Tony Devenish is a former member of the London AssemblyÂ
The first actual policy of the 2024 General Election is a welcome change from media debate on the fact it rains in London in May and our Prime Minister got a little wet. Or that Labour Leader Keir Starmer is determined to bore the country into submission. While attempting to sneak into Downing Street on a blank cheque. While it’s true that even Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher produced only a few memorable soundbites, it’s a dead cert that neither Starmer nor Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves will say anything remotely interesting for the entire General Election, or beyond.
After 18 years in local government community service (on Westminster Council, eight on the London Assembly, until 2nd May 2024) let me spell out to cynics why compulsory community service for 18-year-olds is a strong public policy worth debating. I started work at two Industrial giants. Arnold Weinstock’s GEC and Rolls-Royce Plc. Both employed a Training Officer, to look after the apprentices and graduate trainees. One was an ex-Scottish Rugby International player, the other a former NCO in the SAS. Both summed up why the world of work was so important to young people in plain English :
“ You turn up before 8.30 am on the dot. Clock in, get yourselves some grub on the way to the works. Listen to your superiors until you clock out at 5 pm. Life is largely about putting one foot in front of the other (repeat) until you retire aged 65. “
BBC and Guardian commentators will sneer. Indeed one of my oldest friends, an Oxford contemporary of Cameron and Boris and a central London resident was incandescent with rage, texting me, threatening not to vote Conservative. I pointed out that his sole child, a product of a leading public school with straight As, now at Oxford and one of the most motivated young individuals I have met (like her American-born mother) was not typical of most 18-year-olds today or ever.
Before Westminster Council fell to the Labour Party, one of the then Labour councillors complained that the Council was encouraging teenagers living north of Paddington Station to travel nearly 20 minutes via the London Underground to attend work experience interviews near Piccadilly Circus (yes really).
This was before Covid. Today every employer in the UK from big business to small and every school and college will tell you that we are seeing many teenagers boycotting education and the workplace. Even those who sign up for an internship interview will be at best 50 per cent likely to turn up at all, whether on time or not for an interview. While unemployment is at a 40-year low these figures are massaged by certain communities having worklessness built increasingly into their DNA, by a failure to recognise, let alone robustly address this issue.
If we don’t address this is – whether the media call it national or community service or not – we risk writing off any youngsters who do not have pushy parents like my outraged friend. Call it a mental health epidemic, call it a lack of self confidence but the Conservative Party four years after the Covid lockdown commenced in March 2020 are finally coming up with a policy to start addressing this.
Only 30,000 youngsters would actually join the armed forces the rest would undertake various community activities. Is this so bad ? A little stick and a lot of carrot will be needed. Yes we need more detail. But no one will go to prison. My own Army Reserve experience was in no way as impressive as so many of my elected colleagues. I briefly served in what was then called the TA at the end of the Cold War and before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. But I thoroughly enjoyed the experience: weekends away with ex-miners, the sons of serving regular soldiers and an entire cross-section of Greater Manchester life. Cooking on a stove, washing and ironing your uniform and turning up on time was more a feature than firing an assault rifle, even before the MOD’s cuts under Options for Change, there was very little live ammunition. A permanent grumble of our regular army NCOs and officers.
The way the sneering Starmer, who hasn’t come up with a single idea to make our country better, dismissed community service out of hand shows again why he is unfit to be our Prime Minister. Labour’s corrosive negativity hasn’t stopped for 14 years.
Giving vacuous speeches with a Union Jack in the background (and pretending Labour councillors used to be Tory swing voters) doesn’t make Labour electable. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been preferable if the Cabinet had signed off on the community service policy. After the 2017 General Election, you would have thought our Party would have learnt that lesson. But at least we Conservatives can come up with a policy to provoke debate during what will be as an exciting six weeks’ as Rachel Reeves personality, unless the media join in questioning exactly what our country would look like if Labour become our next Government. God help us and all 18-year-olds who aren’t fortunate to have pushy parents.
I’m looking forward to more bold policies from Rishi Sunak.
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Author: Tony Devenish
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