James Crabtree
Civic service: what would Cicero do?
Britain needs a universal programme of youth civic service, as Prospect argued in a cover essay I wrote with Frank Field earlier this year. Recession-era Britain also needs a massively expensive new public spending programme—whose benefits are difficult to quantify—like a hole in the head. Discuss.
Solving this conundrum is tricky. No one has run the numbers on such a civic service programme for some time. Number 10 did cost a scheme, in secret, in the early 2000s—when they looked at doing something big and bold, and ended up doing “V” instead. While they didn’t publish the result, I seem to remember being told it was “a lot”.
Thankfully, we have think tanks to help out—and so congratulations are due to Prospect’s “one to watch 2010” think tank, Demos, for picking up the ball, and moving it well down the park. They have just produced a paper on how one variant of a civic service scheme might work. And it’s a genuinely strong piece of work.
The authors — Sonia Sodha and Daniel Leighton — have come up with a compelling new model. Their approach is informed by a fair criteria to rank possible policies, and a clear reading of the evidence (full disclosure: I used to work with both Dan and Sonia in different jobs, and admire their work.) Congratulations should also got to the Private Equity Foundation, who supported Demos—and who are currently bringing CityYear—a nonprofit organisation whose primary goal is to build democracy through citizen—service to the UK. That said, the gist of what is interesting here lies in two novelties.
Read more »
James Crabtree
Those kids in red jackets
Next month in Prospect we review Economist editor John Micklethwait’s new book about the rise of world religion, which reproduces a familiar argument that the success of faith in America owes much to the lack of an established church. Many churches, competitive with each other, win more converts. It was a thought, in a different context, brought up this morning at a breakfast seminar I went along to, jointly hosted by Demos and the Private Equity Foundation, on national civic service.
David Willetts was the main speaker, along with a visiting representative from City Year, an American outfit who send an annual cohort of a thousand or so teenagers in striking red jackets into inner city schools, aiming to mentor and inspire children a little younger than themselves. My interest in this stems from the article I wrote with Frank Field a few months back, calling on this government (or the next) to institute a mandatory, national scheme for every young person. And it was Willetts’s point that such a programme risked ending up like the Church of England—national, tied to the state, and unloved. If your aim is to develop a national culture of service, as the Americans put it, better to do so from the bottom up—following the example of American Protestantism, where many churches (or, in his analogy, charities), compete with one another to win over the faithful.
Read more »
James Crabtree
Daddy: what did you do in the crunch?
In last month’s Prospect Frank Field and I wrote a piece calling for a gutsy, ruinously expensive and rather illiberal national programme of national service. It kicked off a bit of debate—and is still being debated, for instance here last week by Nick Spencer, head of the think tank Theos. In the next edition, out this Thursday, we’ll have some reactions too—from everyone from communitarian giant Amitai Etzioni (broadly supportive) to a 15-year-old letter writer (broadly dismissive.) But no one thinks it will actually happen, right?
Perhaps not. Relatively well sourced rumours reach Prospect towers that, indeed, the government is looking into a new programme, on exactly the lines we describe. For sure, it would be small in the first instance—perhaps numbering in the tens of thousands, concentrated in areas of deprivation and focused on prevention of the “summer of rage,” anticipated not just by Frank and I, but also by various senior coppers. But the gist would be the same: service programmes doing good works, providing—apologies, but it will doubtless be called this once its gone through DCSF—an “offer” to young people which is better than unemployment. Its not even that different from the Tory plans, which plan to start small before moving up to that oddest of aspirations a “universal voluntary” system. Watch this space.
If Number 10 need a little steel, they can look to the US, where President Obama continues to aim for as many targets as possible, where last week the house of representatives approved what the New York Times described as the “largest expansion of government-sponsored service programs since President John F. Kennedy first called for the creation of a national community service corps in 1963.” The US, even more than the UK, has a problem with the compulsory element of such a programme. (One story I didn’t manage to get into our essay concerned Andrei Cherny’s abortive attempt to get John Kerry to sign up for such a mandatory scheme, an attempt which didn’t last a minute longer than the first story accusing him of bringing back the draft. The inside story is well told in Joe Klein’s inside account of the campaign.) The Obama plan wants to set up “a national day of service” too. Why not do that here?
