Send ‘em on the wishful-thinking course!

Outrage at what appears to be unanimity between Red and Blue corners in respect of the creation of some kind of Komsomol (or perhaps Hitlerjugend).

The Devil points out the similarity between the usual suspects’ promises, while Their Contempt For You Is Total and the Cynical Optimist are united in condemnation, though perhaps somewhat different in interpretation.

This idea is not only ethically indefensible, it is also very silly, and resembles what logisticians sometimes describe as ‘a load of wank’.

If such a scheme is to be introduced at all, then it has to be consistent. Though neither party’s schemes appear that they could be so, let us give them the benefit of the doubt (here we go again) and assume that they are both talking about some sort of compulsory ‘gap year’.

A government (of either colour) which bangs on about the value of education is hardly likely to stand up for long to outraged middle-class parents whose plans for their childrens’ futures do not include their being academically retarded for a year thanks to having to go off and do slave labour. Considering that some middle-class parents are government ministers, there will simply have to be a mechanism of exclusion for the children of the people who matter. There will, of course, be endless trouble over this, with parents of bright children, who cannot afford the bribes, being obliged to watch those of people who can getting to university, and into the qualified labour market, a year ahead. This will be somewhat difficult to news-manage.

Of course what this is really about is getting all those knife-wielding, crack-dealing, hoodie-clad feral youth off the street corner and out of the headlines.

The Army doesn’t want them. The days of cannon-fodder are over. Of course they could be given a year’s ‘military training’, but would you really want them to be, at the public expense and the Army’s considerable inconvenience, taught to handle firearms and explosives and, if necessary, to kill with their bare hands? Thought not. One might as well just put them in prison; it would be cheaper, and the training it would provide could hardly fail to be less lethal.

As for the Navy or the RAF, forget it. You want a gum-chewing oaf who can’t write his own name or add up two one-digit numbers in charge of something technical?

What other ideas? There was the one about doing the Three Peaks. I’ve done that. It didn’t take a year. It can, if one is up for it, be done in a day. Will they just go round and round: Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough, Whernside, Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough, Whernside, for a whole year? How many of them will be doing this at any one time? Where will they camp? Has anyone thought about path erosion?

And, of course, there’s ‘working with old folk’. The care of the elderly is in a somewhat parlous state already; would voters really want their great-aunt Agatha to be looked after by totally unqualified people who have, in all probability, huge chips on their shoulders and access to the dangerous drugs cabinet?

Then there’s ‘charities’. Of course a fake charity could be paid oodles of our money by the state to find something for large numbers of aggrieved slaves to do, but it probably wouldn’t involve any powered machinery. Or edge-tools.

No real charity would touch this with a barge-pole, and if forced to accept unwilling conscripts would probably go under with all the additional costs and workload. Maybe the government (whoever forms it) would see that as a bonus; can’t have these damned amateurs like the RNLI showing up the quangos-with-a-licence-to-beg, can we?

And finally, it boils down to:

…and even travel overseas helping Third World countries

Transportation.

It is certainly a coincidence that both Red and Blue socialists promise to implement a scheme of this kind, but it seems to me that they have not thought it through. It is therefore probably no more than one of those political promises which become so common at election time (well, it only just over a year away, isn’t it? Think how early Christmas starts).

Even if they did implement it, who exactly is going to go out there and round up the chav youth to be compulsorily made to do nice things? Will it be the police? Or perhaps social workers? Teachers, then? Perhaps not. Oh, of course; we’ll simply fine the parents, and fine them again, and add interest to the fines, and fine them for attracting interest, if they don’t make their children turn up and sign on the dotted line.

Just like getting them to go to school, then.

Pah.