Cameron marooned as 'Big Society' goes up in smoke

David Cameron under pressure: an unusually harsh assessment from France 24.

As he flew off to Tuscany for a summer break less than a fortnight ago, British Prime Minister Cameron could justifiably have thought that he had weathered the worst of a rotten summer.

The British public had swallowed plans for the steepest spending cuts in recent history without budging, student protests against rising tuition fees had – for the time being – abated, and a sprawling phone-hacking scandal that had prompted calls for Cameron’s resignation had seemingly died down.

But less than a week later, the British prime minister rushed home to find that his government’s widely touted credentials on crime prevention had been ridiculed and that his cherished project of a “Big Society” – an ambitious and ill-defined concept to return power from the state to the people – lay in tatters.

And the article gets tougher- much tougher- from there.