PRIME Minister Brown on Sunday promised that bringing in a compulsory community service programme for youth will be a part of his next general election manifesto.
Last week he also let it be known that a government review will recommend more state school pupils be ‘encouraged’ to sign up for military cadet training.
A civil and military relations review headed by MP Quentin Davies has already suggested that expanding school cadet forces would improve attitudes towards armed forces and introduce young people to order and discipline.
Brown said that ‘It is my ambition to create a Britain in which there is a clear expectation that all young people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will become a normal part of growing up in Britain.’
He added that this scheme ‘will build on the platform provided by citizenship classes as they develop in our schools. But because the greater part of what I envisage as community service takes place outside the school day, it will require the close involvement of local community organisations and charities.’
Brown made it clear that he loves compulsion, adding: ‘By building from compulsory citizenship studies in the 14-16 curriculum, we can create an expectation of national youth community service.’
The military will be rubbing their hands. They are half way there. All you have to do is leave out ‘youth community’ and you are left with ‘national service’ and the much bigger army that the military is aspiring to, to fight the Afghan and other imperialist wars.
What Brown is unveiling with his compulsory measures is a roadmap to the reintroduction of compulsory conscription into the armed forces for all youth.
In fact the Brown programme for youth is a straightforward confession of economic and political bankruptcy.
His regime and capitalism cannot provide jobs for young people. Over a million of the very young are now unemployed, with many ineligible for benefits.
His regime cannot provide education for all young people since it has destroyed free state higher education. It has abolished the student grant system, and brought in ever rising fees, now in the tens of thousands for student doctors, along with loans that will take decades to repay.
All this means that education is being returned to being a privilege of the very well-off and the rich.
This crisis for youth is sharpened by the fact that graduates, because of the capitalist slump, cannot get into the careers that they aspire to when they graduate.
They are ending up competing with the poorest working class youth for places in McDonalds and KFC which offer them six-month ‘apprenticeships’.
It is the Labour government and the capitalist slump which it is presiding over that has robbed millions of youth of a future.
Of course this does breed youth unrest and rebellion. The answer of Brown is to force youth into compulsory cheap labour, into cadet forces and into the armed forces.
However, youth do not want to be the cheap labourers for capitalism or its cannon fodder for fighting imperialist wars.
This is why they will resist being forced onto compulsory community service and will not join the cadet forces and military societies that are springing up in schools and universities.
The future of youth lies in organising and leading the socialist revolution that will overthrow capitalism and imperialism and put an end to all of their horrors.
Youth are synonymous with rebellion and revolution, and it is the masses of youth that will build and lead the Workers Revolutionary Party in the organisation of the British socialist revolution.
