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.
Foxwood said...
14 Apr 09 at 1:50 am
Obama wants to do the say thing with Americorp. The students will take basic training and learn to be as proficient as regular military, with a force of 250,000. Next will be to tattle on your parents in grade school.
Reminds me of Napoleon taking the pups from the farm, later to bring them back to keep the rest of the animals in line in Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Ryan Cullen said...
14 Apr 09 at 8:35 am
One wonders if those who do 50 hours of forced Community Service (the very naughty kids) will be able to opt out of the “voluntary” hours?
Bunny Smedley said...
14 Apr 09 at 9:02 am
I’ve got an only slightly dog-eared copy of R J B Bosworth’s ‘Mussolini’s Italy’ if you want to borrow it, Charlotte.
Charlotte Gore said...
14 Apr 09 at 9:14 am
Ryan, that whole area is a minefield!
What will happen to existing Community Service? At the moment it’s a punishment. If they keep it, will the punishment simply be, “MORE community service” – which strongly suggests that the 50 hours compulsory for all is also a punishment. Or will the difference be the nature of the work? Volunteers get to dig flower beds, convicts have to wipe arses, that sort of thing?
Maybe they’ll just drop Community Service as a punishment altogether (because, after all, Community Service is a good thing now, right?) and have convicts in special work camps in special uniforms instead.
Like I said… minefield.
Charlotte Gore said...
14 Apr 09 at 9:15 am
Ha, Bunny, you say so much in so few words!
Edis Bevan said...
14 Apr 09 at 9:43 am
France under the Ancien Regime had something called the Corvee and we all know what happened there..
AJS said...
14 Apr 09 at 9:49 am
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Whatever next — a bill which makes it an offence to vote for anyone but Labour, then disenfranchises anyone with a criminal record even if they are not actually in prison?
Charlotte Gore said...
14 Apr 09 at 10:16 am
Corvée? Looked it up on Wikipedia and found,
Hilarious.
Roger Thornhill said...
14 Apr 09 at 10:16 am
This is all part of the mindset that believes we owe the State, that we are owned by the State. Chattel, in other words.
Imagine the generation brought up with this, and trained to believe it via the indoctrination programmes as part of the National Curriculum*. One shudders to think.
This is why we should also be abolishing Income Tax. The State should not have first call on our earnings. It does not own us. We are not cattle to be milked.
The same mindset asks for our details when travelling. The excuse of terrorism and “non dom” is trotted out. They think we belong to them. We do not.
There is no way that this government owns my son. He is not their property. The government is elected and delegated to. It does not rule over us. It is our servant.
* and people wonder why there are howls of protest about this concept? Free the schools from the grip of the National Curriculum. Some schools struggle with numeracy and literacy, so as far as I am concerned, a voucher system should be restricted to that – demand that children can read, write, COMPREHEND, and are numerate and can apply it to the outside world. Everything else is down to the Heads and Teachers.
asquith said...
14 Apr 09 at 10:17 am
Of course, you don’t need to be a fully-fledged libertarian to object to this. You just need to understand that coercion wouldn’t work in terms of delivering any even vaguely useful impact.
You’ll have to excuse me for not commenting at length, but I’m a bit tired & can’t work up any outrage. My observations were made here:
http://nhsblogdoc.blogspot.com/2009/04/gordon-brown-to-conscript-teenagers.html
As I said on another occasion, Cameron has ideas similar to this & they do have a lot of currency. A lot of people will vaguely like these proposals, let’s be in no doubt. But if in-depth arguments against are presented to them, they will change their minds as quickly as they did over such shite as ID cards.
Charlotte Gore said...
14 Apr 09 at 10:21 am
Asquith, it’s very gratifying to know that you don’t think you have to be a full-blown Libertarian to find these proposals objectionable.
I’ve no doubt some will like these ideas, conjuring misty rose tinted images of national service. Incidentally, the BNP have been calling for the restoration of National Service for years now.
Funny that.
Edis Bevan said...
14 Apr 09 at 10:57 am
One thing is that if young people are in fact tagged with a Feudal Labour liability, the Feudatory Seigneurs have to keep track of each individual and an account of the labour hours exacted.