Tom Chatfield
March issue: on sale now
The cover story of our latest issue, written by our own James Crabtree and Frank Field MP, garnered significant media attention even before the edition hit the shelves, with coverage in the Mail, Sun, Sunday Times, Independent, Evening Standard and the BBC’s Daily Politics, among other places. In their piece, Crabtree and Field argue that the time is ripe for Britain to forge a positive legacy from the current crisis, and institute a scheme of compulsory civic service, to be undertaken by all young people at any time between the ages of 16-25.
It’s an idea that sounds, they acknowledge, both utopian and illiberal; that can be accused of being both expensive and unrealistic. And yet, they argue, there is both unprecedented support for such an idea in principle, even among the young (as a Prospect/YouGov poll of over 2,000 adults throughout England, Scotland and Wales reveals); and a pragmatic as well as a philosophical case to be made for its benefits, run along progressive rather than authoritarian lines, and drawing on the well-established lessons of organisations such as the Peace Corps, Americorps, Teach for America and CityYear in the US, or Britain’s Teach First and Duke of Edinburgh schemes. In a country that’s starting to reel from the effects of recession—and where fears that discontent may bubble over into civic disorder are increasingly rife—it’s a proposal which has struck a powerful chord.
Ultimately, though, the case Crabtree and Field make is a social and moral one: that this this scheme would offer 21st-century society something it lacks and needs—a sense of belonging, mutual achievement and pride, meaningful national identity and a motivating start in life. “The task facing Britain’s leaders today,” they argue, “is nothing less than beginning to bind the wounds of the post-industrial revolution.” As ever, let us know your own opinions below.
Tom Chatfield
As part of the research for our forthcoming cover story on the case for a national civic service in Britain, Prospect and YouGov polled over 2,000 people in England, Scotland and Wales to explore their hopes and fears for the recession, and their feelings towards a compulsory national civic service. You can now read a detailed analysis of the results on our website, and let us know your own thoughts below.
The pie chart, above left, represents one of the more dramatic findings. In answer to the question “will there be civil unrest in Britain?, 31 per cent (light red) said they believed this was likely to happen, and 6 per cent (dark red) said they believed it was certain to happen; 39 per cent (light blue) said it was likely not to happen, and 12 per cent (dark blue) that it was certain not to happen. 12 per cent (grey) responded that they “did not know.” That’s 37 per cent—over a third—of people across Britain thinking unrest is certain or likely this year; a finding that chimes uneasily with today’s Guardian report that the police are predicting a potential “Summer of rage” here, with a return to the kind of scenes last seen in the 1980s.
Tom Chatfield
A positive legacy for the recession
With our new-look March issue hitting news-stands on Thursday, it’s been a busy weekend for the authors of our next cover story, James Crabtree and Frank Field MP. In their essay, Crabtree and Field look at the results of a YouGov/Prospect poll of over 2,000 adults, released today, which reveals that 64 per cent of British adults (and a majority of young people themselves) now support a compulsory national citizenship programme in which all 16 to 25 year olds would be required to spend one year doing full-time, modestly paid community service. The poll also shows astonishingly widespread concerns about civil unrest and the long-term impact of the recession.
James spoke this morning on the Today programme, talking to NUS President Wesley Streeting about whether such a scheme could be a positive legacy of the recession; he also wrote a comment piece for the Independent this morning making the case for civic service; he and Frank Field also published a joint essay in the latest Sunday Times, which gives a foretaste of what you can expect from their full essay in Prospect:
Critics will say such a programme is illiberal, expensive and ineffectual; a tax on the young, and a way of funding state services on the cheap while sapping the strength from the existing voluntary sector. But this need not be true. Civic service would give focus to today’s fragmented efforts. All parents, at least, would have an incentive to help out: this would not be something that just happened to other people’s children.
With an annual intake of up to 500,000 teenagers, a compulsory programme would cost many billions. Some of this money could come out of education budgets, perhaps by postponing the plan to raise the school leaving age. The rest could be justified as part of the push to boost the economy out of recession. Franklin Roosevelt did something similar with his Civilian Conservation Corps – Roosevelt’s “tree army” – just weeks after taking office in 1933.
The full Prospect cover story will be free to read on our website from Thursday morning; you can also read a more detailed analysis of the poll on our website now, with plenty more additional analysis and responses in the pipeline.
Read 5 comments »
