Just three years ago I wrote about interesting thinking coming out of the Conservative party, but doubted whether it could be “turned into a coherent programme for government, & whether anybody can then articulate a central idea(l) to inspire the voters.”
Well as we are seeing, David Cameron is till finding it very difficult to get across what The Big Society means in practice.
Three years ago I was intrigued by the metaphor of society as a dry stone wall - dry that is as in without mortar, so not at all wet; a suitably Thatcherite ideal.
The dry stone walls in the Peak District certainly exhibit some of the virtues which the government wish to see co-opted in the Big Society – the use of purely local materials, respect for local customs, built with nothing more than hand tools & individual human ingenuity & craft. But they are not reliably solid & need constant care & maintenance, which is expensive in these days of high wages. And though they have their uses as boundary markers & herders of animals, they provide no shelter for humans.
Machu Picchu on the other hand is a masterpiece of design & organised labour for its construction on a large scale. Even so, its usefulness came to an end for reasons that are still not reliably understood, & it remained undiscovered by outsiders for hundreds of years.
Then of course there is the kind of dry stone barn of the more familiar conservative territory of the Cotswolds & Oxfordshire – not a type of building with which I am familiar. I have been having trouble getting any information about its method of construction, virtues & usefulness - not because Google does not produce plenty of results, but they are all for very desirable conversions for sale as very expensive homes - for bankers, no doubt.
