When society’s safety net is shredded, the predators move in | Phil McDuff

In place of the 'big society' we were so fatuously promised, we have growing numbers of loan sharks and slumlords

It may be hard to believe, in the midst of a benefit sanctions regime that sees one in five universal credit applications turned down, and a "hostile environment" that directly led to the Windrush scandal, but most of the current Conservative government also stood at the 2010 general election with a campaign that centred on something called the "big society". The idea was that the state, massive and overblown as it apparently was after years of Labour profligacy, was taking up too much space in people's lives. Move the government out of the way and communities would step in to fill the gaps, giving it some of that old British blitz spirit, reinvigorating civil society along the way.

As with many Tory policies, this was based on the fantasies of people whose only interaction with the realities of the private rental market was checking the yields on their property portfolios. It's a philosophy that contains a toxic mix of soft-focus nostalgia for a time that never was, and quasi-religious moralising that sees poverty not as a scourge to be eradicated but a tool for disciplining society's undeserving into better behaviour.

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