It is difficult to fault Cameron’s idea of a national volunteer force. While the Labour Party was forced to spend today defending the National Insurance hike, the Tories were able to seize the intiative with a genuinely far-sighted proposal. All the more galling for the government that this idea has been rattling around in Labour circles for at least a year. Cameron has stolen Labour’s clothes on this just as he did on co-operatives.
David Lammy will be seething. His ideas for compulsory civic service were promoted in the pages of Prospect a year ago. He has been lobbying within the Labour Party for the policy for considerably longer.
Unfortunately, like so many other good ideas proposed during the Brown era, this one just got stuck in the system and Cameron simply nicked it from under the Prime Minister’s nose.
Labour supporters should be very worried about this. It is a sign of a properly-functioning opposition that it can move more quickly than a lumbering decadent government.
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