The Tories’ masterstroke after 14 years of epic malfeasance, negligence and looting, in the face of electoral Armageddon, is to “bring back national service”: get The Young, who they’ve done so much to demonise and burden with debt, tax, disenfranchise even from voting, and grow up in a world aflame, to ‘volunteer’ to clear it all up.
Three-word slogans
Look, the three-word slogan is ready already, “Community, Opportunity Security”. It’s up there with “Get Brexit Done”, “Stop the Boats” (nicked from Australia), “Build Back Better” (stolen from the Democrats) “Take Back Control”, and other belters.
Re-introducing national service
It’s such a perennial it made for an episode of Yes, Prime Minister years ago, with Appleby swaying Woolley’s mind hither and thither: Are you worried about the number of young people without jobs, the rise in crime among teenagers, the lack of discipline in our comprehensive schools? Wouldn’t the young welcome authority and leadership and some sort of challenge? Then of course you’d support reintroducing national service! Unless of course you are worried about the dangers of war, the rise in armaments, forcing people to take up arms against their will, training the young to kill … then of course you oppose reintroducing national service.
I remember an old family friend who did national service the last time, he was sent to Malaya during the insurgency, decades later still ruminating with guilt on the unknown people he knew he’d killed in panicked self-defence in a war he’d no interest in at all, and which was why national service deserved to fail, it being ‘full of people like me who’d no idea why they were there and didn’t want to be there’. I remember seeing and experiencing the incredible violence in Moscow in the mid-90s meted out by Russian men for all of whose two years in the draft had trained them very well in beating the living hell out of one another. So who is this appealing to? All the Brits that suffered it the first time hated it and/or are dead anyway.
Spectator article
Oh no, none of those tired arguments apply, argues the Spectator. The Tories “will invite” the young “to compete” for selective 12-month spots, with only the best being taken on in a military-style Oxbridge, so great a leveller that Norway’s Princess Ingrid Alexandra sleeping in barracks alongside the hoi polloi, while others can “choose” to serve with the NHS and charities to look after the elderly and lonely.
Interestingly for a Spectator piece, its author expands on the idea’s appeal by pointing to its success and take-up in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, those Scandinavian outposts of social democracy normally pointed to for inspiration and guidance by the woolly left – but wheeled out for the right-wing.
Except the “best” will only ever be the ones that want to do it – you’ll only ever succeed if you want to do something, which is how it works now, isn’t it? So essentially it’s just expanding recruitment into the services, for a far shorter, and cheaper, period of service.
And we’ll get the American model, where military recruiters literally park their tanks on high school lawns in the rust belt towns to hoover up young people with nil other option for them to get jobs, learn essential trades, with the pay offs being college tuition fees paid, decent health insurance or anything resembling a pension dependent on donning a uniform to fight rich men’s wars. ‘Volunteers’ on the civic side will be deployed by privatised care companies who no longer even have to pay those dreaded people of colour from overseas who at least wanted to do the work.
What if you don’t want to do it?
What if you don’t want to do it? What if you’ve got a job, at weekends, that pays for you, and dependents, to exist? Or are already studying, doing something volunteary on a gap year, abroad, already? No excuse, it seems. Well, those young people are going to be really happy, charged up, on it, when they turn up to care for the vulnerable and elderly, with all of 25 days’ experience, spread over a year, to do a great job. How, how does this work?
It seems a stretch that those refusing to ‘serve’ could be arrested, unless the young are recruited into policing duties aimed at arresting members of their own generation en masse, a la Sunak Youth, while potentially criminalising an entire generation will backfire on efforts to reduce crime rates – but not ‘serving’ will count against you, in a country wholly shorn of any rights, workers, unions, under UK law and definitely not under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Because the whole point is it’s divisive, along patriotic lines. The benefits and kudos of ‘volunteering’ run parallel to the disdain, forever on your record, of not doing so, and totally undermines the apparent love and loyalty of joining up. It’s how North Korea’s run – in order to get anything done, get anywhere, get the basics not to die, you have to be a member of the Korean Workers’ Party – the alternative to not being a member is disdain in a country where that puts you at risk of the gulag or famine – but, but, not everyone can join, it is selective, it is like Oxbridge, doesn’t matter if you want to do it: either you’re in, or you’re out.
The gall from a ruling cabal whose sole raison d’etre for getting up in the morning is awarding themselves inflation-busting pay-rises, fiddling expenses, ‘consultancy’ fees and lining up directorships, before raising hell starting another front in the culture war of their own making that’ll further demonise and divide the young. The state isn’t there to actually govern or prevent war or any climate conflagration or invest in modern training for all, it’s there to chivvy people into coping with the outcomes of its own deliberate, privatised negligence, from which a few might benefit on pain of not being utterly bereft and scorned.
Well it’s not like the Tories are going to win. But with Labour also looking at the idea, part of Starmer’s ‘broad church’ nationalism which accepts into its ranks the like of Natalie Elphicke. If you want to invest in the young, great, do it, that’s what our taxes should be going on. But not like this.
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
