(no subject)

David Davies may be insisting that he was misheard (an entire conversation, including his repetition of Tory donor Lord Ashcroft’s bon mot, “Brokeback Coalition”? That's quite a mishear), but the bitter little analysis attributed to him by the Financial Times journos who sat next to him at lunch the other day is hard to argue with:

The corollary of the big society is the smaller state. If you talk about the small state, people think you’re Attila the Hun. If you talk about the big society, people think you’re Mother Teresa.

Ultimately, wasteful and inept state spending and haphazard philanthropy relying on rapacious corporatism are probably quite as harmful as each other, so his aggrievedness may not be as justified as he appears to believe. But his underlining of the fact that “big society” is just welfare-slashing in an unconvincing moustache is instantly more credible than his boss's claims that “This is not about trying to save money, it is about trying to have a bigger, better society”.