Against National Service (again)

Engineering a woke madrassa

The prospect of re-instituting National Service has again raised it’s head in recent weeks, this time concerning actual military service.

In an interview with LBC, Sir David Lidington suggested offering both a stick and a carrot to draw young people into conscription by offering, in his words, to “knock a bit off your student loan debt if you come and take part.”

As a comic example of boomerist attitudes towards following generations, this is satirical perfection approaching Swift; ‘as recompense for conscription (which I did not do) we’ll knock off a few quid off your student loan (which I did not need)’.

But it is not just a case of what Madeline Grant describes as a ‘new mentality... benefiting old over young.' There is a serious question of national security, too; a previous virulent bout of discourse was prompted when CGS General Patrick Saunders pointed out that Britain is unlikely to win a peer-to-peer conflict with forces as currently constituted, arguing;

Taking preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing when needed are now not merely desirable but essential…Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.

This latter caused a total chimp-out online, as the discourse raged between RWers who said the country hated them and so wouldn’t fight, LWers who said the country hated them and so wouldn’t fight, LWers who wouldn’t fight accusing RWers who wouldn’t fight of patriotic cosplaying because they weren’t itching to get shipped into the М'ясорубка Бахмут and RWers who would clearly be exempt from frontline duties screaming they couldn’t wait to sign up.

Probably the only people not taking part in this debate are the people who’d actually bear the brunt of this policy; namely, people from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds than the average twitter user, C2DEs like my uncle Wayne and my cousin Jake (no jokes please), both of whom have served as regulars or reservists.

The idea of National Service has been relatively prominent for about a year now, and although I have written on this subject before I think this debate affords me the opportunity to add to the reasons I am still against it.

It’s mainly been raised by postliberals, who argue it will ‘benefit the young and benefit the nation.’ A recent report from Onward showed that ‘57% of British people support national service versus 19% who oppose it.’ Rather than putting words into their mouths, I’ll quote those postliberal arguments. First, Onward’s François Valentin* on the underlying need - and desire - for National Service to counteract social atomisation in today’s young:

Young people are unhappy, unskilled and unmoored. Over one million people under 18 were referred to mental health services last year. Suicide rates amongst 15 to 19-year-olds are the highest in over 40 years. One in five 18 to 24-year-olds are economically inactive. The same age group is three times more likely to distrust their neighbour than the over 65s. Most young people (57%) say they are less patriotic than previous generations.

But there is cause for hope. Young people are the most likely to want to volunteer in their community: two-thirds of 18-34-year-olds say they want to help out in their area, ahead of half for 35-54-year-olds and around a third of people aged 55 or older. During the pandemic, three in four 16-24-year-olds were either already volunteering or wanting to volunteer to support the nation’s recovery. 

Next Gavin Rice* - who wrote in support of this policy in The Critic - on a few of the potential benefits.

Depending on the model, the right material compensation for participants would help to ensure they enter university or the world of work with some savings. It might encourage people to make more informed choices about what education or employment to pursue next. The skills taught would need to be of practical use, though the main benefits would still be moral and social. As part of a wider national programme, there should be opportunities for older people to give back, too. Those who retired early during the pandemic could sign up to provide free community-based childcare, for example, or offer parenting classes, as already happens on a smaller scale through family hubs. A national service programme would need older adults to run it, of course.

One of the major factors in the postliberal drive for National Service is the quest for community, which I’ve previously written about;

Those in favour believe that bringing people from a variety of background together to work towards a shared objective, providing an opportunity to form networks and connections through ‘social mix’ and building social cohesion through encountering difference (meeting people you’d never normally meet). A programme of group-based tasks, by focussing on community improvement, help nurture a sense of civic obligation, giving participants the sense they are contributing towards something greater than the immediate work at hand by participating in a wider – and national – collective project. 

But my major problem with this is; nobody contributes more to the national project right now than Britain’s young. Postliberals talk constantly of duties and rights, but when it comes to young people - as I’ve previously written - they seem keen on further responsibilities but uninterested in extending rights:

Let’s consider the average UK working age person. The Resolution Foundation found recently that after 15 years of wage stagnation, the poor sod was £11,000 worse off than they should be. After that decade and a half of flatlined living standards, their real income is now predicted to drop 5 per cent by the end of 2023. 

