So should foreigners volunteer at food banks?
Over the decades we’ve said that we think food banks are an excellent - even glorious - idea. So we used to have this problem whereby hungry people did not have food. The people who founded the Trussell Trust imported the idea of food banks. Excess - as in donated, about to go out of date, that sort of thing - food was collected and directed to the hungry. Problem solved - as we’ve said so many times, an excellent idea.
There’s a certain amount of pushback to our obviousness here. The very rise of food banks is seen as a condemnation of modern British society. Every new food bank is seen as evidence of the callousness - of neoliberalism and all that - of modern society when it’s quite obviously evidence of Burkean conservatism. The little platoons will get out there and solve problems and here’s the evidence that the little platoons do get out there and solve problems. Hungry people get fed. Glorious, excellent even.
So there’s that little dichotomy there. Folk solving problems is great. But there are those who insist that if a problem is being solved then this indicates that government should already have solved the problem.
Migrants will be forced to leave the UK unless they can show they are good citizens under Labour’s plans to toughen immigration rules to combat the threat of Reform.
Foreign citizens will have to volunteer in their community,
Will volunteering at a food bank count toward this requirement? Is making up for the failure of the British state one of those things that qualifies you to be a Briton? Alternatively, how Burkean do you have to be to be a Briton?
All of which is most fun, obviously. But there is then that rather grander question. How did we end up with a polity where it’s a Labour Home Secretary that is actually the Burkean conservative insistent upon the power of the Little Platoons?
Tim Worstall