The Youth Justice Board (YJB), under recent threat of abolition, was saved like the NHS and the benefits system before it, by the politically appointed of the Lords and the self-appointed of the commentariat. But, putting that to one side, the threat has brought to the surface an ongoing conflict in youth offending circles: should they be concerned most with criminal justice or with the ‘rights’ and welfare of children?

Rod Morgan, a former chairman of the YJB, has expressed his hopes that the reprieve will embolden it in its ‘progressive’ mission. But what does this mean? Particularly now, after the riots. Is it true that the fundamental problem facing society today is a lack of concern for the ‘rights’ of children and a neglect of their welfare? We are surrounded by such concerns. And yet, while critics are right to condemn the knee-jerk incarceration of young rioters – apparently increasing the already shockingly high number of children in detention by 8% – this has less to do with hostility to children’s welfare than with an absence of adult authority.

Regardless of whether or not we are in breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – the legitimacy of which should be in question – what is of greater concern is the lashing out by a society, and its institutions, as they lose their grip on the morals and the behaviour of the young. Mark Johnson, a ‘rehabilitated offender and former drug user’ now heading up the charity User Voice, argues ‘there is no other way to access the lives and minds of the marginalised than by utilising the skills of those who have been there too’. Similarly, an advocate of ex-offenders going into schools says: ‘The corridors are intellectually bankrupt on this issue but the cells have more than enough wisdom to confront it’.

While I’m no fan of the punitive and regard myself as a progressive, is it really the case that the youth justice system and society at large have so lost faith in their ability to hold the line, that only ex-cons have any authority over young people these days? What’s progressive about that?

Why is it that those who worry most about racism today and call for greater tolerance, exhibit an intolerance to outsiders not seen since, well, the time when society really did have a problem with racism?

According to Hugh Muir at The Guardian, from female genital mutilators to the alleged hate crimes of Luis Suarez, there are some people that ‘shouldn’t progress further than the tarmac at Gatwick’. This is not to say that there are no longer racist crimes or that we don’t still have a problem with institutional racism. If by that we mean an institutionalised practice, particularly in the police force, of targeting certain sections of the community. I am not referring to the ‘canteen culture’ version of institutional racism here, invented by the Macpherson Inquiry, and subsequently used to (ironically enough) police the thoughts and speech of the rest of us.

In an instructive short film Muir interviews some of the key players in the Inquiry. According to the Lawrence’s family lawyer Imran Khan: ‘It made race mainstream’. And yet even he acknowledges that while the language has changed – as people mind their PC Ps and Qs – racism is still there, just ‘slightly more secret’. The Macphersonisation of the race issue has been disastrous, both for black people and for society as a whole. It has racialised social discourse at a time when racism itself has been in decline as a social force; and encouraged a censorious climate around an official anti-racism that only gets more hysterical.

The Inquiry brought an end to the double jeopardy rule – an important and long-standing legal safeguard against police harassment (not least of black people) – on the pretext of giving the police the opportunity of getting it right the second time around; and played an important role in the creation of hate crime laws – criminalising what people say or even think, as opposed to what they do. We’re so used to being told that it’s everywhere, and that its ‘unwittingly’ in all of us that we can’t see racism for what it is anymore. Peter Preston, a former editor of The Guardian, recalls in a recent column the Walworth, South London, of the 1970s:

The only black people you tended to see were young men in old cars having their boots stopped and searched by the white, Carter Street Old Bill.

The persistence of this old-style institutional racism is confirmed by a recent study – again, conducted by The Guardian. It finds that of those found guilty of driving offences: black people are 44% more likely to serve a custodial sentence; 38% more likely with regards public order offences or possession of a weapon, and 27% more likely to go to prison for drugs possession. As Preston says,

Everything changes, except stop and search, down the Walworth Road.

There were record seizures of class A drugs into the UK last year. According to the National Treatment Agency, there are 10,000 fewer addicts seeking treatment than there were two years previously. But the fact that border officials found 2,116kg of cocaine and 773kg of heroin between April and September is hardly in itself cause for celebration. On the contrary, the evident and continued – if not increasing – demand for these drugs points both to the depths of the drug problem and to the futility of its criminalisation. Reportedly, the UK spends more, proportionally, on drug prevention than any other country in Europe. The sentences for those supplying drugs are as stiff as they come.