I suppose we will need a national database, an universal ID card system, a ban on foreign travel until liability is discharged, oh all sorts of minor details.
In the USSR (as some of my immeduate relatives could have told you) some of this ‘local obliogation’ was facilitated by an internal passport system. Or we could look at the Chinese Offical Residency system…
Anton Howes said...
14 Apr 09 at 11:25 am
Ach, you forgot to mention the fbook group against it!
(which I emailed you about)
http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=86872840451
Andrew Hickey said...
14 Apr 09 at 11:47 am
You definitely don’t have to be a Libertarian (at least if you define Libertarian as “those views held by most self-described Libertarians” – I would call myself Libertarian in a literal sense, but not in a Libertarian Party sense…) to be horrified by this. I certainly am. (Though I would ask how it is different from requiring children to be at school… it feels like it, but I’m not sure why…)
Stu said...
14 Apr 09 at 12:47 pm
As Asquith says, The Conservatives have been considering a lighter form of this for a while – although I’m don’t think theirs was compulsory. I think they were offering a cash incentive to those who complete it, rather than a fine for those who don’t. Obama also has a similar initiative in the works, I believe.
The idea of young people undertaking some form of cohesion-building exercise is not a bad one (think of Scouts, Duke of Edinburgh, or school activity trips, for instance) but the implementation would need to be very carefully put together. In fact, it would probably be better to start getting behind and supporting institutions such as the Scouts and DoE who already do this sort of thing so well.
Tristan said...
14 Apr 09 at 12:49 pm
Its not simply a tax, its slavery.
It may be part time slavery, but whenever someone forces you to work through threat of violence (with or without renumeration) then you are a slave for the time you are working.
There are two instances of slave labour in western society – the draft/national service (still practiced in much of Europe) and forced prison labour (carried out in the US at least).
(the income tax==slavery argument is however rather overblown – you don’t /have/ to work to pay income tax – if you don’t work, you have no income, you don’t pay income tax).
Nelson said...
14 Apr 09 at 1:49 pm
I remember one of the series of House of Cards – forget which – Francis Urqhart was looking at likely election defeat. So he pledged to bring back national service. It worked. Perhaps that’s where the idea came from.
Policies these days invariably go through hours and hours of focus grouping. It obviously played well. And – dreadful as the proposal undoubtedly is – I can see why. “Young people should contribute to society” is the sort of statement it’s difficult to disagree with. I suggest running ads with unemployed people saying “I lost my job because Gordon Brown got a teenager to do it for free”.
Roger Thornhill said...
14 Apr 09 at 2:15 pm
” but the implementation would need to be very carefully put together”
Which is why the last thing you need is for the State to do it.
Voluntary groups need to attract volunteers, so they need to compete for relevance and sense of achievement. The fact that they compete for volunteers means they by and large deliver that.
A State with a monopoly access to a pool of non-consenting labour? No chance. See what happens to Sure Start and other LSC projects and very soon local monopolies will pop up, lobbying the State for “certification” – making volunteering groups even more beholden to the State whim – and further lobbying for their percentage of the “resource”.
Not only does this idea enslave our young, it hijacks the entire volunteering “sector”, making it dance to the Statist tune. Fabians are “finding a room” at the thought of this being put into practice.
Ian B said...
14 Apr 09 at 5:46 pm
It doesn’t hijack the Third Sector- it’s what the Third Sector wants. Free labour, access to young minds to indoctrinate, and yet more “governance” with accountability. Nothing will warm the Third Sector’s cockles more. If anything, they’re hijacking the government.
Something I’ve ranted about before is that we need to see the charities for what they are; in many cases, since they were set up during the first Progressive Era, they have always been lobbying organisations who hand out the odd cup of soup as justification. Meanwhile, the entire progressive strategy is based around floating the governance off from government and handing it to corporatist groups beyond democratic oversight- charities, NGOs, quangos, academic bodies, committees etc. The Third Sector are fully aware of what’s happening here, and it’s just what they want.