The lukewarm dust has barely settled on David Cameron’s big society speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham yesterday, but two of the city’s academics have this morning posted a (bite-sized! Readable!) debate on the pros and cons to the new approach.

I appreciate that many of us are suffering from BSFS (Big Society Fatigue Syndrome) and some of us might – whisper it – simply wonder what all the fuss is about (a recent Ipsos Mori poll suggests 55% of people had never heard of the big society), but the academics’ debate is an interesting quick read for those confused by the often woolly and rarely defined idea of big society

Angus McCabe, senior research fellow at the University’s Institute of Applied Social Studies, argues that big society might simply be a recycled New Labour concept and that public trust in politics won’t be restored if the approach is seen as services delivery on the cheap.

Helen Sullivan, Professor of Government and Society, offers a definition of big society as something that might plug the gap in public finances while boosting civic organising, voluntary action and private sector intervention, clearing a path to a diminished state. The danger of the state no longer being in fashion, she says, is that the voluntary sector will not automatically expand to fill the gap.

In conjunction with think tank Demos, the university’s just launched a policy commission on the future of local public services in the context of the big society; fingers crossed that this places some much-needed meat on the bones of the big society rhetoric.