National Service

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Yeah I'm like a machine

I hope you're right man

Right? Haha.

I'm a soldier at heart

I believe it.

One advantage would be it would concentrate minds on military action.

People and politicians are happy to send others to war and die. They would be less willing and more careful if it was their relatives that could potentially be in the firing line, which would be slightly more likely with this

Conscription doesn't usually affect the wealthy much, because they can simply pay the fines and they have better access to legal loopholes. They mean to inflict the idea on the young working class, in the hope of hanging onto the votes of a few old right-wingers who are defecting to Reform UK.

This is what it's all about. It's a tossed off idea that just appeals to Daily Mail and Express readers because they basically don't like young people with their Tik Toks and their gender neutral toilets. It's same attitude that leads them to conclude the reason young people can't afford houses is because they don't save money and spend it all on avocado toast and designer coffee. They think young people are spoilt and they want them to suffer a little because they think it will do them good.

Young people don't vote Conservative so they don't care about pitching policies that will be unpopular with young people. They're just trying to recover some of the votes they're losing to Reform.

It's another attack on a section of society who don't have much of a say

It peeves me this it really does

The Tories, suggesting that youngsters be forcibly made to 'volunteer'.

How about creating good jobs so people can live a nice life? What happened to that instead of forcing people to give up their free time for no pay?

I can't imagine the armed forces being happy with such a policy

Me neither. Conscription is unpopular with professional soldiers.

It's just a stupid, silly policy, made by stupid, silly conservatives.

Yeah thanks man

for the reassurance

It's a half-baked idea.

There are some European nations that have conscription. They can be divided into three categories:

- countries that border Russia, or are Russia
- countries that are, or until recently were, neutral, and therefore responsible for their own defence
- Greece and Cyprus (half of Cyprus is currently occupied by Turkiye)

The UK is not in such a precarious position. We would be better off building up our professional military.

I could go on criticising the various aspects of the scheme, but the most important detail is that the Tories are going to lose the election and nothing they say matters.

As ever, if you look at the (scant) detail of what the Conservatives are proposing, it's not quite what it seems.

When you hear National Service you think military, kids lined up doing drills getting shouted at by an angry sargeant. That's what Rishi wanted, to gee up the elderly who lap this stuff up.

But what they were actually proposing was something more like the Scandinavian approach which involves a small number of suitable kids doing military assistance, working in areas like IT security, learning real-world skills and getting paid for it. The rest would have to do some unpaid hours working on community projects and with charities like the RNLI.

It's not actually a bad idea, in itself.

But Rishi was never interested in the idea, he was just interested in the headlines.