'Staying at home doing nothing will be a thing of the past' - Tories plan boot camps

[halliburtonsux]

'Individuals will be expected to report to the centre every day for an intensive training programme.' Tories plan boot camps for jobless youths --Automatic referrals if out of work for three months --Companies and voluntary groups to run centres 26 May 2008 A future Conservative government will bring in "boot camps" for unemployed young people aged between 18 and 21 who refuse to take a job, Chris Grayling, the party's welfare spokesman, will say tomorrow. Grayling plans to ask private sector companies and voluntary organisations to run the intensive training centres. Individuals will be expected to report to the centre every day for an intensive training programme. Grayling will say: "We plan to introduce much tougher rules for young people under the age of 21 claiming jobseeker's allowance. For this group, the welfare to work process will start much earlier. There will be employment 'boot camps' and community work programmes for those who don't find a job. Staying at home doing nothing will be a thing of the past." (Work camps - so corpora-terrorists get free slave labor?)

[Kutjara]

1. Just the inevitable next step in Britain's inexorable progress...

...toward becoming the World's largest concentration camp. The erosion of basic liberties that has characterized the UK during the past 20 years should serve as an object lesson in what government and business are capable of doing in the face of an apathetic electorate.

[halliburtonsux]

6. 'UK - world's largest concentration camp' --well, after the US.

We're one (Fort Detrick-generated) bioterror alert away from a complete police state. The KBR camps are already built.
See: KBR awarded $385M Homeland Security contract for U.S. detention centers 24 Jan 2006.

[Kutjara]

10. It's a close race, but I think they're slightly in the lead.

- Four million CCTV cameras.
- The average Londoner is caught on camera 300 times per day.
- No right to silence (abolished about five years ago).
- Random stop and search, without requirement of due cause.
- National ID card.
- National DNA database for all citizens (proposed).
- ISPs required to keep copies of all customer communications for three years (proposed, current requirement is six months).
- Police can demand ISPs hand over customer communications without warrant.
- Failure to provide computer or account passwords to police is a criminal offense (penalty: two years in jail).
- 10,000 speed cameras on UK roads.
- Owner of cars caught speeding must provide name of person using their car, or be prosecuted themselves (loss of presumption of innocence).
- Abolition of trial by jury (proposed).

These and other abominations motivated my decision to leave the UK two years ago, after more than 20 years of protesting, marching, writing, arguing, speechifying, broadcasting, and raging against the destruction of freedoms and rights that generations of brave people have fought and died to secure.

[Echo In Light]

23. Thanks for listing all the firsthand specifics. Ugh...

[Zywiec]

24. Was anything every built with your referenced contract?

Let's see your link is from January 2006 about a one-year contract. Was this extended?

:shrug:

[LeftishBrit]

17. That's an exaggeration

Thatcherism is evil; but it isn't on the level of a concentration camp. I have known survivors of real concentration camps.

This is not part of some 'inexorable progress' to a 'concentration camp'; but a reversal of limited progress. It is a return to Thatcherite policy of treating poverty and unemployment as punishable offences - in itself a return to 19th century attitudes and policies.

And let's also remember: this is the policy of the OPPOSITION Conservative Party. They are not in office now; certainly won't be for the next two years; and if we don't elect them then, this won't happen.

[pnwmom]

20. You're right. This is an overreaction to what essentially is a workfare

program, not Hitler youth or a concentration camp, or even a boot camp.

[Kutjara]

25. First of all...

...the term "concentration camp" is wider than merely the Nazi camps we all know of. In fact, it was the British who invented the concentration camp, to inter those who opposed them during the Boer War. They again used a concentration camp on Cyprus at the end of WWII, as a staging post for the settlement of Israel. My wife's great uncle was a Polish Jew who had the unenviable distinction of being imprisoned in both a Nazi and a British camp. He once told me that the physical conditions in the British camp were actually worse, but he didn't mind because he at least knew he wouldn't be killed.

The "concentration camp" I'm talking about is one in which the inmates are watched 24 hours a day, their basic rights are severely curtailed, their mail and electronic communications are intercepted, they require state sanction (in the form of ID cards) to engage in economic activity, they are subject to search and seizure without cause, and (if the Tories get their way) their labor is taken from them by force. If you dislike the term "concentration camp" then call it a "surveillance state," but that rather underplays the strong coercive element in the whole thing.

As for a "reversal of limited progress," when in the past did we have four million CCTV cameras watching our every move? When in the past did we have to carry National ID cards to secure basic services? When in the past could we be investigated by the police, and then not even tell our relatives we're under investigation without committing another crime? What we're seeing now is not a return to "the bad old days," but something entirely new, something for which we have no precedent (outside of the works of Orwell and Huxley, perhaps).

Some of the current measures are from the past, of course. The distant past. Forced labor, no right to silence under questioning, presumption of guilt rather than innocence: all these and more are from a Medieval past I don't think any of us want to revisit.

I wonder how much more HMG has to do before people in Britain stop watching Pop Idol and start noticing.

