Hey Blunkett, leave those kids alone

The BBC: Blunkett urges mass volunteering.

Everyone between the ages of 16 and 25 should do at least six months of "intensive" voluntary work, former home secretary David Blunkett has said....The ideas are presented in a report for Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I started reading Blunkett's report for the Fabian Society, got as far as this bit, and cringed.

Furthermore, active citizenship – including stimulating the involvement of young people – is already part of government policy, whether in the National Curriculum or in the development of youth opportunity agencies funded by government to stimulate such engagement.

Which young people; what government, and; whose national curriculum?

Is it, perchance, the English youth, the UK Government, and the English National Curriculum?

Blunkett's report is menacingly entitled Mutual Action, Common Purpose: Empowering the Third Sector.

If this doesn't scare you - and it should - then you must read The Nationalisation of Childhood (pdf).

Back in 2006 Gordon Brown's big idea was to rope English students into "voluntary work" to encourage "strong modern patriotism" and "an agreed British national purpose". As an incentive he suggested that tuition fess could be waived, in effect a Britishness bribe. The rather glaring problem with the policy was that such a measure would not apply to Brown's own constituents in Scotland, it would only apply to English students, the only group directly affected by the UK Government's legislation on education. The idea was that English students should volunteer for community work to help build "an agreed British national purpose" when their Scottish counterparts did not have to pay the same tuition fees, because it was Scottish MPs voting in the UK Parliament that imposed those fees on English students.

The Russell Commission, set up by the former Home Secretary David Blunkett and Gordon Brown in May 2004 to develop proposals for a new national framework to promote youth volunteering in the UK (the "National Community Service" programme), spawned a new charity that has changed the face of volunteering "for 16 to 25 year olds in England". How very fucking predictable.