Yet, these are only examples of the latest round in this long running Statist assault on self-help and personal responsibility. The State has all but destroyed community in our cities and put it under siege even in our most distant rural places. Its key weapon is the professionalisation of everything, so that the volunteer and the amateur are usually excluded, and always thought second best. It is this that explains all those advertisements in The Guardian for local-government co-ordinators and facilitators. It's why the public sector has employed an extra 900,000 staff in the past decade. It's the reason for the growing belief that, if a job's worth doing, it's the state's job to do it.