And yet there were estimated to be around 3 million users of illicit drugs in 2009/10. The authors of a piece in the Guardian‘s Comment is Free rightly point out that the criminalisation of drugs is long and widely acknowledged to have failed, and that it is time to try a different approach. They go on to argue that we should look to The Science. But the likes of David Nutt, the government’s former drugs adviser – sacked precisely because he thought the experts were better placed to make policy decisions than our elected representatives – are tripping on the news that magic mushrooms might heighten wellbeing for depressives. They are not, it would seem, best placed to make a principled case against the use and abuse of drugs.

According to Nutt’s fellow academics at Imperial College London, test subjects described a ‘loss of connectivity’ and a state of consciousness that is ‘less constrained by inputs from the outside world’. Whatever the merits of the research and the benefits this particular drug might hold out for those suffering from clinical depression; the subjects may, inadvertently, have stumbled upon the problem with drugs, and the problem with the arguments for decriminalisation made by its more spaced-out advocates.

A disconnect from the wider world is not just an emergent property of hallucinogenic drugs; it is also an argument against their use. Similarly, those who hide behind The Science to defend the decriminalisation of drugs, also tend to exhibit a studied withdrawal from any wider political or moral debate. Which is precisely the opposite of what is required. It is only by engaging in an open public debate about the rights and wrongs of the matter that we are likely to get beyond a policy that – I think we can all agree – doesn’t work.

For that reason the fact that Richard Branson, (albeit the archetypal hippy entrepreneur) has appeared at a House of Commons home affairs committee inquiry in an effort to make the case, is a good thing. As are new sentencing guidelines recommending much greater leniency for recreational users. The guidelines also, rightly, recognise that so-called drug ‘mules’ are often impoverished middlemen rather than the sinister types we imagine. However, we are told that it is the poor women that we should feel sorry for. They have fallen victim to and been exploited by the dealers and gangs, according to the kindly judiciary.

Campaigners need better arguments than this if they are to go beyond the patronising view that those caught up in the drugs trade are helpless and pathetic; or to get beyond dopey assertions about the supposed health benefits of getting high. The seeming libertarianism of many advocates for the liberalisation of drug policy is largely illusory. I’d much rather hear a good life-affirming defence of the criminalisation of drugs, than be fed the victim-centred therapeutics cooked up on a spoon by campaigners for its decriminalisation. The sooner they put down their spliffs and re-engage with the world around them the better.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,900 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

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Over the festive season, as I fattened myself on its culinary indulgences, I also tucked into two fascinating and agreeably slim publications. While I would differ with the authors of each, they were good pointers, respectively, to understanding the welfare state past and present, and to how we might rethink the politics of community. Michael Ward’s Beatrice Webb: her quest for a fairer society and Kevin Harris’s Picnic: order, ambiguity and community had much to offer those of us interested in escaping the ghosts of the past, and to begin to argue for a new relationship between state and society in 2012.

Ward is not just interested in telling us about the author of the Minority Report to the Poor Law Commission – the document widely regarded as the blueprint for today’s welfare state. He also, by reviewing what she and its architects set out to do, helpfully outlines its defining features and points to some of its related ongoing problems, too. While he is clearly an admirer of Webb’s and a defender of the welfare state, his contribution to the debate suggests that welfare reform might not be nearly enough. He begins with what he describes as the seven core elements of the welfare state: the contributory or insurance-based benefits such as pensions, sickness and unemployment benefit; and a commitment to full employment, a commitment which was ‘at the heart’ of the welfare state, and upon which the system of benefits would depend. But it wasn’t long before money was being ‘doled’ out rather than being earned through insurance-based contributions.

