Brown’s unemployed army

Ever since JFK established the Peace Corps, policymakers here have been keen on a British version of it. The latest idea is from the new knife crime tsar, Alf Hitchcock, who tells the Daily Mail that he’d like all young unemployed to do a kind of national service. It’s a seductive thought, but has he thought about the scale? Gordon Brown has raised an army of 686,000 under-25s claiming out-of-work benefits (DWP breakdown here)—more than six times the strength of the ever-thinning British army (105,090) and larger than even the United States army (525,482). Add in all the British under-35s kept on out of work benefits of various kinds and there would be 1.57 million – more than the US Army, Navy and Air Force put together.