Dad's Army is going to be here to save you.
Gordon Brown wants tens of thousands of Britons to join a new Dads’ Army-style volunteer force to help the Government tackle threats to national security...
The new force, called a new Civil Protection Network, will be based on the local Neighbourhood Watch schemes.
The Prime Minister said he wanted to see “improved resilience against emergencies” from floods to terrorist attacks.
This would take “not the old Cold War idea of civil defence but a new form of civil protection”. (The Telegraph)
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.The new force, called a new Civil Protection Network, will be based on the local Neighbourhood Watch schemes.
The Prime Minister said he wanted to see “improved resilience against emergencies” from floods to terrorist attacks.
This would take “not the old Cold War idea of civil defence but a new form of civil protection”. (The Telegraph)
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.