Indeed, it was the removal of this commitment, the continuation of universal, non-contributory benefits such as child benefit, and the ever-increasing burden of non-contributory, discretionary means-tested benefits in the depressed inter-war years, and today, that put an end to the welfare model as originally conceived. The ‘top ups’ to pensions, family allowances, etc have become its mainstay, and continue to bring into question the future of the welfare state not just as it is currently constituted, but in its very foundations. The provision of comprehensive education and health services free at the point of access, and of social care for children, older people, and people with disabilities or mental health needs, seem continually beset by scandals over standards. With the possible exception of Ward’s final element, the free provision of a number of goods and services according to need e.g. school meals for children, and free prescriptions, public travel and winter fuel payments for the over 60s, the only point of agreement today is that things need to change.

But until about a quarter of a century ago there was a broad welfare consensus, that would perhaps surprise us today. Welfare’s champions included Winston Churchill. He was responsible for the establishment of labour exchanges, forerunners of today’s Job Centre Plus. This Tory hero (though a Liberal minister at the time) declared, sounding more like a state socialist, that ‘the State should increasingly assume the position of the reserve employer of labour’. Indeed, he and fellow-minister Lloyd George, competed to claim responsibility for the national insurance model. To add to the confusion, Webb was a social conservative, supportive of child benefits so long as the mother ‘devote herself to the care of her children, without seeking industrial employment’. But there were differences too. Webb was opposed to the shift from trades union-based insurance, while, ironically, the labour movement were supportive. Says Ward, Webb ‘did not want to see the state in competition with unions for the money of the workers’. But it wasn’t just this. The ‘moralist in Beatrice’ also baulked at the unconditionality, the lack of an incentive to work, that she felt this would imply. Nevertheless, the principle of ‘less eligibility’ lived on.

Originally aimed at those who might think the workhouses an attractive proposition, it continues to deter the work-shy and the migrant from those allegedly generous benefits. Webb and her fellow founding Fabians were not radicals of course, ‘their links were with the Liberal imperialists, or Limps’, says Ward. They ‘had no prejudice against our views of social reform’ remarked Webb in her diary. Moral imperialism knows no bounds, after all, as today’s Limps amply demonstrate. Indeed, for Kevin Harris, even the humble picnic was once a pastime with imperial overtones.

Community is presented as the ‘endangered panda of our social impulse’, he argues. Not only by those who take fright at its prospects, but also in the ‘living-memory images peddled by the nostalgia industry’. ‘Our politicians and journalists invite us to do penance’ says Harris, ‘before the curling monochrome prints of streets where doors were always left open and everyone knew everyone else’. In reality, there was somewhat less of a social consensus when compared with the welfare one reached by the political class.

Harris’s rather unseasonal interest in the picnic is as metaphor for community. He is not interested though, in the uses and abuses to which picnic as vehicle is put. Indeed the tourism-led contrivances and politically prescribed spectacles of community, rightly come in for some criticism too. ‘Picnic is an exercise in portable sociability’ he says. Here, community is ‘in the gathering, it is not apparent until people mingle and spread the rug’. His is more than another contribution to the crowded literature on community development, it is too critical for that. Indeed, in its few short pages this delightful little object of a book, featuring illustrations by Gemma Orton, ventures into a history of the picnic, taking in Wordsworth and street parties along the way. While this makes his account all the richer, it is also where I begin to differ with Harris.

For one, he doesn’t seem to much like the Victorians, not least for not mucking in (that was for the servants) or entering into the spirit of things. I can’t help but like the Victorian appetite for ‘order’ and their sense of occasion, even if they were a little uptight for contemporary sensibilities. Harris is rather fonder of ambiguity. Also, despite his description of the increasing numbers of people newly able to transport themselves (by train, then by car) to the countryside, in the pursuit of picnicking pleasures, he isn’t entirely taken with what it meant to picnic when the nation was living off the spoils of Empire. The humble picnic became ‘a way of partaking in and asserting this extraordinary sense of dominance over the planet’ , he argues. In this sentence Harris collapses a distaste not only for colonial conquest, but of mastery of nature too.

