Compelled to volunteer

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Traditional wisdom says that oppositions never win elections, it’s just that governments lose them. It’s not one of those laws of politics that I’ve ever found entirely convincing, but it’s one which Sunak seems determined to prove does apply, in his case at least. His latest sure-fire election loser is his half-baked plan for the reintroduction of National Service. It’s a compulsory scheme under which 18 year olds can choose either to spend a year in the armed forces, or to give up one weekend a month for a year to ‘volunteer’ to do community work. Compulsory volunteering is a concept which will, of course, be familiar to many former members of the armed forces (as in “I need three volunteers – you, you and you”), but the ‘compulsory’ part of both elements seems to be optional, since there will apparently be no sanctions for those who decline to participate. Sunak, who ruled out conscription just a few short months ago, claims that National Service isn’t at all the same thing as conscription, and I suppose that if it’s only optionally compulsory he might have a point, if only in terms of linguistic niceties.

What’s harder to fathom out, though, is who exactly he thinks this policy will appeal to. He has probably calculated that since it doesn’t start until 2025 and only applies to 18 years olds then, those most directly affected haven’t got a vote in this election anyway. And he’s already lost the votes of most of those young people who are already 18, so can’t make that much worse. I suppose it might be popular with those who did their National Service back in the day and feel that the country has gone to pot since it was abolished, but since the policy ended in 1960, with the last conscript released in 1963, anyone who actually was conscripted would have to be at least in their late 70s, and most would be over 80. Demographics tells us that that is a comparatively small and diminishing cohort. It’s also one of the few cohorts where a majority reliably vote Tory, meaning that the scope for winning extra votes is necessarily limited. Returning to the possibility that there is some sort of cunning plan here to throw the election, it could just be an attempt to make sure that as many as possible of those MPs who’ve plotted against him go down as well.

There’s no real need to worry too much about anything he promises to do over the next six weeks, given that the probability of him still being around to do it is vanishingly small, but the bit that concerned me most wasn’t the ‘interesting’ use of words like ‘compulsory’ and ‘voluntary’, it was the point made in news reports about the need for cohesiveness. As a Tory spokesperson put it, “Only by nurturing our shared culture and fostering a sense of duty can we preserve our nation and values for decades to come”, as Sunak said, “…to create a shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed sense of pride in our country”, and in Cleverly’s words, “The bulk of this is about helping build a cohesive society”. It looks and sounds a lot like a scheme designed to inculcate a sense of Britishness, deference and obedience into a reluctant and ungrateful peasantry. And they’re planning to pay for it by raiding the wholly inadequate fund which was set up to replace EU funding. That scheme has already been used to redirect funds from poorer area to richer ones; this proposal would further rob those poorer areas of the funds they need and were promised in pursuit of an outdated and dangerous form of English/British nationalism which sees any alternative sense of identity as a threat.