Don’t allow government to nationalise the little people

John Harris in The Guardian bemoans how the youth clubs of today simply don’t exist:

If you want a vivid example, consider a drastic loss from millions of young lives that is still bafflingly overlooked. During the first 10 years of the spending cuts that began in 2010, councils’ funding for youth services in England and Wales suffered a real-terms cut of 70%. By 2023, about 1,200 publicly run youth centres had closed, and more than 4,500 youth workers had lost their jobs. Villages, towns and cities still bear the scars: empty buildings that look just as forlorn as any shuttered library or Sure Start centre.

There is an answer to this. To be found in a reference Harris makes:

In 1958, the Tory government led by Harold Macmillan commissioned a watershed report about youth services, put together by an aristocratic social reformer called Lady Diana Albemarle.

That report opening the History with:

In 1939 the Board of Education called the Youth Service into being with the issue of a single circular. This could not have happened but for what had gone before. The voluntary organisations had been labouring in the cause of youth, some of them for well over half-a-century. Some of the local education authorities had been trying to help and co-ordinate the voluntary work in their areas through juvenile organisations committees. And in the 1930s the State itself had tried to promote social and physical training and recreation. What the Board did at the start Of the war was to bring these three parties, State, education authority and voluntary organisation, into a working arrangement to which the term “Youth Service” has ever since been given.

The government nationalised the provision of those “youth services”. The very things that had been done by those associations of Burke’s little people. The Scouts and Guides, Brownies, Cubs, Woodland Folk, every church (and Church) in the country had youth groups as did many other organising groups. Then we added bureaucrats and budgets.

So that when government decided that other things were better places to spend money so other things had the money spent upon them. Having eviscerated those groups set up and run by the little platoons.

Should youth clubs be defunded? Not particularly - but our insistence is rather different. By nationalising what the people do for themselves then what was previously done by the people becomes subject to national politics not local desire. And national politics will, at some point, decide not to meet local desire - we insist upon that as a certainty.

The correct reaction to “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” is to check the definition of “vermin” on that shotgun licence, vermin control for the use of.

Tim Worstall