They face the biggest fall in living standards on record. The OBR predicts they’ll still be 0.4 per cent below pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2028. That will coincide nicely with the highest levels of public spending since the 1970s, funded by the biggest tax burden since World War Two. 

That is without factoring the pensions conundrum. The effects of an increasing dependency ratio means that workers’ income tax burden will have to increase by £15bn a year, according to the Resolution Foundation. Pensions will weigh increasingly on a workforce already shrinking — and predicted to shrink even more as the youngest boomers begin to retire. That is in addition to supporting the Triple Lock which, far beyond simply entrenching intergenerational inequality, is now more comparable to a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

And what rights do these responsibilities beget? We have blocked almost entire generations from owning their own home, despite it being a key step in the development of rooted community & family-focussed life postliberals are supposed to value. Meanwhile it continues to prioritise the interests of fringe interest groups and NIMBYs over raising the living standards of citizens, for example reducing the cost of living through increasing energy production.

Added to this is, of course, that Britain’s young sacrificed two years of their lives during a lockdown from a virus that didn’t particularly affect them in order to protect the vulnerable.

Regardless of how much more it is right to take from those who have already given so much, I am not just against National Service from an intergenerational disparity perspective.

I am against the idea because it will worsen our social divisions and get move us further away from the restoration of a cohesive national community. Here’s Gavin again on the form National Service might take;

Most voters do not think this should be mandatory, but most believe it should have mixed military and civilian elements, going further than either of the civic models proposed last week. There are several international examples to look to, from the Service National Universel (SNU) in France to the full-on military service expected in Switzerland and Israel — on many measures, in more cohesive societies than our own.

Saunders was right to point out that we are unlikely to win a major conflict without conscription. But it can be argued that is very much the British way of war, given that conscription was introduced as an emergency measure for the World Wars and subsequently in early Cold War/colonial conflicts. National Service was never introduced to improve community cohesion (as the nation already had high levels of ethnic and ethnical homogeneity it was already highly cohesive) but as a solution to a military manpower shortage.

Right wing Boomers love the idea of NS because they think it will toughen up today’s avocado tosspots. But it will not; today’s political realities mean a purely military form of National Service is completely off the table. You aren’t sending them off to a Spartan crypetia - you aren’t even sending them off to the playing fields of Eton.

You will be sending them off to a woke madrassa.

If NS is to be accepted, it will require an element of service; if political realities mean you cannot mandate that element of service be military in nature, then you have to give the choice between military and civilian forms of service to the draftee; but, given Gen Z does not think Britain is worth fighting for, they are highly unlikely to choose military service.

If we consider the ‘civilian’ aspect of proposed NS programmes, that is likely to follow the form of David' Cameron’s National Citizen Service (we must ignore the fact that so far NCS has had little impact because, as the scheme is not mandatory, it has low % levels of participation). This has some commendable aspects, including a residential element and physical and team building activities. The ‘service’ element farms out young people to plan and deliver "social action", usually in their community.

Whilst the charities that form The Blob have currently limited themselves to political campaigning and institutional takeover, it is inconceivable they would look on government offering to loan charities thousands of man-hours from impressionable teens to engage in ‘social action’ as any other than a marvellous opportunity to form a wokeist indoctrination camp. As we have seen with the redefinition of the Charities Act in 2006 to allow charities to allow for campaigning on ‘the advancement of human rights, conflict resolution and reconciliation and the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity’ it is possible for charities to secure expansive redefinition of ‘charitable acts’ to include non-party political campaigning.

The organisations and causes which will be the beneficiaries of the generous will not be controlled by or aligned with conservative aims around restoring a national cohesive community. Conservatives have already made the mistake of spending the last 13 years funding an ideology it is opposed to, and that is opposed to it. As I asked in CapX;

If conservatives are opposed to identity politics because of the damage it does to Britain’s social fabric, then why continue to fund organisations who prioritise the propagation of that agenda?

A similar question may be asked; why would we loan them 6 months of somebody else’s prime years?

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*Friends of the Potemkin Village Idiot