Government Rolls Out National Indentured Service For Teenagers

As a triumphal Conservative party conference got under way, cabinet office minister Francis Maude proudly took the wraps off a pilot scheme of indentured service for Britain’s young people, in which school leavers will be invited to volunteer for enslavement in the hope that a willingness to work for nothing will make them irresistible to future employers.

“There will be 10,000 places initially,” Mr Maude told cheering supporters. “We reckon that’s roughly the number of youngsters sufficiently lacking in insight and self-respect to step forward and degrade themselves in this way.”

Later, he promised, the scheme would be expanded to forcibly volunteer all school leavers for an eight-week programme of soul-destroying labour, culminating in a character-forming open-ended outdoor challenge in which the youths will be blindfolded, dumped on a tropical island miles from anywhere, and encouraged to settle down and develop a rudimentary tribal hierarchy for themselves and their children, if they survive long enough to have any.

Get lost

"The National Citizens Service will be a rite of passage to adulthood for young people - ultimately, we hope, for all of them,” he smiled. "No one expects this to be an overnight transformation, but you have to start somewhere. Over the years and the decades ahead, this programme will gradually help to build a bigger, stronger society - more cohesive, citizens with a stronger engagement with their communities, with a deep sense of social responsibility.”

“Then we can send raiding parties across the seas to capture and carry off the most docile ones for any menial jobs that need doing," he concluded to wild cheers and a standing ovation.