Does Britain need more volunteers? David Blunkett thinks so, and has just told BBC Westminster Hour that a “civil corps” is the answer to deep poverty. Here are his words (transcribed by the indispensable Politics Home). The lower classes, he says, “see volunteering as the preserve of the middle classes. To reach them, you have to have a dialogue, be able to talk with them, where they’re at and what they’d like to do. It’s egging them on to feel that they could do something and might just give them hope. What’s certain is that we need to give people hope.”
He bemoans “young people’s behaviour” which he considers “in all sorts of ways completely dysfunctional.” But has he considered the effects of the perverse incentives of the welfare system he was once briefly in charge of? Community ties have been savaged by the destructive way Labour has implemented the welfare state. Dependency has replaced the horizontal ties – which once bound people to each other (families and communities) – with vertical ties, which bind people to the state. And this is how Labour likes it: an atomised society, not of families, but of individuals all preferably with a reason to be grateful to the state.
‘Twas not always thus. Two generations ago, people would depend on each other – and volunteer on an ad-hoc basis. Give each other’s children a skelp across the ear, impose and police standards of behaviour across the community. It was a natural, human, organic welfare system, that existed pretty much from when we crawled out of caves. It has taken billions upon billions of pounds to erode this amongst the poorest communities.
It’s not as if the middle classes are somehow better, more moral and public-spirited people. Welfare dynamics have not messed up the way they (or should I say ‘we’?) organise their societies. Just imagine if they did. Say if a women was to be guaranteed her husband’s income even if she left him – how many middle-class marriages would survive? And if the middle class workers were offered their salary (or just a bit less) for doing nothing, how many would persist with their not-always-interesting jobs?
More government means less community. That is the equation which explains the damage done, in the name of compassion, in the communities that Mr Blunkett talks about. During the six months he ran welfare, he was in a position to do something about this. He did squat. Now James Purnell is trying to do what Blair should have done in 1997. Tragically for Britain, the social damage is so much more extensive now.
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