James Crabtree writes a long article, which is worth reading, following up on his idea of compulsory civic service in the light of recent work by DEMOS.
I have a few philosophical problems with the idea of compulsory civic service, not least the idea that it is the State’s responsibility actively to define what its citizens should do, rather than to prohibit what they ought not to do.
That said, James’s piece makes me a little better-disposed to the proposal, not least because it sites it within the liberal republican tradition (the idea, not to be too wonkish) that this service is part of a range of obligations the citizen has to the political community to which he belongs, as in Switzerland, the Italian city-state republics, and so on.
There is still a problem for me, though, in the idea of compulsion. Are we really going to force people to undertake this service and send them to prison if they don’t? After all, a fine would just be used by the well-off to ‘buy out’ of six months when they could be working in the City or bumming round Europe on Daddy’s millions.
Perhaps an alternative approach might be – in the civic republican tradition – to prevent people from taking up their civic rights of voting, participating in juries, etc., until they had completed the service. Given the level of political disengagement, though, how many people would just not bother?
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