[LeftishBrit]

26. We have technology we didn't have in the past...

but don't you remember the 'sus' laws? Low-tech abuse of civil liberties is just as bad as hi-tech abuse of civil liberties.

Incidentally, citizens are beginning to use surveillance technology as a defense against surveillance technology! I know people whose Tomtoms in their cars include not only the capacity to find routes and give directions, but to discover and inform the driver about speed cameras en route!

[Kutjara]

28. As a former "teenage rebel" I remember the sus laws well.

Sometimes it seems as if I spent half my teens and early twenties with my hands on a wall, being searched by some rozzer or other.

I'm not sure I agree that low-tech abuse is equal to high tech-abuse, though. Let me qualify that, it is certainly equal in intent and morality, but technology enables abuse to be systematized in ways never before possible. What before were patchily-enforced local efforts are fast becoming industrialized on a national scale. Even in the days when "IRA terror" was being used to justify every state excess, the police were limited to abusing only those people they could physically catch on a given day (by pulling a handful of demonstrators out of a crowd, for example). Now, the police can just sit back and let the CCTV do all the work. Add face recognition technology and a National ID card database to the mix, and you've got the recipe for oppression on a grand scale, with a minimum of resources.

It's not a huge leap to imagine the national CCTV database being made available to corporations for the purposes of employee vetting and tracking. "Where were you this afternoon, Wilkins?" "At a sales meeting, sir." "<turning to CCTV footage on his laptop> Really? And what exactly were you selling to that young woman in room 212 of the Strand Palace Hotel?"

It's somewhat heartening that individuals are using technology to try to circumvent some of the restrictions (I have a UK GATSO database in my Garmin GPS for my holidays back home), but it's going to take far more organized resistance to stop this trainwreck.

[Selatius]

2. That sounds like Hitler Youth. The UK probably already has the largest CCTV camera network in Europe

It's not enough that everywhere there is a camera watching you. Now, your kids are going to boot camp? And what guarantees are there that they won't be indoctrinated while in the camps?

This is just a ploy to flood the labor market and drive down wages to pander to UK's corporate elite who want more exploitable labor instead of actually having to compete for scarce labor resources.

If people aged 18 to 21 aren't taking jobs, maybe it's because the employers are offering shit for wages and benefits and terrible hours?

[LeftishBrit]

19. It's not like Hitler Youth. It's a form of what I believe you call 'workfare'

And it's not happening now. Similar things happened under Thatcher; and it might happen again if enough of my fellow-citizens are fools enough to vote for the Tories in two years' time,

[lurky]

3. England already tried this 200 years ago.

Foucault wrote about it in "Madness and Civilization". It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Maybe the Tories should read a little history before they propose repeating it.

BTW, what a nice society when you intentionally maintain a certain unemployment level in order to keep wages down, then criminalize those same people who are unemployed.

I bet the bosses would love this. Their employees will work twice as hard if they have to worry about going to jail if they lose their job. Talk about productivity boosts!


(Edit: It's been ages since I read that thing, so don't hold me to any specific details...)

[Art_from_Ark]

7. 200 years ago, they were busy fighting Napoleon

and building their empire, and they had various ways to keep the unemployed from being idle and free ("Join the army/navy, emigrate to Australia/Canada, work in a workhouse, or go to debtors' prison"). I think to some Tories, those might be the "good old days".

[lurky]

11. Please see my disclaimer about details.

However, it has been tried, and it has failed miserably.

[LeftishBrit]

18. We tried it in the 1980s - or rather, Thatcher did

The Youth Opportunities Scheme (YOP) and its successors. Very similar to this.

Actually it would not have been so bad if it was real job training for jobs that actually existed. But it was just a way of getting people off the streets and the unemployment rolls, getting a bit of cheap labour, and making unemployment even more humiliating than it was already as a deterrent to supposed 'scroungers'.

Anyway, this proposal is nothing new.

[lonestarnot]

4. Slave labor. We do that too, in the industrial prison complex,.

[pnwmom]

13. It' not slave labor.

It's for youth who want to claim a "jobseeker's allowance" -- in other words, they will receive the allowance if they get job training.

[lonestarnot]

5. dual post.

[MisterP]

8. Guardian link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/may/26/conservatives.welfare
And New Labor and the DLC will be right there, patting themselves on the back on how they've "grown out" of the scary Bennites or the dirty New Deal/Great Society idealism.

[tom_paine]

9. That's some creepy Bushie shit. However, the Brits have consistently demonstrated a desire to

remain free that simply dwarfs the apathetic accomodationalism and appeasement that characterizes we Imperial Subjects of Amerika.

Does that make them perfect? Hell no, and as has been mentioned, their nation is almost as much of a surveillance state as ours or China.

But there is something, and I have seen it in the BBC and elsewhere, that suggest that the Brits will not go down as quietly as easily as we have.

Maybe I am wrong, and Britain is an Inverted Totalitarianism just like us, filed with overworked, underpaid, exhausted, underinsured, confused cowardly fools who would gladly give away what few freedoms we have left for $2/gallon gas.

We shall see. My faith in the Brits, much more sturdy than my faith in my fellow Imperial Amerikan Subjects, leads me to hope this will resoundingly fail.

