So 50 hours of compulsory “community service” is to be demanded of all 16-19 year olds, under plans that form part of Gordon Brown’s “please for the love of God don’t make us clean up this mess” manifesto for the next General Election.
Oh where to begin with this?
Let’s talk about enforcement, because, ultimately, if it’s going to be compulsory then there needs to be some sort of disincentive for evasion.
Will these young adults be subject to fines for failure to comply with a work order?
One can easily imagine that the well heeled will simply pay the fines as a means of getting their offspring out of this indentured labour. To guarantee compliance, as with convictions for cannabis use in the states, being banned from attending university will be the only means of ensuring all children, from all backgrounds, are forced into this unpaid, unvoluntary labour. Or, at least, the nice middle class kids will attend, while the kids from the estates will find themselves in an even worse situation.
Of course, it may be that the parents will be the ones that suffer the burden of fines – it will be have to be determined who, exactly, is responsible. There are children that cannot be made to go to school… how do you make them attend a compulsory work order?
See, from a libertarian perspective this is simply a means of taxing young people. It’s taxation ‘in kind’ because they have no wealth worth taxing, but as yet they remain an unplundered resource, so they’ll pay it in pure labour. Based on 3.2 million 15-19 year olds (2001 census), and a minimum wage of £3.53, that equates to a levy over half a billion raised on the least powerful, the least democratically enfranchised part of the British workforce.
It took the Ancient Egytians an average of 15,000 people working over 10 years to build a pyramid (with numbers of workers peaking at 40,000 at times). With this scheme, Brown could build a pyramid in over 9 years (assuming that they get their half a billion worth of free labour once every 3 years). I just thought I’d put that in a bit of context for you.
If we accept that it’s good for the state and the nation to have state mandated compulsory labour (also known as slavery, even if it’s just for 50 hours) from 16-19 year olds, pressure will grow to have 50 hours from absolutely everyone. Think what you could do with 30,000,000 people doing 50 hours of work? A windfall to the state of £86 billion (based on full national minimum wage) every single year!
Taking cash is one thing, and there’s enough problems with that as it is – but taking tax in kind through labour is a whole new level of evil, as far as I’m concerned – and it must be fought, stopped and whatever else necessary to prevent this abuse of human beings as commodities to be exploited.
What makes all this possible is the ID cards programme. It’s easy when all young people have ID cards. You’ve got a centralised database of all the ‘eligible’ teenagers, and you can track how many hours they’ve ‘donated voluntarily’ through that. No exemptions, no excuses.
Worst still, they’re not going to be able to vote against this, just like they can’t vote against being forced to take up ID cards.
The minds that dreamt up this policy seem to me to be sick. That this has come from the Labour Party doesn’t surprise me anymore – it would have done 10 years ago – but to me this, when I talk about ‘socialism’, is what I’m afraid of. I can’t help it. I have this irrational fear of people making me do things against my will, and a sense of anger and outrage when I see someone else being made to do something against their will, too.
Of course minors are a special case, but to exploit this is beneath contempt.
Call me weird.
UPDATE: Anton Howes kindly reminds me that he did, in fact, send me a link to a Facebook group opposing this. If Web 2.0 based Cyber activism is your thang, try this facebook group.
