis apparently referred to the Big Society as being the “Blairite dressing” to a cuts agenda…

Food for thought. Thank you Paul Gosling for ripping off the velvet glove to reveal the mailed fist.

Within hours of hearing this from one friend I had a phone call from another PCT worker looking for advice and support to investigate turning his sixteen-strong medicines management team into a social enterprise. Health managers are clearly looking not just to reposition themselves for when their jobs go – who wouldn’t? — but to capitalise on the intellectual property they have.

This interesting article in the GPs’ online mag PULSE makes it official. You may have to register to read it but it’s free and well worth it. “GP leaders,” the piece says, “have backed moves for existing PCTs to morph into social enterprise-style agencies that could potentially support several consortia as an alternative to the private sector.”

October 24th 2010 sees the third half-marathon to be run in Birmingham and Pete is taking part to raise money for BLC. Changes to the Legal Aid system mean that unless the Law Centre raises at least £100,000 by the end of this year – and more in subsequent years — it could cease to be able to help the 2,000 people a year who currently benefit from its expert legal advice, support and representation. Pete is ‘running for social justice’, aiming to raise £30,000 for the Centre and its services — and doing this the hard way.

BLC has a history that stretches back almost 100 years. It evolved from the Birmingham Citizens Society, founded in 1916, when the world was at war; it grew into Birmingham Money Advice & Grants, a project based at BVSC’s offices in Digbeth, and in 2000/01 became an independent law centre.

Many readers will share the values of BLC so please help by sponsoring Pete here. And if you want more info you can download a flyer about BLC’s ‘running for social justice’ fund-raiser here.

And don’t forget — you can also volunteer to run for BLC. I can’t obviously, because I’ve found that running in the  rain puts my roll-ups out, but I bet there’s lots of people out there who could.

Further to this post, a featured comment from Kevin Maton at SEWM drawing attention to a forthcoming roundtable discussion:

RAWM along with SEWM and WMEN is hosting a series of round table discussions on the implications of Big Society for the Third Sector. The meeting for Birmingham and Solihull is on 26th Aug at GOWM offices. Details from RAWM website. The attached articles in this post set context for debate very well.

If you can’t get business finance from the banks, then this is the event for you.  – Steve Walker, ART

Finditinbirmingham’s September networking breakfast focuses on business finance — and how to get it. Register now for this 2nd September event by going to the Finditinbirmingham website, here.

Representatives from Arrow Small Business Finance, ART, and investbx will all be on hand to explain how they can help with business lending for both conventional and social businesses. You can book a five minute one-to-one with any or all of these providers and get a pastry or bacon and egg breakfast into the bargain!

Make sure you don’t miss it by booking early.

And now the Cabinet Office has announced the first twelve ‘pathfinder’ projects (that name will be changed, I bet you!) which will test the spinning-off of public services as mutuals. (You can read Francis Maude’s article here.)

And who will be helping to advise these would-be mutuals? Admittedly, Sunderland Home Care and Baxi are due to be involved, but these seem outweighed by private sector corporates — KPMG, PriceWaterhouseCooper, John Lewis, and Tribal.

Am I the only one that sees key social enterprise and co-op bodies such as SEC and Co-operativesUK being marginalised in this? Or have they in fact painted themselves into a corner? Our key national membership organisations have little if any hands-on development capacity, and on the other hand have spent recent years investing heavily in ‘strategic voice’ functions to which it is increasingly evident no one in government has the slightest intention of listening any longer. Isn’t it time for a rethink — and fast, before those membership subs start to dry up…?

Here, Jonathan Freedland argues that Cameron and the coalition are the wrong bearers of the right message, and that those of progressive politics should resist rejecting the idea out of hand. There is a baby in that bathwater, he argues, to which we have at the very least a decent ‘claim of paternity’ as it reflects our values of co-operation, mutualism, self-help and self-organisation.

More  recently, Polly Toynbee here takes an opposing view. One of the lessons of post-communism, she argues, was to watch the tragic unfolding of social implosion once the communist regimes fell, largely because there was no heritage or tradition of voluntary and community action able to step in to the vacuum left by failed statism. An interesting view.

But she goes on to argue that that in the UK voluntary sector activity is made possible overwhelmingly by state financial support (currently in the form of contracts and the purchasing of services rather than grants, as of old) and that this expenditure too is being slashed, especially by public institutions looking for cheaper (and less confrontational) alternatives to making their own workers redundant. Hardly news to anyone familiar with the sector, but interesting to see this being argued in an informed way in the national press.

Of even greater significance, perhaps, is the news that the women’s equality organisation, The Fawcett Society, has launched a legal challenge to the budget on the grounds that the Treasury has broken the law by failing to carry out an equalities impact assessment which would have revealed — as the Fawcett Society’s research has shown — that the public spending cuts being pursued by government impact disproportionately on women. You can read coverage of the case here in the Guardian and here on the BBC news website.

Women in low paid and part-time public sector employment are more likely than men to be hit by wage freezes and job cuts because they are in the majority in these kinds of jobs. Cuts in benefits and tax credits will also hit women harder than men. The Fawcett Society’s initial analysis of the proposed budget cuts indicated that almost three-quarters of the cuts would be met from women’s incomes. You can read their coverage here.

The significance of all this is that it has huge implications for how civil society organisations choose to align themselves with big society ideas. To put it bluntly, there will be many currently trying to work out how to capitalise on the good parts of the big society agenda while minimising the potential for reputational risk with the wider public.

Well done, Enta.