Free labour? At whose expense?

Volunteering sounds like a thoroughly worthy occupation. It enables people with the time to do so to make a generous contribution to their community or some charitable purpose close to their heart. In doing so it benefits the organisation, its beneficiaries and the volunteer. What is not to like?

David Cameron started out his disastrous premiership propounding the Big Society, in which everyone would contribute to the communities in which they lived through volunteering, with these apparent benefits. This would enable government and councils to outsource public services to charities deemed to be specialists in their field, with savings to the public purse. Unfortunately, he accompanied this policy with swingeing cuts to Local Authority budgets, which had the result that funding for community projects and charities was severely curtailed, such that those which might have had the capacity to carry out contracts for services lost this.

However, the cuts to State delivery continued and public services were either digitised or simply reduced. Thousands of competent civil servants and council staff lost their jobs. Citizens were gradually deprived of more and more services on which they had relied. Many, appalled that parks and libraries were to close, stepped up to volunteer and keep them going. Others, seeing the plight of neighbours impoverished by the reductions in welfare, started and ran food banks, now helping sustain over 1m citizens of this country. More yet, often frail themselves, are driven by lack of alternatives within their compass, to act as full-time carers for their ageing loved ones. What a triumph for the Big Society.

So before accepting that volunteering role, consider whose job it used to be or should be; what skills and training it ought to have; and whether by taking it, you are helping the diminution of the State or local services on which we are all entitled to rely. Volunteering can be a good thing but should surely not supplant the livelihoods of fellow citizens, especially by a less professional alternative. Maybe that energy which would be used in volunteering could be devoted to demanding that the State does its job.

Activists - what drives them?

What on earth makes thousands work in their own time and often at their own cost in the name of politics?

It is perhaps quite understandable that people should stand for election at whatever level of the democratic pyramid. They may seek the Viagra of power. They may seek to change society for the better. They may simply be ambitious. But at the end, there is a reward, in the form of remuneration, celebrity, influence, satisfaction at outcome, even a better society.

But what of the volunteer foot-soldiers who work tirelessly to put them in this happy state? What do they get? Why do they/we do it,  for there is no glamour and not a little stress involved in cold-calling on the phone, in unwelcome door-knocking, in carrying through the 19th century form-filling or in raising funds which may serve little purpose, for candidates with no hope of victory? They travel at their own expense. They spend their own leisure time devoted to boring, repetitive tasks often in the face of insults. They are largely anonymous both within their party and the outside world, so expect no reward or recognition.

For some, it may simply be a hobby, a past-time linked to their political allegiance but this is surely insufficiently powerful a pull to explain the sheer number of volunteers and hours devoted to the campaign trail. This can surely best be explained by the values they see in the politics. Being myself of the Left, I certainly promote Labour because I want to live in a fairer, less selfish society. How Tories explain their values I leave to them - this is beyond comprehension [unless malice is a value]. But a vision of a better society must surely be the driver for the great unpaid armies currently at work. Let us hope we get one.