British society needs all the help it can get
Social participation has plummeted, leaving young people lonely and disconnected — time for a volunteering revolution
William Hague
So, let’s roll back all the rules and bureaucratic costs that make volunteering such an expensive proposition.
The big question is whether we can ever brace ourselves for mandatory service.
How did I know that Billy Hague wasn’t going to say that?
Ooh, Young Men!
By William Hague
Meanwhile, in the Grauniad: “But some experts and grassroots organisations have warned that the goal of the Big Help Out to inspire the next generation of volunteers is compromised by its explicit links to the monarchy.
“I would have liked to volunteer but by making the event part of the coronation, I can’t do it,” said Quamina, founder of Dope Black Queers.
“The monarchy is the very antithesis of what my charity is about – many of the difficulties we face in society are a direct result of colonialism and the monarchy, both historically and how they operate now.”
Shanelle Webb, who runs the Soul Shack, a Black and youth-led social enterprise in the London borough of Lambeth, agreed that linking the Big Help Out to the drive to find more volunteers was problematic.
“I think a lot of my service users would be disappointed in my charity if we took part,” she said.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/02/volunteering-in-sharp-decline-in-england-since-covid-pandemic
Two charities I won’t be supporting.
Anon – oh wait, you’re not joking, that’s real. Just like BBC Pidgin, which seems like you’re in Alf Garnett’s nightmare, but is also very stupidly real.
I’m sure King Sausagefingers and his offspring will have an… interesting, but not long, relationship with the new non-English majority the British government has planted in England.
They might want to start quietly moving some assets to New Zealand and Canada now, before Labour gets back in and starts copypastaing retarded American racial politics they saw on Twitter.
Two charities I won’t be supporting.
Don’t count on it. Go look at their accounts & see where their funding comes from.
It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? Enforced servitude. Scratch a politician and you will always find a nasty authoritarian scumbag underneath.
The best help that British society can ask for is to hang all the politicians and civil servants.
I assume there’s a bit of an undercount by the survey: people volunteering in Ukraine not being available and all.
Difficult to work out whether Billy Boy’s a communists or a fascist. Think we can all agree he’s a cvnt.
Twat Mekon tears himself away from all that heterosexual sex he’s been having with Ffion to warn:
Something quite fundamental and deeply disturbing is going on here, with implications for almost every aspect of public policy. If we do not raise levels of participation, volunteering and mixing with each other it will be increasingly difficult to level-up poorer areas, improve social mobility, maintain social cohesion, prevent a growing divide between elites and the rest, make common sacrifices in future crises — and there will be plenty of those, mark my words — or even maintain basic voluntary services.
You don’t say, genius.
Maybe should have thought of that before allowing another 10 million immigrants in, with rapefugee hotels now established in every major town across the land. Immigration – especially low quality immigration – is the acid that dissolves social cohesion.
“Why are Albanians and Somalis uninterested in picking up their own litter? Why are young women now afraid of walking the streets?” – it’s a mystery for the ages, innit.
I shared an office with Hague in the 80s when we were both working for separate consultancies on different workstreams to deliver a project for a restructure of a major listed UK group.
Long story short, the fvcker lied in a main board meeting when it became obvious in his presentation to the board that he had made a fundamental mistake in his computer modelling and in effect blamed his mistake on my consultancy and so, by implication, me. I wasn’t at that meeting and a member of the board told me what had happened.
He’s an unprincipled, lying, backstabbing, cvntish cvnt. All ideal character traits for a Tory Lord of course.
Our new Nato allies, the Finns, are enthusiasts for national service. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, remarked recently on how much he would love to have the reserves this creates.
Are Wallace & the RUSI barking? Finland envisages the possibility of combating a Russian incursion on its own soil. So its conscription is part of giving Finns the means of individual self defence. The UK military mostly does expeditionary warfare. If it came down to fighting on British soil, it’d be all over before it started given your population density. Any erosion of UK internal logistics would have you starving within a week. So what are you going to do with a conscript army? Use it for cannon fodder á la Russia in Ukraine. You have enough problems providing the logistic support in theatre the military you’ve got needs. It’s a stretch even being able to afford to arm it.
Although I can see one chink of daylight. There’s a lot to be said for an armed citizenry. If they give you weapons, you don’t have to give them back do you?
He’s an unprincipled, lying, backstabbing, cvntish cvnt. All ideal character traits for a
Tory Lordpolitician of course.FTFY
Great ideas have been floated — a National Volunteer Reserve, a National Nature Service, a Biosecurity Citizens Army, a new online national portal for volunteering opportunities — and many more.
Translation: we are going to need all the lions we can get.
BiS – Are Wallace & the RUSI barking?
Yes?
Finland envisages the possibility of combating a Russian incursion on its own soil. So its conscription is part of giving Finns the means of individual self defence.
Yarp, Finnish military planning is based around the very high likelihood they’d be quickly overrun by Russia in the event of war.
At that point, there’s no good options for Finland, which is why it’s better not to have a war with Russia if it can be avoided.
This is what Finland’s traditional post-WW2 neutrality was supposed to achieve, but Chesterton’s Fence isn’t exclusively English.
Anyway, The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, remarked recently on how much he would love to have the reserves this create – I’m sure he would. But like the Coronation – who’s interested? Trying to conscript today’s British passport holding Yoof would be a hilarious, and very educational, disaster for the British government.
No, you muppets, Tyrone and Mohammed are not going to fight your wars for you.
Mandatory volunteering? Cue Inego Montoya – IDTTWMWYTID
> we can ever brace ourselves for mandatory service
I like the way it morphed from volunteering to conscription.
