A piece in The Guardian extolling those who stepped up to aid during the recent unpleasantness. People who volunteered to call the lonely, deliver prescriptions, check on neighbours, provide food to those without incomes and all manner of those little platoon actions.

You know, that reminder that by and large we’re generally just plain good folk. Things that need to be done get done motivated by no more than the milk of human kindness and the knowledge that we are all in this together.

However, the second part begins to disturb, for it’s a list of the “support” that is to be given by government to these activities. Only begins to disturb for we’re quite willing to believe that some of the things done by volunteers or private economic actors are ripe to be put on a more organised, even governmental, basis. This has, after all, been historically true - we’ve no problem with the idea that the occasional street sluicing by the well meaning was replaced with municipal drains. So, to examine what is being voluntarily done to see what can be done better is just fine.

But by the end it all rather seems to go off the rails.

Lady Barran is the minister for civil society

The entire point of the very concept of civil society is that this is what we do without government, ministers or central direction. Meaning that we can just about imagine a member of the Lords whose job is to police the government’s, or the bureaucracy’s, interference with civil society - yelling “Don’t touch that you fool!” at anyone who offers “support” from the centre - but we find it very difficult to understand that we’re collectively employing someone whose job is to kill civil society by assimilating it into its opposite, the government.

To note that civil society is managing to take care of things is to recognise that we don’t need to change things in order for them to be taken care of. Why do we need a minister - unless this is their job, to keep repeating that hands off mantra - for that?