Compulsory voluntary community service

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to ensure every young person has done 50 hours of voluntary work by the time they are 19 years old.

Mr Brown said a promise to bring in compulsory community service would be a part of his next election manifesto.

From the BBC.

Are the BBC having a laugh at Brown's expense, or is failing to apply logic to contradictory doublethink just a Pavlovian response for them?

What concerns me about it is that the government has always had a vision of correct behaviour which it is willing to bribe and coerce people to act according to, or use legislation to control otherwise legal behaviour (ASBOs), or to spend millions advertising to tell us how to behave. And apparently now this moralising has passed into the realms of temporarily making all young people slaves. It's entirely predictable as more ways have to be explored to shape society as people look to the state in the face of every problem and expect solutions. But things like this undermine respect for the law, because it makes boundaries into one big evolving experiment orchestrated by grubby dishonest politicians who have no respect for empowering people by leaving them alone.

Update: BBC have edited the article to play down the doublethink aspect. Unfortunately I didn't quote the whole thing so I don't know if they've edited a direct quote from Brown.