‘Don’t count on it. Go look at their accounts & see where their funding comes from.’
Indeed. Bail for Immigration Detainees has received financial support from Children in Need. Wonder how many people who gave money to Children in Need expected and wanted that to happen. Then of course a lot of these progressive nests also hook themselves up to a nice bit of taxpayer funding.
What the govt should do is forced registration of all drones in private hands, so that they can be conscripted to drop grenades on invading Russki/Chinese/Islamic Republic of West Yorkshire tanks.
Hague seems to have access to the same hallucinagenics as Max Hastings, Simon Jenkins, Monbiot etc etc..
Calls for military conscription in this country are always about social engineering and the belief that the military will instil some discipline and self discipline in the conscripts. Tories like the idea because they believe it will be good for law & order, Labour hate it because they’ve always feared a large military on home soil.
I eventually got a Swiss friend to accept that their conscription was more about social engineering.
Aside from the excellent comments above (particularly Steve’s “Immigration is the acid that dissolves social cohesion”), the truth is that the private sector has increasingly crowded-out the voluntary sector.
Tesco delivers food to the infirm. Uber transports patients to hospital appointments. IKEA provides cheap furniture; Facebook Marketplace provides effectively free furniture. Online second-hand shopping is killing charity shops. Online marketing & fundraising is more efficient than door-to-door leafleting and street chugging (charity-mugging).
On the supply side, it has never been easier to find work. Charity shop work used to be a good stepping stone into real work; but now you can skip straight into a job.
The charity sector is long overdue some consolidation.
So what are you going to do with a conscript army? Use it for cannon fodder á la Russia in Ukraine.
That seems like an excellent idea. Send the nation’s most vibrant undesirables to run at the Russian guns. Or send them to Somalia. Or Yemen. Anywhere we can help really.
“These trends have become particularly pronounced as more of our lives have moved online, with an added push from Covid-19. In eight years, the proportion of people who volunteer in their communities each month has fallen from 44 per cent to 34 per cent — that’s more than four million fewer adults choosing to participate in some way.”
I don’t think this reflects the truth. It reflects how the numbers get counted, no doubt Proper Charities and Official Volunteer Bureaucrats.
There’s a ton of volunteer stuff happening on Facebook groups. But it’s not official charity, it might not even be a weekly thing, maybe even only a few hours, but it’s happening. Like I’ve offered to do a talk to the local WI about crypto currency. Does that count as volunteering? But if someone asked if I did volunteering, I might say no.
BoM4,
Why do WI women need to know about crypto currency, so they can pay the scammer who tells them he as a video of them masturbating while watching perverted pornography?
BiND,
“Calls for military conscription in this country are always about social engineering and the belief that the military will instil some discipline and self discipline in the conscripts. Tories like the idea because they believe it will be good for law & order, Labour hate it because they’ve always feared a large military on home soil.”
The problem is that the military won’t. There’s a myth about National Service that it whipped people into shape. That was certainly not my father’s and uncle’s experience. Their experience is that beyond basic training, they got left to loaf around. Because the problem for the military is that didn’t benefit them to train a load of people who would be gone in a year.
The same thing would happen for a non-military version. It would be a whizzo scheme from a May/Cameron/Rishi twerp to sound good. Everyone below would just do the minimum amount of effort not to get fired, except that they’d polish up a place and make sure that the most committed and smiling kids were put in front of the King to greet him as he visited for the cameras. Every talented nerd would try and leave the country to work in pharma labs in Germany or software companies in the USA, rather than waste their time on whatever of-the-moment political thing is (probably supporting the NHS).
@ BoM4
I think that you are right about it being how you count “volunteers”: I don’t normally think of myself as part of the “Charity sector” but I occasionally respond to requests for help when it requires negligible skills or just mathematical ones (e.g. raking the long jump pit, marshalling a cross-country course or Club treasurer).
If they found that fewer people were volunteering during lock-down that could be because there were fewer opportunities/requests for help as many activities were cancelled. Someone is picking on a pair of extreme values of a variable as if each was a norm to create a headline when comparing the two.
“the volunteer revolution” will be mandatory.
“In eight years, the proportion of people who volunteer in their communities each month has fallen from 44 per cent to 34 per cent — that’s more than four million fewer adults choosing to participate in some way.””
Hmm, I wonder what proportion of the millions of new arrivals in the UK volunteer to help people? We keep hearing that organisations like the blood service can’t get enough non-native blood types, what does that say about the propensity for immigrants (and their offspring) to put something back into society?
We keep hearing that organisations like the blood service can’t get enough non-native blood types, what does that say about the propensity for immigrants (and their offspring) to put something back into society?
Dunno.
Non-native blood types?
Propensity for giving back among a demographic?
All sounds a bit racist…
You’ll never get a true De Toqueville associations thing going in the UK because the government itself will not leave room for it. If they see activity outside their influence they will ban it or regulate it (but I repeat myself). Or take it over. Examples abound. And if it’s not the govt it will be the creeping left charity sector, charity as a political statement.
What on earth could possibly have happened in the last 3 years to reduce social participation, not just by young people, but by people in all age groups?
Can’t quite put my finger on it.
Who could possibly have foreseen that increased ‘diversity’, thanks to third-world immigration, destroys social cohesion?
Anyone with an ounce of sense, thus ruling out our Establishment masters.
@ Jonathan
You assume that the Establishment wants to preserve social cohesion which rarely appears to be “woke”
They say: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity…”, but I’m increasingly coming round to the idea that malice IS the explanation.