The New Labour Jugend

Demos have released a new publication, Service Nation, which has (of course) found favour with the commissars of New Labour (Ministers back 'national service' from age seven).

citizenship is not just about individual rights and legal status, but about participating in communities with a view to securing the common good: we are citizens not only of a polity but of a community.

Thus civic service encapsulates the idea that there should be an expectation that citizens contribute to their communities by ‘giving something back’ at one – or several – points in their lives. It differs from volunteering, which is more commonly perceived as an add-on to citizenship: something that is morally desirable but not an integral or implied expectation in return for the benefits that citizenship confers.

So there you have it: compulsory civic service, courtesy of the state. Nothing to do with differing or more traditional views; nothing to do with individual responsibility, freedom or choice; just pure statism at its most nauseatingly self-righteous and authoritarian.

New Labour's 'citizenship' agenda is nothing more than state propaganda and indoctrination, an attempt to create a passive, compliant and uncritical populace. What that citizenry will be serving, though, is not their own country, but the state and its apparatchiks.

(The Demos publication is available on our Scribd site).