His enjoyable musings on picknicking nevertheless leave the reader with some questions to answer. Is community as ‘contributory picnic’ really enough? While, like a picnic, it does ‘entail a little trouble and enterprise’, that we ‘invest something of ourselves and allow others to have a claim on the common result’ implies something more substantial and longstanding is at stake. The grass is already beginning to spring back’, says Harris, of the fleeting sense of community that picnicking necessarily entails when everybody goes there separate ways. But why celebrate the ephemerality of picnicking? Community, surely, needs to have more staying power?

While I share Harris’s optimism for the future of community, and am struck in Ward’s account by the comparative confidence and ambition of yesteryears political classes; I hope in 2012 that the grass doesn’t spring back, and that communities are able to break free of their dependency on the welfare state, and to start building themselves anew.

Communities took quite a hammering in 2011. There were the riots, of course, in which the opportunism of the apologists for them among the commentariat was more than a match for the rioters themselves. Instead of an honest appraisal of what went on, there were shameless projections of prejudices onto those actually quite unprecedented events. I even found myself in the unusual situation of agreeing with Theresa May when she said the rioters ‘weren’t trying to make any political or social statement; they were thieving, pure and simple’. But even before the riots, those self-same commentators had been anticipating the damage to come from economic crisis and the government’s austere response to it. From rough sleeping, to wife-beating and rioting, no doubt, communities would begin to descend into all manner of deprivation and depravity, we were told. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation warned early in the year that ‘fortunes may nosedive’ for the poorest as community-builders lost their foothold (not to mention their livelihoods).

More recently, as the well and truly hammered were being picked up by the seasonal booze bus, the emptying out of the high street (of shoppers at least) met with dire warnings. Mary Portas, author of a government-commissioned report on the subject, talked of how they would ‘give a sense of belonging and trust to a community’ if only they could be revived. As if to confirm that all may not be lost, the organisers of Britain in Bloom (the UK’s largest voluntary campaign), reported that their tens of thousands of amateur gardeners still ‘built strong communities’. Nevertheless, the government’s flagship Big Society seems to have sunk without trace, living on only in a tiresome spat about cuts to public services and the voluntary sector; and in ongoing complaints, most recently by the public administration select committee (does anyone actually know what that is?) Without a Big Society minister, the select committee concluded, how could they (or we?) build a Big Society?

In its absence, Baroness Hanham rather pinned her hopes on the Localism Bill currently passing through the House of Lords. She thought it might help bring an end to a public sector culture that has ‘fostered dependency, with top-down targets, smothering bureaucracy and heavy-handed guidance’. But I continued to wonder whether localism – a creed that ‘attracts support across the political divide’ according to Hanham – was ever really going to make a difference. The consensus that localism is a good thing had done nothing to rebuild communities to date, and there was little reason to believe that more of the same would do any better. Having said that, I welcomed the deputy prime minister’s ‘very serious offer of more economic freedom and more political freedom’ to the nation’s core cities. There is a world of difference between advocating better local democracy and greater autonomy for cities and resorting to the petty parochialism that only tends toward a dismembering of the body politic.

Our communities, after all, are not blighted by distant political structures, redundant community-builders or deserted high streets, anymore than they were brought to ruin by the seasonally inebriated, horticulturally indifferent or riotously uncivil. They continue to stumble along despite community-worriers’ diminished view of their members as dependent, incapable of running their own lives and finding their own solutions to their problems. Perhaps instead of hammering communities into submission, we might be best to leave them to build themselves in 2012?

Yesterday evening, I attended a debate at the Palace of Westminster, organised by Family Law in Partnership and Researching Reform. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting to find much to agree with. Supporting families after the riots and the role of family law would, surely, just be another opportunity to blame the apparently 120,000 ‘problem families’ for the

So I was pleasantly surprised to hear Elaine Halligan, Director of the Parent Practice, argue that there is too much ‘parent bashing’ these days. We need to get beyond the ‘blame culture’ she said . Many of those young people rioted ‘despite rather than because of their upbringing’. Sadly, and rather incongruously, what at first sounded like a defence of parents turned into its opposite. There is a ‘crisis in parenting’, said Halligan, and we ‘need to help parents become good role models’. They need a ‘comprehensive package of support’. All of them. Sue Atkins, the BBC’s parenting expert, agreed. It is not just poor parents who are, well, poor parents. Parent classes are spoken of as if they are ‘akin to therapy’, she argued, when really they’re just about ‘coaching’ parents.