Of course, that discrepancy may simply be because I have not visited Britain, so I am viewing these things I think I see from afar and through a media filter. They may be just as horrible and deserving of totalitarianism as we are.

Time will tell.

[pnwmom]

12. Are we overreacting here? From my reading, it seems like this program

will be required for "young people under the age of 21 claiming jobseeker's allowance."

Is it so terrible to require that youth seeking some sort of unemployment benefit agree to participate in a job training program?

[Selatius]

15. It's corporate welfare simply because it uses gov't funds for something private companies do now.

If private companies are in desperate need for labor, they can pay for the cost of finding and hiring employees themselves rather than externalizing the cost onto the rest of society. If young employees are offered shit wages and McJobs, don't expect many of them to be jumping at such opportunities.

If they wanted to cut down on the number of people who seek unemployment insurance checks, simply require that they work a job for a period of time before allowing them to qualify.

If they wanted to copy America and get real miserly, then simply give unemployment insurance only in cases where workers are laid-off and not fired or quit. Then, after 26 weeks like it currently is in the US, cut off the unemployment checks cold turkey and let them sink or swim in the labor market despite the fact they were laid off by their employer.

What the Tories are offering is a watered-down version of Taylorism where every minute of every life is regimented for profit maximization of the few. That kind of philosophy died with the invention of social democracy and labor unions.

[pnwmom]

21. In that sense, some might say that national healthcare would be corporate welfare

because it would use government funds for something private companies do now.

[Selatius]

29. That argument doesn't fly. If that were true, corporations wouldn't oppose single-payer health care.

In point of fact, they vehemently oppose single-payer health insurance. You're confusing an argument based on whether it is a human right to get access to health care and the argument that government should work to the benefit of business at the expense of everyone else.

People who are pushing single-payer health care are not pushing that because it means corporations don't have to go to the trouble of negotiating a health care plan for employees with insurance companies. They are pushing single-payer health care because they feel it is an issue of human rights and whether any individual has a right to access to health care.

They are not the same arguments, and I am frankly surprised anyone here would try to argue that it is.

[pnwmom]

30. My husband's large corporation now supports national health care,

whether it is managed by insurance companies or a single-payer government plan.

More and more corporations do, because running health plans is becoming a burden on all companies.

[Selatius]

35. Ask him if they support single-payer health insurance or the watered down variety.

When I say watered down, I'm talking about forcing people to buy private health insurance like in Massachusetts, sort of like with mandatory auto insurance laws. (That would be a classic example of corporate welfare, making people buy a product from a private entity, such as health insurance) Your husband's company would be rare indeed if it unabashedly supports French-style single-payer health insurance.

Lots of corporations now whitewash themselves as being in favor of universal health insurance. So what? Doesn't necessarily mean they support massive government intervention in the markets, since it sets a bad precedent for other sectors of the economy that the government may intervene next, like oil refineries. In the case of single-payer, taking over the whole market and consolidating it and kicking out all health insurance corporations.

The business community is in favor of some kind of universal health care, but if you sat them down and told them the government was going to enter the market and kick out all private health insurance corporations and replace it with government-run single-payer health insurance, a lot of them get leery because few of them like the idea of a government taking profit out of an entire market. It's the same situation when Medicare was first proposed and then passed, despite opposition from the business community.

The point of the matter is I could give a crap if they support or oppose single-payer health insurance for monetary reasons. I support it as an issue of humanity, not because corporations support it, and I'm pretty sure at this point few Fortune 500 companies would support single-payer, and it is a completely separate issue from what the Tories are doing with these boot camps because of different motivation. The Tory proposal failed in the 1980s with Thatcher; it failed two centuries ago when they tried it then, and it will fail again today. The biggest difference between single-payer health insurance and proposing what the Tories are doing is that with the Tories, this is completely un-needed and unjustified on any moral equivalent to single-payer health care.

There are easier and cheaper ways to cut down on unemployment insurance fraud than these idiotic boot camps such as adopting a more punitive system of unemployment insurance, like what the US practices. These boot camps are an expensive subsidy to private corporations with questionable results for the citizens who have to pay for it. Drop it. It's Taylorism reanimated, and it is a tired and worn philosophy from an age where workers were treated like garbage. It's a loser of a proposal.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

14. awww... poor chavs

[LeftishBrit]

16. Sounds like a retunr to the glorious days of Thatcher!

And let's not forget: as moderate as Cameron may seem or even be, there are plenty of RW Tories in the wings - like this Grayling character- prepared to impose sado-Thatcherism on us all again!

[LiberalEsto]

22. England may have won WW2

but it looks like the Nazi system is alive and kicking

[Freddie Stubbs]

27. Sounds like the Civilian Conservation Corps from the New Deal

[Kingofalldems]

33. It is nothing like the Civilian Conservation Corps--Mr. Dems do it too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
Another nice try though. The republican sight is down the street----------

[Initech]

31. Correct me if I'm wrong but isnt this slavery?

:shrug:

[The2ndWheel]

32. The machine churns along

Wonderful.

[xchrom]

34. fascinating conversation here -- kick