Rishi Sunak needs YOU! - Tory plan to revive National Service is their first “big idea”
If this is what happens when you take a day off from the campaign, maybe don’t have any more days off.
Rishi Sunak has announced the Conservatives’ first “big idea” for the General Election, and it’s to force the nation’s 18-year-olds into the military, or volunteer work (though I’m not sure you can call it volunteer work when you’re legally obliged to do it).
The Prime Minister, writing in the Mail on Sunday, says bringing back National Service after more than 60 years will “restore a sense of pride” in the country — not a sentiment shared by some of the newspaper’s own columnists…
It will also, albeit temporarily, fill the yawning gap in an under-strength military, though what the generals will make of an ever-changing group of unwilling conscripts is anyone’s guess.
As Mr Sunak keeps reminding us, we live in an increasingly dangerous world, and our military is smaller than it has been for decades. While other countries are looking at conscription, or expanding periods of compulsory service, it’s less than six months since Downing Street ruled out any form of compulsory military service in the UK.
The great majority of 18-year-olds would not be sent to the barracks, but instead forced into community service, and presumably the Prime Minister’s plan includes comprehensive screening before hundreds of thousands of teenagers are sent out to work with the young, the old and the vulnerable. Unless the whole thing was just scribbled down on the back of an envelope in less than 15 minutes, obviously.
Leaving aside the fundamentally illiberal idea of compulsion (18-year-old are, after all, adults) it’s also terrible politics. A YouGov poll last Autumn suggested almost two-thirds of voters oppose compulsory military service, including half of Tory voters. People might not take kindly to their own sons and daughters being marched off to the tender mercies of an angry Sergeant-Major.
What it will do is appeal to the hard-right Tory voters considering a switch to Reform. Some have spent decades complaining today’s young people don’t know they’re born, and need a bit of discipline, without ever having had to do anything similar themselves, and they will lap up stuff like this.
Labour has called it a “desperate unfunded commitment”, but honestly there’s no need to bother responding. It’s an exceptionally daft policy that clearly hasn’t been thought through. Even if the Tories win the election, the chances of this ever happening are distinctly remote.
The greater contrast is perhaps that, as Labour sets out plans to give 16 and 17-year-olds the vote, the Conservatives are planning to force some of them into the military.
This is, let’s remember, just the first of Rishi’s big ideas. Who knows what’s next…
