The Big Society is being relaunched. We know how this sort of thing usually ends. Initiatives that have to be revamped rarely succeed and leaders who reach for the relaunch button often find themselves pressing it again, and again, and again, with diminishing returns. Then we get to the point where newspaper sketch-writers can have fun writing pieces saying that the initiative is in such trouble that its relaunches are now weekly events. At some point the same sketchwriters write the following: "yesterday the last rites were read for the Big Society" (or Tony Blair's Stakeholder Society, or Ed Miliband's New Generation).

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