So they’re all pretty clueless. Atkins didn’t say as much but she may as well have done. Why else would she want to challenge the ‘taboo’ against parenting classes? If only they were taboo, I thought to myself, it would be a sign that parent’s retain at least a modicum of self-respect. And I wouldn’t have to sit through this depressingly familiar mantra. Tis a strange taboo that can be uttered so freely ad infinitum and provoke such consensus. So there were lots of nodding heads on the panel, and around the room, about the importance of instilling confidence in parents so that they can be more effective role models for their children. There was no end of agreement that yet more parenting interventions are definitely the way to go, but this must be ‘free from finger-pointing’ of course.

The idea that parents need to be counselled or coached in their relationship with their children is an insult. As I tried to argue, being a parent is a relationship not a practice or technique to be learned from so-called experts. To the extent that parenting had anything to do with the riots, it is the parenting industry not parents who we should be pointing our fingers at. Parenting classes don’t build the esteem of parents or make them any better at rearing their children. Quite the opposite. These sorts of interventions can only undermine parents confidence in themselves, and their children’s confidence in them. There isn’t a stigma about parenting classes, but there bloody well should be. I didn’t say that last sentence. I was trying not to get any more worked up than I already was. I tripped over my words as I struggled to know what to say. I didn’t know who to be more angry at: District Judge Nicholas Crichton, who wondered out loud ‘why did the almighty make the feckless the most fertile’? Or his fellow panellists who must have thought this an outrageous thing to say. They’re all feckless, aren’t they?

The charity sector has lost its way and seems to have given up on its founding notions. We are seeing a rather unseemly scramble for funding as charities seek to retain what they can of their state hand-outs while public services are cut. Or fundraisers, particularly those pesky chuggers, seemingly unacquainted with the causes for which they are apparently campaigning. Volunteers are expected to be as interested in their own employability as they are in helping other people. And the sector is apparently more interested in contracts and compacts than campaigns and causes.

I don’t think we should blame the cuts or the “big society”, as many in the sector do, for the problems charities face. The whole point of the big society – and the reason why I welcomed it at first – was that it proclaimed itself to be against an overbearing big state. We were told it was for the idea that people are able to do things for themselves, and to run their own lives without being “supported” all the time. But it seems that the charity sector doesn’t see the big society in quite the same way, and the inference that it would not play the starring role in the coalition’s big idea really rankled.

“We are the big society”, it screamed. But is this true? At the same time that the sector has been claiming to represent us – to be the 99% (to borrow a phrase) – it has also boasted of its special relationship with the state. There is little pretence from sector leaders that it has any real independence, or indeed that this should be a problem. This “dual role” as both campaigner and service provider is described as a positive boon, allowing it influence that it wouldn’t otherwise have. But it also means that charities don’t stand for anything much anymore. The sector has no identity of its own, straddling both state and society. And so the promise of the big society, already held back by the prejudices of a parochial political culture, has become just another argument about funding, rooted in the charity sector’s historical sense of entitlement.

To the extent that charities have increasingly focused on providing services rather than campaigning, no matter how good a job they do they are no longer charities in any meaningful sense. The Shelters, NSPCCs and RSPCAs of the charity world bear little resemblance to their former selves. They struggle with their dual identity as very sizeable public servants, on the one hand, and rather compromised campaigners, on the other. Is it any wonder that public trust in charities is reportedly “second only in volatility to its trust in banks“? Nobody knows what they’re for any more. By shifting the focus of their work from tackling a social problem to managing their relationship with state bodies, they neglect what it is that gave them their reason for being in the first place.

My experience working with local government and the charity sector in one of the areas most affected by the August riots has been instructive. People have been coming forward, wanting to do something. The authorities have been going on about how uninterested and disengaged people are, and yet when they have come knocking on the door, are at a loss as to what to do with them. This has been interpreted by charity leaders as a problem created by the cuts – about not having the resources, and in particular the volunteer managers – to respond to this unexpected outpouring of community spirit. But I’m not so sure. I think it is their disjoint from the communities they claim to represent and serve that gets in the way of capturing that spirit.

