One of the most bizarre things about King Charles’s coronation is that no one can make the argument that the Chubbly will stimulate the economy at a local or national level. Businesses are mad that there’s another holiday so close to other bank holidays in the UK and it’s just going to be a lot of lost productivity. Maybe people will be buying little flags and Chubbly memorabilia, but I’ve seen reports that sales are way down for that kind of stuff too. Most notably, the palace and the government haven’t gone on a hiring spree for temporary workers. You would think, this is like Christmas only even more rare, you’ll have to hire hundreds, maybe even thousands of temporary workers. Not so much – overall, King Charles seems to expect “volunteers” to work for free around the Chubbly. Not only that, but the day after the coronation, Charles has declared a day of service, only he’s calling it The Big Help Out. People have never been into it – the serfs do not want to do unpaid labor on their day off, in addition to footing the bill for Charles’s big hat party.

An event at the heart of the king’s coronation festivities is at risk of being a “damp squib” because of a volunteering crisis across Britain, the government has been warned. The Big Help Out is inviting people across the country to mark the occasion by signing up to volunteer in their communities on the one-off bank holiday Monday on 8 May in the hope of inspiring more people to start volunteering amid record shortages.

Volunteering experts warned that the initiative could fail. Richard Harries, associate director at the Institute for Community Studies at the Young Foundation, said: “My fear is that it will be a damp squib and that will further undermine efforts to get people engaged. I obviously hope it’s not going to be.”

Volunteering was in “steady decline”, a trend that without government intervention was likely to continue. “You look at levels of volunteering over the last decade and it’s just been relentlessly downhill,” he added. “It’s hard to put a gloss on it.” Volunteering is at a historic low in England, government research shows. In 2021-22, 34% of respondents to the Community Life Survey volunteered at least once a month, down from 41% the year before and 44% in 2013-14.

Organisations suffering as a result include the Scouts, who have 90,000 young people on their waiting list and are struggling to recruit volunteers, according to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. The Charity Retail Association, representing charity shops, said its volunteer numbers have dropped from 230,000 to 186,000 since the pandemic.

[From The Guardian]

Britain really kicked out the two people who believe that “everyone can serve, service is universal.” Not only that, the palace briefed the media that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had a lot of gall to claim that peasants could serve, that true service is “a member of the royal family looking grim and horsey at the opening of a grocery store.” And now those people are panicking because no one wants to participate in the king’s big day of service? Oh well! Again, the coronation really could have been an economic stimulator if only Charles and the Tory government didn’t expect everyone to do all of this unpaid labor.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.