Big society requires audacity to allow it manage itself sustainably.

The push to deregulate and give more autonomy to local communities is most of the time driven by the desire to slash funding, not out of the genuine belief that it would sprout better results. Where in theory sustainable local management is better than being governed by a vote-sponsored bureaucrat, local initiatives are seldom the result of the political vigor.

To make things worse, the prime evil on why the local deregulation happened in the first place — lack of funds — make it more harder to police the grounds. Where by coincidence or not, the recent FT article told of more petty crimes go unpunished as the Met has to prioritize to track bigger crimes.

This leaves the smaller communities vulnerable to burglars and other nasty folk. Sometimes despair lead to uprisings, while they can be battled by the same social call to arms — as it was when Londoners made to streets to cleanup the mess following the debauchery of 2011. Even greater advancements can be routed to assist local communities thanks to hi tech.

Better policing can be enforced through traceable liquids that can put a person at a crime scene (already pushed forward by the likes of SmartWater) as well as facial recognition tech that is making great strides in terms of cost-efficiency and overall effectiveness.

We might as well imagine that the development of low-cost personal printing technologies would allow people to administer smart tags that would make the society more balanced as everyone would have the mean to implicate wrong-doing.

Where such reasoning is also behind the US arms lobby that everyone should have arms, the tech to aid the well being of local communities should be passive — can only be used to defend the right and hardly can be utilized to attack and abuse anyone.