Forget the Big Society, Dave - just hand it over to the Anglican ladies

Prince Charles has been heaping praise on an Anglican vicar and 500 female volunteers who saved All Saints Church in Peckham from demolition after it was allowed to fall into a state of decay in the 1990s.

As it happens, I had in any case been planning to write about the awesome energy and efficiency of the female volunteers at our church. I got another chance to see them in action when I helped in a small way to prepare our local town hall for a charity ball at the weekend. The theme was butterflies, and my wife was responsible for creating most of the magnificent decorations for the event (which is how I got roped in). I’ve been mincing carefully around the house for weeks, feeling like Shrek, trying not to inadvertently destroy anything before the event.

During the three and a half hours I was there on Saturday afternoon – my height and heft come in handy occasionally – I was increasingly struck by the happy hum you only really get when a disparate group is pulling together to achieve a common goal. I’ve experienced it before a few times, mainly at work: the BBC newsroom when a big story had broken and everyone had had their tasks assigned, the interactive TV floor at Bush House when the launch of a big service was too close for anyone to waste time arguing. I imagine it’s how a big ocean liner feels mid-voyage, when everything’s going well.

But of course, Anglican ladies – unlike TV journalists and sailors - aren’t paid to run around like headless chickens making sure everything is just so: there isn’t any bonus or potential promotion on offer. What they’re doing is for their own satisfaction and for the common good, which may be why there are so few arguments – that and the absence of testosterone and the deep English desire to avoid a row at all costs. Granted, the participants are pretty much all white, middle class and won’t be celebrating their 40th birthdays again, but I found it impossible to tell which of them had high-powered jobs and which of them were housewives, which ones had large families and which ones lived on their own. I also didn’t have a clue as to their politics – the church in general is pretty left-wing these days, but I’m not sure how far that applies to us. (It’s probably easier to admit you’re a satanist than a Tory these days - or an Anglican, come to think of it - so I’ll probably never know.) But while gender probably does matter in this sort of enterprise, I’m not sure political allegiance, class or colour do – a photograph of Peckham’s splendid  volunteers, for instance,  tells a very different story.

What was obvious about all the women at the Town hall on Saturday afternoon was how industrious and focused and decidedly unfluffy they were, and how willing to set aside differences and territorial disputes to make it all jolly well happen.

If only the rest of the country worked that well.

When David Cameron rather meekly introduced his Big Society theme during the election campaign, I guessed his “vision” had been fed by an upbringing which must have frequently exposed him to groups of doughty Anglican ladies Getting Things Done, without coercion or the promise of reward (well, not in this life, anyway). I can imagine him now thinking how much better things would be if he could sweep away all that resentful, self-important, expensive public service deadwood with itheir fat pensions and automatic sense of entitlement, with all their undeserved privileges, happily preening themselves under a tarnished halo of ersatz sainthood, and replace them with the sort of church volunteers he remembered from his youth.

It’s a tempting fantasy. 

There are, however, at least three severe problems with Dave’s desire to harness all this energy to a vast hamster-wheel designed to enliven a society enfeebled by the state’s enervating, clunking fist. 

For a start, the altruistic ladies he remembers from his childhood, and the ones Prince Charles was busy praising yesterday, and those whose sheer oomph I was admiring on Saturday, emerged from a tradition of service which I suspect barely exists any longer outside the Armed Forces (it has long disappeared from the police and the nursing profession, for instance). Their church and their parents imbued these women with values which mixed selflessness (“Oh, for goodness sake, think about someone else for a change!”), gratitude (“Don’t moan, darling, there are people much worse off than you are”), and just getting on with things (“Oh, do stop faffing about, darling - just get on with it!). They imbibed the concept of “putting something back” with their mother’s milk.  (Now, of course, this sort of attitude is considered insultingly patronising  - “Who does she think she is?Lady Muck?” - especially as benefits are guaranteed.)

But more problematic is that in our case the prime mover making all this activity possible – the man who has created the right structure for this whirl of benign busyness – is our vicar. He is the harnesser in chief. Of course, much good work would still get done, were he to leave – there are many splendid volunteers in our church (some of them, believe it or not, men!). But it’s our vicar’s sheer energy and his rich High Church vision of what a church is for that fuels so much local do-goodery (I’m sure the same is true in Peckham). 

And, of course, there’s the minor issue of faith, of Christian values. The people who attend out church tend to believe in certain things, and to hold certain values in common, many of which are now alien to society as a whole. (And before anyone bothers taking me to task - I realise that you don’t have to be a Christina to perform good deeds - but it does seem to lend the enterprise momentum and coherence, and makes it easy for people to contribute.)

Being brought up in a tradition of service, the need for strong leadership, and the presence at the centre of all this happy industriousness of a living, breathing church whose members share beliefs and values are the key ingredients to philanthropic activity (as well as energy and a good heart, both of which my wife and her fellow-volunteers seem to possess in abundance).

Cameron is proposing to appoint what in effect would be five thousand secular vicars and send them out on a mission to focus all the do-gooding energy out there. Unfortunately for the plan, I’m pretty sure the Anglican ladies – who, as usual, would be the ones putting in the hard work, wouldn’t be much interested in following orders from some jumped-up pipsqueak of a politically-motivated, atheistic pseudo-social worker. Besides, the ladies already have an outlet for their philanthropy.

And thank God for that.

And, for those of you who imagine a church do must be fantastically dull and strait-laced, when I went back at midnight to help clear up, they were all still going strong, and many were - how shall I put it? - as merry as newts. So, in one respect at least, they’re just like the rest of the population.