ThunderDragon Blog

Via the excellent, amusing, and ever-entertaining Tory Bear, I’ve come across what CF seems to regard as social action:

As part of the National Social Action day in Richmond, kindly being hosted by the Richmond Borough Conservatives, one of the many projects you can visit on the 20th is the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust in Barnes. On arrival you will be treated to a free guided tour of the centre, including a talk about the work and wildlife within the area, and then taken to an area of marshland where we will be helping to carry out essential conservation work to protect the land and the birds and wildlife which inhabit the area.

So if you fancy meeting some endangered ducks and getting to grips with some conservation work at the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust in Barnes - you know where we are.

Yes, this really is social action. Not.

If Conservative Future wishes to do social action, it should actually do social action, not a bit of stuff to ‘help the environment’. Social action doesn’t have to be hard or individual. There are more than enough charities and other organisations out there that do social action and just need more volunteers to help them.

CF should set up relationships with charities which provide these sort of services to those who need them - both national and local. And Conservatives of all ages should make an effort to get involved as well, wherever and whenever they can.

If we don’t, how can we possibly make any claims to be the party of society? We should do, not just say.

[FYI: At the time this post is published, I will be out doing my bit for society, as a Scout Leader.]

This week is Volunteers Week.

Volunteering is massively important, both to society and to individuals. Society as a whole benefits from it because those in need can be helped without government and taxes getting involved. Individuals - both those who receive and give - benefit from the contact and experiences.

Just think what we could accomplish if everyone gave up just a few hours of their time every now and then. We could leave this world a far better place. Don’t think that money is the answer. It’s not. Most charities don’t need monmey anywhere near as much as people - especially Scouting, which has thousands of young people across the country on waiting lists due to a lack of adults.

Of course, no volunteering is completely selfless - and I’m definitely speaking from experience here. Anyone who claims to do so is a liar. Volunteers benefit from volunteering their time very nearly as much as anyone they help. The benfeits are just in a different way - they are seldom obvious, but far more internal and personal. The personal satisfaction you can get from volunteering and a job well done can outweigh pretty much anything that has been sacrificed to achieve it.

I fully support the idea of workers getting time off to volunteer, as it encourages those who wouldn’t otherwise volunteer to do so. Though the idea of regarding volunteering as a “proper job-seeking activity” is ridiculous, as anyone and everyone could find the time to do some volunteering if they wanted to.

My employer gives me and every other employee half a day every month time off to do volunteering activities. This volunteering can be done on internally organised schemes, such as helping children in schools to read, or externally like me, with Scouting. I used my last month’s half-day to enable me to ensure that everything was ready for my camp on time.

This is the sort of model that all companies should seek to emulate. It provides for a more motivated workforce, and one who knows that the firm is making an effort to put something back into the community.

I volunteer as a Scout Leader because I enjoy it. I gain so much from the time I spend with my Scouts that the hours I spend doing it - and preparing for, and clearing up after - are way more than worth it to me.

If everyone can just put a few hours every now and then in to volunteering, then everyone benefits. Just a small amount can help so much. Just a little bit of your time can mean so much to other people in so many ways.

So volunteer, and let’s leave this world a better place than when we found it.

One last thing to say - just do-it.

I have some good news and some bad news.

Good news: I am now a warranted Assistant Scout Leader [having been on a provisional warrant for the last few months] after completing the required training modules. Now I’m working my way towards my Wood Badge.

Bad news: There will be no posts* this weekend (inc. bank holiday Monday) as I am on a Scout camp. Unfortunately, it seems like it’s going to rain. All weekend.

* or at least not many - depending if I have the time to wrote a couple before I go.

Dad’s Army is going to be here to save you.

Volunteering in Britain is already screwed. Few do it any more. It has fallen by a quarter in the last decade. So how on earth does Brown expect to get people to do this? Those who would already do volunteering and are unlikely to drop their current commitments to take on this new pointless one, and those who don’t almost certainly won’t.

We already have people to fulfil this role - y’know, the police and the other emergency services? As well as associated volunteers? - so this proposal of a “Civil Protection Network” seems like little short of an attempt to take it all under on centralised authority - a good thing in some ways, and very very bad in others.

And the inevitable comparisons with Dad’s Army are never going to be lived down, no matter what.

The number of volunteers in Britain has fallen by a quarter in the past decade. I’m not overly surprised by that, even if a quarter is a large number. But I don’t think that it can possibly be claimed to be directly the government’s fault for failing to support them.

Volunteers don’t volunteer because the government does or doesn’t support them - they volunteer to do some good in their community or elsewhere. They volunteer to help others in some way. What the State thinks matters little to them.

Instead, it is indirectly the government’s fault. This is because they have fostered a society of reliance on the State rather than the individual. At the same time as this, they have made it progressively harder to volunteer - CRB forms being quite possibly the biggest offender. Not because they are in themselves a bad idea, but just because the Criminal Records Bureau are so damn slow! They have also extended it to cover too many situations.

I am both a Scout leader and a St John Ambulance first aider. I don’t do them for purely altruistic reasons, because I do them because it makes me feel good to have done them. There are two ways that people decide to become Scout leaders or otherwise involved in the Movement: (a) Their children join Scouts and they get dragged in, or (b) they are Scouts and want to give others the chance to do it. That’s my reason. I am a Scout leader because I want to pass on the fantastic knowledge and experience that I got as a Beaver, Cub, Scout and Venture Scout. I want todays children to be able experience it as well.

Some people forget - or simply don’t realise - that Scout leaders and first aiders don’t get paid. They get nothing from doing it but the experience and knowledge that they are doing something good. It was fantastic to see the Scout contingent in the Remembrance Sunday parade yesterday and the voice-over reminding people of this fact - it is all voluntary.

The reason the number of volunteers has declined is because the government has indirectly stifled independent charity in favour of State redistribution. But nobody works for the State for free, yet thounsands will work for charities for free. The amount of paperwork surrounding volunteer charities needs to shrink, and it needs to be simplified. Or else the volunteer won’t be just an endangered species, but an extinct one.

Source: The Telegraph