“Sunak had a day off, read the interview with ex NFU chief Minette Batters who wanted compulsory military service so that farmers and care home bosses would have free labour”, said someone on X and a lightbulb appeared above his head. All children, except his, obviously, were feral drug addicts and wastrels. “Let’s reintroduce national service!”
The idea is that all 18 year olds would be forced to choose between the military full time or volunteering for jobs like building flood defences for one weekend every month. Or working for the fire service, the police or the NHS. It will get young people “out of their bubble” said the hopelessly misnamed home secretary James Cleverly. John Crace, the Guardian’s brilliant sketch writer calls him Jimmy Dimly. That’s more like it. Whether or not you agree with Sunak’s so-called Big Idea, let us be crystal clear what this announcement is all about and it isn’t reintroducing national service.
Rishi Sunak, who has never served in the armed forces, says bringing back national service would help bring back the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic. Would that be the recent pandemic during which the chancellor – what was his name again? Oh yes. Rishi Sunak – was fined by the police for partying in Downing Street when the rest of us weren’t even allowed to attend funerals of loved ones. That was him. But in reality, this is Sunak, lashing out desperately, trying to find something that will engage the only group of people who still vote Conservative in large numbers: the old.
Of course, not all old people are bad people. I’m certainly not that bad, but you have to remember why older people vote Tory. It’s because they perceive that it will benefit themselves. This is why both major parties guarantee to retain the triple lock on pensions because they want to attract the so called grey vote, although I believe that Labour believes in the triple lock because they actually value senior citizens, beyond begging for their votes. Older people can be conservative with a small c, genuinely believing that all young people are, as I said above, feral drug addicts and wastrels. National Service, they assert without evidence, can only do them good. “I’ll vote Conservative because I hate my grandchildren,” is essentially the aim of this policy.
Perhaps, I too live in the same “bubble” Jimmy Dimly thinks young people live in because my experience of 18 year olds is that, in the main, they are perfectly decent people. Most don’t go round trashing the country and instead work to gain decent qualifications and a good job. That is literally what happened to my children and, from what I can tell, pretty well all their friends. A year going round shooting people, performing surgery in NHS hospitals (that would help doctor shortages), putting out fires, picking fruit for free and wiping people’s arses in care homes could only benefit young people, right?
The cost of Sunak’s gimmick, because that’s what it is, would be circa £2.5 billion a year at the very least, at a time when we are told the national coffers are bare. I have an idea how to pay for it. National Service for pensioners. In order to claim the full retirement pension, everyone reaching 67 would have to carry out a year of “voluntary” service. And for those already in receipt of the state pension, they would have to carry out a year of in the army or wherever. Look, if it worked in Dads Army, it would work in real life. No more shortages of labour in the fruit fields or care homes. The young and the old together at last. Rishi Sunak’s Big Idea, a man worth around three quarters of a billion quid forcing people to do voluntary work, or else. But or else, what?
Presumably, Sunak will send those who would rather not carry out national service to prison. Just think how much they would learn spending a year or so alongside burglars, sex offenders and mass murderers. So our prisons are already massively overcrowded? Big deal.
Of course, none of this will ever happen. Sunak won’t set up his Royal Commission to work out how to force people to volunteer. This is bag of a fag packet politics, red meat for those who genuinely believe that everything was so much better in the past and young people are all untamed wrong ‘uns. And it’s a stark admission that the Conservatives have run out of ideas and are now resorting to ill thought out, pie in the sky tosh that even the hard of thinking – I am thinking of Daily Mail readers, here – will find hard to support.
Above all, this is not serious politics. National Service is not even as much as sticking plaster for a country that Sunak and co have spent 14 long years tearing apart, a country where everything is broken and nothing works. Yet this is all they have left when they beg us to give them five more years in office.
It would even worse if Sunak meant all this, but he doesn’t. These feel like the end of times for the Conservatives and if this is all they have left, it should be.