The authorities – and I include the charity sector here – were taken aback that communities were rather more capable of building themselves than they’d imagined. That much-sought-after “sense of community” did what big society advocates and critics alike said it couldn’t – it emerged of its own accord. The clean-ups were organised overnight on Facebook and Twitter by impromptu “pop-up” community groups. Volunteers got their brooms out before the smoke – both metaphorical and real – had settled, and then went their separate ways. Some wondered whether we were finally seeing the big society in action, but not in a good way.

One way or another, the big society is doomed. The charity sector doesn’t have the resources to deliver it. We ordinary folk are not to be trusted with it. And, as some have noted, Cameron and his government have been talking a lot less about it anyway, as it has increasingly been seen as a byword for the cuts. This is a shame, not only because the big society preceded the cuts, but because its prospects should never have hinged on the cuts in the first place. It should have been a project for freeing up society, and creating a new culture of self-reliance, not a programme for government and its friends in the extended state sector to argue over. And yet, despite a sector seemingly intent on digging its own grave, we might try to breathe new life into the idea of charity. One more suited to today. And we might still resurrect some of the more appealing aspects of the big society, whatever we decide to call it. Maybe that way, rather than it being a clean-up for the charity sector, we can claim it for ourselves.

This is an edited version of a speech I gave at this weekend’s Leeds Summat

Despite what Ed Miliband thinks, August’s riots were not the poor equivalent of what Cameron and Boris Johnson got up to at the Bullingdon Club. Cameron has struggled to live up to the old Tory image.

Though he has made much of a ‘slow-motion moral collapse’, a ‘broken society’ and how some people just aren’t taking responsibility, in the absence of a compelling moral case of its own the government has fallen back on behavioural pseudo-science. The sort of interventions into our behaviours and lifestyles, into our communities and the way we raise our children; that further extend the role of the state in people’s lives, exacerbating the problem of dependency that is so demoralising for those on the receiving end. And, in my view, that created the conditions for the riots in the first place.

The post-riots policy review is all about revising ‘the signals that government sends about the kind of behaviours that are encouraged and rewarded’. But who is to blame? The former government’s ‘Respect Tsar’, Louise Casey, is now effectively the Riots Tsar, with a brief that covers ‘problem families, school truancy, antisocial behaviour and gangs’. She is to produce the obligatory Action Plan this month, hopefully explaining what all of this has to do with the riots. Perhaps the review of so-called ‘gang culture’ by Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith, or Nick Clegg’s panel on the riots, will find the culprit. Maybe its those 120,000 apparently ‘troubled families’, or the 100,000 children identified as ‘falling through the cracks’ and destined for Clegg’s summer schools?

Julia Unwin at Joseph Rowntree Foundation argues that while it might be tempting to blame ‘poverty, bad housing, poor life chances or weak parenting’, the ‘overwhelming majority of people living in poverty had nothing to do with these events’. While Unwin nevertheless ends up citing the usual suspects of the recession, alienation, a lack of social mobility and the evils of what it brings should you be so lucky, it is indeed apparent that there was something else going on in August (a something that will no doubt remain under the surface for some time to come). It wasn’t gangs or social media either. The former were shown to have played an insignificant part in the violence, and a quarter of rioters were ‘unknown to the police‘ – and Facebook and Twitter were used as much to organise the ‘clean-ups’ as they were to network the looting.

Patrick Vernon of Afiya Trust plays the race card. He claims that black communities were depicted during the riots as ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ in a kind of ‘retro racism’. This is about as off-beam and misjudged as David Starkey’s infamous comments on Newsnight. Starkey’s argument that the riots demonstrated that ‘the whites have become black’ was a little blunt to say the least. But the important point is that, like Vernon, he was not especially insightful. The censorious reaction to what he said – and the same goes for the overblown response to those recent comments made bySepp Blatter - demonstrates that while race had little (if any) part to play in the riots, all it took for the intolerant advocates of toleration to go on the offensive, was the mere hint of provocation.

