‘Big Society’ con

With regard to the food banks, in June 2011 the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams alerted Christian organisations like the Trussell Trust (Scotsman, 7 November) to the dangers of the Big Society initiative to shrink the state and abrogate responsibility for some services to volunteer groups and charities, warning it might be a “stale slogan” and a euphemism for “an opportunistic cover for spending cuts”.

This much was apparent in Prime Minister David Cameron’s address to the Council of Christians and Jews at a reception in Downing Street in 2012, where he reaffirmed his Big Society idea “that there’s a huge space between government and the individual that can be filled by organisations, faith-based organisations perhaps in particular, that can deliver great public services, that can do great things in terms of tackling some of the problems of our time”.

There can be no greater witness to the problems of our time than food banks, a clear sign the poor are both increasing in number and being made poorer.

We shared Rowan Williams’ concern then as we do now, that while with food banks churches, mosques, secular charities and the donating public are delivering a valuable service, they are all being seen as convenient patsies by a Christian Westminster Gov- ernment as intent as ever on offloading the financial, social and moral responsibility for the poor on to volunteerism.

ALISTAIR MCBAY National Secular Society Atholl Crescent, Edinburgh