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.
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