We are working towards ensuring that, in time, every young person gives at least 50 hours of service to their community in their teenage years.… Through the new Youth Community Service, all young people will be expected to give something back to their communities, and this will become a customary part of the growing up process for every young person.The pdf document talks of "the opportunity to give something back to the community". The html, though, tells a different story: not an opportunity, but a legal duty. Young people will be made to "give something back", and made to carry out "community service". You know who else is made to carry out community service, don't you: petty criminals. Given that being a young person is not a crime, the only name I can come up with for the concept of forcing young people to engage in work is child slavery.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Labour government to institute child slavery
This is not hyperbole. The recent Labour manifesto "Building Britain's Future" document has some pretty barmy stuff in there. Under the heading, "Investing in young people", we read the following:
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Guns apart, is this really much different from National Service as we used to do it, though?
And unsurprisingly, the arguments often used for the retention of National Service, not only here but elsewhere, were used in the early nineteenth century to defend slavery. The most famous, of course, is that it would cost an awful lot of money to stop doing it. But we stopped all the same, because it was wrong to confiscate time out of people's lives. Did it stop being wrong?
The other difference is that these would be under eighteen, of course. But then, age shouldn't be a barrier to being forced to work against one's will, eh?
Apparently, it's not slavery if a socialist is making you do it for the public good.
And it's part-time, don't forget. Part-time slavery is always more acceptable.
Next we'll be forcing children to attend large institutions on a daily basis for years of their lives. Oh... wait......
I don't like this idea, for various reasons - including the impact it will have on existing forms of volunteering. Human nature is such that once you coerce people into giving "at least" 50 hours of service, that quickly turns into "at most".
But it's a bit much to say this is "child slavery", especially if it takes place during school hours. And I don't see any reference to compulsion. "Expected to... customary party of growing up..."
Plus old-style National Service was more like 17,500 hours rather than 50...
And anyway, criminals don't do "community service" any more. They do (*adopts gruff voice*) "community payback". Much tougher-sounding, I'm sure you'll agree. ;-)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending this proposal. Like a lot of Brownite policies, it combines a half-decent idea (encouraging and enabling greater opportunities for youth involvement in voluntary service - query whether that's the state's job, though?) with a depressing combination of gimmickry and coercion.
Of course, we do *not* currently force children to attend large institutions, as we learnt from Graham Badman, right? There remains an opt-out.
Should I defend the language of child slavery? Well, it would certainly be compulsory unpaid work (oddly, that is the phrase which is now used by the Home Office to describe community service). Is compulsory unpaid work slavery? I think it's pretty hard to argue that that's not the essence of slavery.
So perhaps it's not compulsory. I hope it isn't. But if it is, then I've no qualms in calling a spade a spade.
It's not slavery if you've got light skin.
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