This makes Vernon’s call for a ‘non-judgmental perspective in understanding and exploring the causes and potential consequences of the riots’ rather ironic. Especially as he goes on to pre-judge the work of the panel by trying to establish the causes of the riots with a shopping list of ‘big issues’ of which race relations is one. And yet, as well as a corrosive culture of dependency, it seems to me that also behind the riots, and the reason why the panel will ultimately fail, is a culture of non-judgmentalism when it comes to the truly big issues. While right-thinking types are all too keen to strangle debate in the name of equality or protecting the vulnerable, there is an almost palpable reluctance to talk about morality, authority, and notions of right and wrong. All of which no doubt makes me sound very right-wing but it shouldn’t.

Even if you remain unconvinced, and you think the rioters had some genuine grievance rooted in material disadvantage, may I refer you to the wiser of the ex-Oasis brothers, Noel Gallagher. He got the riots right when so many commentators got it so very wrong. Also speaking on Newsnight, but making more sense than Starkey or anybody else for that matter, he said: “it’s hardly the French Revolution was it … it wasn’t politically motivated, it wasn’t particularly against anything … it was all for tellies and all that”. “There’s many reasons for those riots” he acknowledged “but there is no excuse”. I think we should take Noel’s advice and stop making excuses.

According to the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector, ‘independence – of purpose, voice and action – is what makes the voluntary sector special’. Sounds fair enough, but why the need for a panel? Is something amiss that makes such pronouncements necessary? Apparently so. Labour MP Lisa Nandy has accused her party’s former government of treating the voluntary sector as a ‘third arm of the state’. There is, no doubt, an element of seeking to co-opt charities to top-down agendas, but there has been little to suggest dastardly take-over plans. While congratulating itself on creating the self-evidently absurd Office of the Third Sector, the party’s policy review group admits to a ‘lack of overall narrative in Labour’s approach to the sector’.

The charity sector has hardly been dragged kicking and screaming down Whitehall. Like the political parties, charities are increasingly uncertain about their role in society. They also have in common, in the absence of a wider base of support, an obsession with wealthy donors. Far from resisting the advances of officialdom it has ‘taken on the role of the state and taken government funding’ into the bargain, says Nandy. Richard Hawkes, chief executive of Scope, seems to agree. He claims that some charities ‘tend to regard success as getting a place on a government committee’. It isn’t hard to imagine why this courtship makes sense from the perspective of a political class not usually associated with do-gooding. According to Nandy, ‘government loves charities because of that legitimacy’.

But, she cautions (and a little too late I fear), ‘charities must think carefully before they give it away’. The National Survey of Charities and Social Enterprises reports a third of respondents describing themselves as service providers compared with one in five two years ago. Nearly a quarter regard this – not campaigning for social justice or the good cause – as their main function. The Big Society, while profoundly irritating for many in the sector, was the culmination of an ever more intimate relationship between state and the so-called civil-society sector. Consequently, far from making us more free, it has only further ingrained a long-standing relationship of dependence. This relationship is only exposed by the severity of the cuts to the public sector, particularly as local authorities close ostensibly ‘public’ services.

A recent report concludes that today’s ‘charities struggle to measure their impact’. But too often this is understood in the narrow managerial terms laid out by local authorities, of specifying the contribution of this or that intervention to the achievement of this or that outcome. Why should voluntary organisations reduce themselves to this, and account for themselves in this way? The adoption of this rather forced and technical language to try to articulate the contribution of charities to the public good, only confirms that the sector is morally as well as financially bankrupt. It lost its independence long ago. Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Association for Voluntary Organisations, argued after the riotsthat we should be ‘giving them direction and showing them far better alternatives’. He was talking about the rioters but he might just as easily have been talking about the organisations he represents.

This stumbling around for something, anything, around which to articulate what charities are for suggests that the game is up. I wish they would just stand on their own two feet, but they don’t even know who or what they stand for anymore. If you ask me, the charity sector and political class are propping each other up like a couple of down-and-outs. And who’s going to help them?