Tory leader Kemi Badenoch talked
on Thursday of her concern that young people will not fight for the UK if all
it can offer them is unemployment. It’s a statement which is wrong on so many
levels. Firstly, it isn’t just young people who are likely to be reluctant to get
involved in a war; whilst young people have historically done most of the
fighting (sometimes as a result of warmongering propaganda, sometimes merely
out of a preference for taking their chances of being shot by the ‘enemy’
rather than the certainty of being shot by their own side, but mostly by being
conscripted and obeying authority), all out war of the sort for which she and
others are trying to prepare us depends on a much wider response than that. There
is no evidence that older people are any more willing to face the sort of
catastrophe which she and so many others seem to desire. Secondly, the word ‘fight’
is something of a euphemism in the way she uses it: what she really means is
being prepared to kill complete strangers or be killed by those same strangers,
a proposition which people are increasingly less likely to embrace. Even if
much of the ‘information’ to which we are exposed is dubious, the availability
of alternative views and perspectives is greater now than at any time in
history: blind loyalty is correspondingly less common. We are no longer living
in jingoistic imperial times, although many of our political leaders seem not
to understand that.
Badenoch is also utterly wrong on the question of
unemployment deterring volunteering for the military: for decades unemployment
has been one of the main drivers of military recruitment. It’s no accident that
military recruiters target their school and community visits on those areas
with the most deprivation and highest levels of unemployment. For many of those
being targeted, it is precisely the lack of any better opportunity which makes armed
service an attractive option. The elimination of unemployment would actually
make military recruitment harder, not easier, because we can be certain that
the ‘young people’ she wants to do the killing and dying aren’t the ones from
her social class, who land well-paid jobs though their connections and families,
and buy homes using the bank of mam and dad.
And yet. We’ve had almost five decades of being told,
under governments of both parties, that it’s not the job of the state to
provide housing or employment, that individuals must do more for themselves, and
that anyone not working is a burden on everyone else. The state, which was
never an impartial observer or neutral referee, has facilitated, by deliberate
choice, a huge growth in inequality in which the benefits of economic growth have
trickled upwards from the many to the few. Living standards have been
deliberately constrained for most of us, whilst a tiny minority has accumulated
ever more wealth. Whole communities have been abandoned and left behind. In
such a context, why would anyone feel loyalty to, and volunteer to be killed
for, a state which primarily serves the interests of those who have benefited
from that situation?
That is the underlying question which Badenoch is raising,
and it’s a hugely significant question. I’m sure that she doesn’t realise what
she is really asking – and would probably be horrified if she did, because it
challenges everything she and her party have been saying for the last half
century. It’s a neat demonstration of how it is possible to be completely wrong
on the detail, yet somehow stumble by accident upon one of the biggest and most
important questions facing us. The chances of her accidentally stumbling on any
sort of answer are zero – she’s certainly not going to propose a reversal of the
policies pursued over the last five decades. There’s a rather different
challenge for the rest of us though – whatever it is which is deterring people
from signing up for military service, do we really want a return to the days of
‘my country, right or wrong’ anyway?
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