for teenagers," enthused the Guardian.
As always it pays socialists to be wary of anything praised by the mealy-mouthed Guardian.
Labour's scheme is a timid rehash of previous failed 'jobcreation' packages, like the Callaghan government's notorious and misnamed 'Youth Opportunities Programme'.
Summed up by Sir Gordon Borrie of Labour's ludicrously mis-named 'Commission for Social Justice' as "a form of civilian national service", the new scheme is in fact a direct attack on working class youth. While national service involved universal conscription, the new Labour scheme would almost exclusively affect the poorest layers of youth leaving school without qualifications: the more prosperous layers of the middle class who could afford to steer clear of the benefits system would not be drafted.
The plan is a cowardly retreat from a properly-resourced programme of useful public works. Some of its newer features have been shamelessly cribbed from the out-and-out wage-cutting programme of the Clinton administration in the USA.
For a pretend 'wage' of just £50 per week, youth would be encouraged to 'volunteer' for a 3-month stint on a variety of "jobs', such as caring for children or the elderly, or 'environmental' schemes such as clearing inner-city waste ground.
Labour's new gimmick is to suggest that completing a 3month tour of duty in the Citizens' Service would entitle the still jobless youth to 'credits' - £500 vouchers, theoretically exchangeable for further training or possibly even for housing.
But in the absence of any promise of a job at the end of the 3- month slog or even after another round of extra training, and in today's dire shortage of public sector housing, with Labour fighting shy of any pledge to boost the housing budget, it is hard to see how young people could take either of these promises very seriously.
Even Sir Gordon's most optimistic projection is that "half the long term unemployed taking part in community service would go on to find a job".
Press gang
What Labour's leaders have steered well clear of is explaining exactly how far this really would be a 'voluntary' scheme, and how far youth would be press-ganged into ing' by the threatened withdrawal of benefits.
Indeed Labour is still in confusion as to whether or not it would restore the entitlement of 16 and 17-year old school leavers to the social security benefits snatched from them by John Major's brutal gang. Even government figures show 76,000 Timid Labour has let the Tories set the political agenda on taxing the rich school leavers have so far been cut adrift by the Tories with no job, no training and no income support to keep them alive.
But instead of seizing upon this as an issue on which to wage a real fight, Labour's front bench are so frightened of promising to spend any money or raise any taxation from the rich, that they retreated like startled rabbits from the issue as soon as the Tories spotted the weakness of their stance and asked the logical question.
So this again questions the credibility of the Citizens' Service scheme. If it is genuinely voluntary, then there will inevitably be thousands of justifiably cynical and disaffected youth who will opt out.
Will Labour restore their right to income support? Or will they copy the Tories in seeking to compel jobless youth into phoney 'training' schemes by withholding benefits?
Another problem affects even wider layers of workers. If the youth who do volunteer are given real rather than pretend jobs, whether in the public or private sector, then inevitably the danger arises that they become simply a low-paid substitute for employing an adult worker at a viable adult wage.
Labour argues that to avoid this problem the scheme would be carefully run in consultation with the unions. But with the TUC and other unions now explicitly prioritising 'job security' above pay, we have little grounds to feel reassured by this.
The harsh reality is that either the youth on Citizens' Service would be lumbered on poverty pay doing marginal jobs which nobody would otherwise do, or they will become low-paid skivvies filling in for the absence of properly-funded health care and social services.
Worst way
Indeed it is hard to think of any worse way to provide continuing care for children or the frail elderly than to draft in an unwilling, cynical and transient workforce of untrained and unskilled youth, forced to turn up on pain of losing benefits, and who know their maximum span of work is three months.
While it would neaten up the unemployment figures, Citizens' Service would do nothing but stoke up increased fires of resentment and alienation among youth whom the labour movement already scandaling on massive programme of useful public works.
Instead of rewarding reluctant youth for undertaking babysitting tasks by offering 'credits' for housing, why not employ them in building schemes to build new council houses and flats for themselves and for the tens of thousands of families that need them? The money for this is already trapped by Tory laws in council bank accounts.
Instead of fobbing off young people with slave wages for delivering community care to the elderly, Labour should pledge a massive expansion of proper community care, offering proper wages, and training thousands of school leavers for useful careers as health workers.
Instead of pussy-footing with environmental questions, why won't Labour pledge itself to invest in a massive expansion of public transport and other infrastructure projects, employing adults and youth at proper rates of pay?
The answer is simple enough: Labour's right wing modernisers, in the ascendant, are trapped in an unspoken economic consensus with the Tories. Having rejected any hint of socialism, even bold reformist policies such as taxing the rich have now been ruled out in the quest for electoral respectability.
Too frightened to challenge the logic of the market system, Blair and Labour's right wing leadership team wind up offering no radical solutions: and by abandoning radicalism, they condemn a Labour government in advance to disappointing the hopes and betraying the interests of millions of workers.