5-6% of the Government’s MPs -> clearly enough of a sample to extrapolate generalisations about the whole of the Government. No attempt to contact Labour MPs, then. Doesn’t that just confirm Labour think the state knows better than the British people?

Have had my attention drawn to this site before. Any idea who these guys are? No info about them on the site, that I can find. Random citizens?

I’d be very interested to see a proper scrape of this information off all MPs’ websites (where any voluntary work really ought to be, if they have half-competent web people).

Tories told us there is no such thing as society, so the idea that they are now saying there is a big society just shows they are a bunch of liars.

Whois Neil Dunnett and what is his game:

http://www.maryreid.org.uk/blog/?q=node/210

Surely a band of volunteers can’t just do it on their own? Don’t they need someone to coordinate things? To ensure safety of all including the recipients of the volunteers’ good deeds? CRB checks? Training? Recruitment?

So they do actually need paid staff, don’t they? My partner works for a charity but came across someone who stated he wouldn’t be giving any money to that particular charity because it would end up ‘in the pockets of people like you’! (people like us living in social housing not a mansion) So, instead he’d give £50 (yeah, right!) to a group of children and say ‘here you are kids, enjoy!’.

So who’s going to pay for these paid employees? A friend who works for a voluntary body (mostly volunteers) is losing her funding and therefore won’t be able to run the organisation. The volunteers won’t be able to run themselves so the whole thing will be disbanded and there’ll be people needing help and not getting it. Ah well. Good idea, this Big Society, innit?

This reminds me of one of those brilliant moments when a politician is being interviewed. Francis Maude (IIRC) was being interviewed on PM on Radio 4 when the presenter asked him what volunteering he did. He was stumped! After considerable flanneling he decided that he did a lot for the church. Brilliant!

I hadn’t seen Mary Reid’s post. She makes a number of good points, the chief one being, would MPs be doing their day job properly if they did any substantial amount of volunteering as well?

Wonder if the owners of the site would care to respond?

Above what Alix and Mary say above and in the linked post, the wording of the sent email I saw was very passive aggressive. Combine that with absolutely no details about who’s running it, and I’d be very surprised if MPs who are normally very busy generally, took any time at all to respond.

Very badly thought through campaign and site that shows every appearance of being some sort of con trick. If it’s not some sort of con trick, then the people behind it, whoever they are, need to work, quickly, to sort out perceived bias and send a set of emails that aren’t passively agressively threatening.

The LibDem controlled Sutton council was one of four local authorities selected to pilot the Big Society and there are sure signs of encouraging new initiatives according to this news report in the local press:

Old, broken and unwanted bikes are being given a new lease of life thanks to an innovative recycling initiative.

Sutton Council is collecting bikes from residents and reusing them for a variety of projects.

More than 120 bikes have already been salvaged since December 2009, some have been recycled but others have been rebuilt and used for cycle training in schools.

About 40 bicycles have been given to Wandle Valley School for pupils to learn about how bikes work and to try their hand at rebuilding them.

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/8389036.Broken_bikes_to_be_restored_under_new_project/

@5 Claire: “Surely a band of volunteers can’t just do it on their own? Don’t they need someone to coordinate things? To ensure safety of all including the recipients of the volunteers’ good deeds? CRB checks? Training? Recruitment?”

I think that you have identified one of the objectives of Big Society. Volunteers should be able to borrow from the skills and capacity of larger organisations for some of the services that you suggest.

It is silly to suggest that a group of parents who wish to organise after school activities need to employ a professional worker. They can organise themselves and only need professional resources for CRB checks, financial audits, liability insurance and the like. They don’t need professionals to assist in recruiting volunteers or day to day management; that is their role, and they will succeed or fail according to their ability.

And I acknowledge that this will impose a greater load on advisory bodies (local government or voluntary sector). If Big Society means anything, government should pick up the tab for that load.

That blog post is a bit bizarre – would you question the motives of people if you were to send out FOI information?

Of course not. And anyone, including bloggers, can be accused of being ‘spamming nobodies’ when they do FOI requests as well can’t they? Doesn’t make it less right.

I don’t see what’s the problem with asking whether MPs who go on about how great volunteering is, actually demonstrate some experience in doing so.

It certainly does them no harm by pointing out what work they have done.

@5: “Surely a band of volunteers can’t just do it on their own? Don’t they need someone to coordinate things? To ensure safety of all including the recipients of the volunteers’ good deeds? CRB checks? Training? Recruitment? ”

It’s sad about Fred, of course, but no one had volunteered to cover for that morning.

Well as you’d like to sit and judge Sunny, why don’t you run down your volunteering efforts for us?

Sunny

It’s certainly a good thing that people ask questions of their MPs and hold them to their rhetoric, on this or any other matter. It’s just that it’s usual to tell them who you are and why you’re asking.

When I write to an MP via theyworkforyou or wherever, I tell them whether or not I’m a constituent, and what my special interest in the matter at hand is, and that I’m a Lib Dem member, in short, how I’ve come to be writing to them. I give them a framework for me. I don’t create a website without any names or profiles on it. It’s just civil to tell people who they’re dealing with, and if they’re dealing with a campaigning group like this, to tell them who the individual members are and how they’ve come to set up this group.

I’ve just never seen a political website like that before, and I’ve never known politico online types to set anything like it up without fulfilling those basic requirements for civility. That’s why I suggested, more in hope than expectation, that it might be “random citizenry”, because people who’ve literally never been near the political internet before might well make those sorts of mistakes. We all have to hold ourselves to high standards of transparency on here because we could all, quite simply, be lying about our motivations the whole time. It’s in our own interests to identify ourselves clearly.

“Surely a band of volunteers can’t just do it on their own? Don’t they need someone to coordinate things? To ensure safety of all including the recipients of the volunteers’ good deeds? CRB checks? Training? Recruitment? ”

Do they really all need CRB checks? For every volunterring job? And what does a CRB check provide? Nothing except some embarassment about some ancient incident when the person was young. It doesn’t tell the organisation what the person will do in the future or what hasn’t been found out already. A CRB check is now a days used instead of common sense and checking of references.

Do they need training – if they are volunterring for something they like doing they probably already know something about the subject. If not, training can be done by mentoring. Does it need an expert to train someone or can it be done by just watching someone else. Do many volunterring jobs need expert training anyway, most are to do with providing labour.

Recruitment can be done by notices in local papers and newsagents and shops and by word of mouth. It doesn’t need top notch experts to interview volunteer candidates.

A friend of mine once attempted to volunteer for the Tate in Liverpool. The interview she went through was more thorough than her job interviews. Yes you need to be presentable and knowledgable if you are going to be helping out in a art/museum but do they need to know if you have done loads of other volunteering, if you have had a driving disqualifications, if you are in council housing or not, what you can bring to the organisation, etc.

And Big Society doesn’t need to be just volunteering. It can be people doing things themselves or setting up commercial organisations to do jobs instead of the council. Not everything HAS to be done by the council beyond that stipulated by law.