Government want students to do community service – and pay for it themselves
David Lammy, the Minister for Innovation, Universities and Skills, has this week come out in support of a scheme for compulsory civic service for students. Based on a report by the think tank Demos, university students would be required to complete 100 hours of community service in return for the state subsidy of their education in the form of loans and grants. Mr Lammy stated: “In a consumerist age young people need more opportunities to develop an ethic of service to others.”
Adding insult to injury, not only would students be expected to find extra time their busy lives to perform this mandatory service like the drunk drivers, vandals and petty thieves of this world, they are to pay for the privilege. The estimated £450 million cost of the scheme would be funded by raising the interest paid on student loans.
When questioned, Dr Sonia Sodha (who no doubt enjoyed a student grant) stated: “This will be a fair levy on those benefiting from state subsidised education”. Gordon Brown has recently put his weight behind similar initiatives suggesting he would like to see all young people complete 50 hours of community service before their 19th birthday, and with the Conservatives proposing similar schemes for sixteen year-olds this initiative could well get the go-ahead.
Whilst the hypocrisy of a generation that received free university education, wasted public money on wars of dubious legality and destroyed our country’s economy now expecting the nation’s undergraduates to perform civic service in return for our education is obvious, it is compounded in the case of the Rt. Hon. David Lammy. Not only did he receive state funding for an undergraduate degree at SOAS in London and a Masters at Harvard Law School, the MP for Tottenham has also claimed over £25,000 pounds in second home allowance despite being a London MP. That’s quite a lot more than the £8000 pounds my degree is costing the government, Mr Lammy.
What particularly irks me about this scheme, however, is the fact that the government sees fit to tell me what to do with my free time. I am a busy student in the 3rd year of a 4 year science degree. I have 2 full days of labs a week, another couple of days of lectures and that’s before I even begin to write lab reports, essays or presentations. In my free time I’m racing and training for a marathon and volunteer with the Red Cross, as well as helping to run a youth group for children with learning disabilities and working full time in the holidays. Last week, I did in fact spend about 20 hours helping prepare a stall and awareness campaign for World Aids Day, so no doubt I would be well on my way to my 100 hours and yet the idea of someone legislating to force me to do so just boils my blood.
P.S. I just can’t help thinking that perhaps if Mr Lammy spent less time telling the nation’s students what to do and partook in a little more studying himself he might have avoided his embarrassing performance on Celebrity Mastermind. He scored a grand total of 13 points, and let slip that he thinks Henry VII is the son of Henry VIII and that Marie Antoinette and her husband Pierre were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. If anyone’s interested in having a laugh the footage, look below:
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