By Cain O’Mahoney
The ancient Greek saying “those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad” definitely applies to the Tories, with their latest gimmick policy of the return of National Service for 18-year-olds. It is a sign of desperation driving them to insanity. Their only hope of retaining some votes is to fall back on that aging, reactionary cohort of Daily Mail readers.
As ever they are trying to provoke anger at the ‘other’. This time, it is young people who are to be bashed. The Tory Minister, James Cleverly, accused young people of “living in a bubble”.
Young people today certainly live in a ‘bubble’– a bubble of high rents, an impossibility of getting on the property ladder, the massive burden of student loans, mass unemployment, short term contracts and zero hours working; a bubble they can’t break out of.
The Tories’ hare-brained scheme would see 18-year-olds conscripted into working on community or public sector projects for one weekend a month, while 30,000 would spend a year in the Armed Forces. To fund it, suddenly the Tories have found a spare £2.5 billion laying around. Where did this massive amount of cash suddenly appear from? Like Boris Johnson before them, it seems they have found the Magic Money Tree again.
The bosses don’t want it…
The Tories are meant to be the representatives of the bosses’ class. The latter have been continually crying out that they can’t get young people to fill the currently 900,000 job vacancies in the UK (April 2024 figures). This situation would only be exacerbated by taking a whole layer of young, inexperienced youth that could have been exploited as cheap labour, out of the mix. Not what the bosses want.
For the 18-year-olds themselves, press-ganged into ‘weekend’ National Service, it will make it even harder for them to get a job: ‘Sorry guv, can’t do weekends…’ In these days of zero-hour contracts and the ‘flexible working’ hire and fire culture, bosses will run a mile from such job applicants.
… and nor do the Military
Outside of war time, the Armed Forces have always opposed conscription. Ask any officer and they will tell you the last thing they want are reluctant soldiers.
They will be furious at the ‘deal’ the Tories are now offering them, as a solution to the massive Defence Review cut-backs this same government already inflicted upon them. Under the Defence Review, the British Army alone saw troop numbers slashed from 110,000 to today’s 70,000, the majority of those cut being the older, more experienced personnel. The Tories’ ‘solution’ to the problem of Defence shortages – that they created – is to fill the shortfall in the Armed Forces with conscripted and probably ‘unenthusiastic’ (to put it mildly), inexperienced 18-year-olds – and only for 12 months at that. From a military point of view, that is a completely useless waste of time and effort.
The Tories claim it offers the 30,000 conscripts a “great training opportunity”. The Armed Forces today are extremely high tec, particularly the RAF and Royal Navy, which takes years of study and training to become operational – not 12 months. So, let’s look at the most basic training that can be found in the Armed Forces, in the Army.
Introductory Army basic training takes three and half months, after which you go on to train for your specialist role. The most non-technical role, and shortest training period, is for Infantry training. Yet even this still takes a further six and a half months. What sort of ‘business case’ is this? Invest time and money into 10 months of training, only to get two months’ worth of ‘soldiering’ in return? That is why in the past National Service was always between 2 – 3 years. Otherwise, it didn’t economically make sense. Sunak knows that. Its just headline grabbing, and nothing more.
Military training is inherently dangerous
In announcing the policy, Sunak said conscription for young people would be “life-changing” (Sunday Times, 26.05.24). That’s true – but not in the way he hopes for. Military training is not like civilian training – it is very, very dangerous, carrying all the risks of a real battlefield. Between 2000 – 2023, five per cent of all fatalities in the Armed Forces occurred during training (MOD statement, Training and Exercise deaths in the UK Armed Forces, 2000 – 2023, 28.09.23). About eight deaths a year.
That’s just fatalities. The number of ‘life-changing’ injuries will be ten times that figure at the very least. And military chiefs know that the first National Service conscript fatality during an exercise would leave them facing a public and media storm. Hence senior military figures have dismissed the policy as “bonkers”.
Of course, the truth is the mad scheme will never see the light of day. Sunak’s predecessor David Cameron similarly made a big fanfare on the election stump in 2010 about his big vision of ‘Big Society’. When elected, he set up the National Citizen Service programme – which immediately disappeared in a deluge of austerity cuts. In 2010, like today, it was all about getting the right headlines in the Daily Mail and Daily Express, and not actually putting anything into practice when in office.
The only good thing to come out of the latest nonsense from the Tories is that it will galvanise young people to get out there on election day and vote to keep the Tories out.
If Starmer and our current Labour leaders, instead of their current timidity, had stood for a ceasefire in Gaza from the start, now pledged to abolish and write off student loans, launched a policy of a building programme of affordable social housing, and stood firm on Labour policy on workers’ rights instead of trying to water them down all the time, this anger of young people would be turned into a massive youthful avalanche of support for Labour.
