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Welcome back slavery

My, it\’s only a couple of centuries since you went away.

PM Gordon Brown intends to force every teenager in the country to carry out 50 HOURS of work to help the community. His call today for youngsters to do their duty and work for Britain echoes Lord Kitchener\’s World War One recruiting poster with its slogan: "Your country needs you." Writing exclusively for the News of the World on this page, the Prime Minister reveals the community service would be COMPULSORY.

Gosh, so nice to see you again. So how was it being out in the dark and the cold then? Being  thought of as morally and socially unacceptable?

Yes? Well, true, it used to be that it was one person who owned the time and labour of another. Now it\’s the State which owns the time and labour of a person. Little difference,  we both know.

So, how are the kids? Oppression doing well is she?

21 thoughts on “Welcome back slavery”

  1. Sunday morning, pardon me. Should read:

    Another legal challenge:Another embarassing climbdown.

    The Ho Hum was right though.

  2. For all the righteous anger at another dumb and authoritarian idea from Broon, let’s leave out the welcome back slavery pish, because its never really gone away in places like Mauritania and Sudan. We are most certainly not talking about like for like here, so a little perspective please.

  3. Since I presume that they will be unable to vote being under 18, or a lot will be, then this is monstrously unfair.

  4. “The current voluntary option has failed.”

    Failed to do what you want I presume you mean. It has very much suceeded in terms of give people the freedom to chose how to spend THEIR own time.

  5. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

    “How’s that painting of the community centre coming along then? Oh no, you spilled the pain bucket again! What? You’re clumsy by nature? It’s a disability and that it’s inappropriate for me to stigmatise a vulnerable person?”

  6. So what used to be punishment for criminals is now to be mandatory for everybody?

    Just shows what Labour think of the British people, doesn’t it?

    Still, with all the new regulations that they keep imposing on us, we will soon all be criminals, so that’ll be all right, won’t it?

  7. It looks like a back door job creation scheme. They would have to recruit new public sector workers from the adult population to supervise the youngsters and find them useful things to do.

  8. I wonder what punishments lie in store for those who refuse? Fines? Imprisonment? Community service?

    What’s actually appalling about this is the number of people who are going to agree with it. I hate doing that conceited thing of saying people who disagree with me are stupid- but millions of stupid people are going to support this.

    The other point is of course this forced labour will be for the extra-governmental governance network- “charities” and NGOs. The troughocracy.

    We’re going to have to kill these people aren’t we?

  9. @Ross,
    Yes, sorry I realised after I posted and saw the link to your blog (a daily read btw) that this was not likely to be a view you endorsed and that I must have (and indeed did) misread it.

  10. “Slavery never really went away it just got called Income tax.”

    I sympathise with the sentiment, but there is a big difference between choosing whether, where, and when to work and being able to keep 60% of the fruits of your labours, and being told where, where and what you will do and being able to keep 0% of the fruits of your work. The former is just another hum drum bit of evil that all governments inflict on their people. The latter – slavery – is a true abomination in a whole different league. Britain once distinguished itself by being the first empire in history to outlaw slavery, and across the globe at that. The fact that it is being reintroduced, albeit in vastly watered down form, in 21st C Britain is pretty disgraceful.

  11. Dr. Nick:

    If a person’s voted for the compulsory service and is called for it, well, he gets what he voted for and certainly wouldn’t complain. But what right does a government of free people have to compel service? If they’re free, they can’t be compelled, whether or not az majority has voted for such service or not. It’s more clear-cut than that: free or unfree.

    Certain types of service are deemed compellable because they’re concerned with defense, usually (though not always) against foreign aggression. Though some see this as a similar matter to other forms of coerced service; a significant and effective (whether majority or not) group (and a view to which I also subscribe) regard such service as merely a coerced program of organization to make effective each individual’s
    right and obligation to look to his own defense. In this view, only the conscientious objector who eschews even his own defense in the face of violent aggression may be legitimately excused; some of these, even, do volunteer for noncombatant duties. In time of war, a draft may legitimately be employed as an extension of the stated principle but has frequently been employed in arbitrary and discriminatory fashion, not dissimilar to other types of official corruption.

    There’s no way to “get the job done” and please everyone simultaneously; folks will argue such points “till the cows come home,” i.e., forever.

  12. Sounds like it’ll be another one of those dumb ‘do a pointless activity and get a pointless congratulations’ ideas, like the ‘Work for the Dole’ concept here in Australia. Not quite slavery, but definitely another symptom of nanny-statism, in which personal responsibility for jobs and work is abrogated in favour of a strong, controlling government.

  13. Far be it from me to bring the Superstate into the argument, but I thought EU law forbade all forced labour except national service.

  14. Bit of a waste of time Tone apologising for it, then? Or perhaps this is one of the myriad ways Gord that is showing that he is different to his predecessor. Or perhaps the needles bent on the moral compass?

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