Don’t Mention The War. Rishi (Sort of) Did, and … Oh.
Sunak, Tactical Genius and so-called “Cleverest Man In The Room”, strikes again.
Memory is a story we tell ourselves about the people we were, and who we hope to be. It’s why, in order to reinforce particular prejudices or to try to provide underwiring for a public mood, there are some who will try their very hardest to leech particular kinds of collective memory back into the public consciousness every so often. And here we go again, now that Rishi Sunak has, in the first week of his increasingly ris(h)ible election campaign launch, had the “genius” idea of announcing plans for National Service for 16–18 year olds, for some reason trying to remind everyone of the 1950s. The week before the election launch, he was also very busy telling us all that everything was terrible, and dangerous, and only he could be trusted to lead us all through this. Clearly, these are desperate, flailing thrashes that say, “please, let’s think of something that will keep those potential Reform voters onside.”
For so many reasons, the National Service thing an utterly terrible idea. The so-called (self-proclaimed) party of liberty and choice is now effectively telling anyone under the age of 18 to suck it. While Labour were talking about offering them the vote, based on the terribly radical principle that if you’re possibly going to be taxed, you should perhaps have some say in who spends it (and how), the Conservatives are offering them the alternative option of, “shut up and do what you’re told by your elders and betters.” This may sound like a jolly wheeze to some of their grandparents, but I’m unsure few under 30 will look at that and think it’s anything other than terrible idea. In the political round of the morning I’m writing this (Sunday, 26 May), the notoriously inaptly named Home Secretary James Cleverly¹ popped up to defend the announcement, saying:
“We force 16 year olds — who we recognise as a society, are not fully formed — and they still require education. So the decision was made that they remain in education or training.
“So we force teenagers to be educated, nobody argues with that.”
Well, actually James, yes we do. We know why that decision to keep 16–18 year olds in education was made, and it’s more to do with massaging youth employment figures than any actual benefit for them. That’s before your dear leader started banging on about making mathematics compulsory until age 18². We know around 40–45% of 18 year olds go on to University or equivalent education, so many are staying in the system anyway. However, a large number wouldn’t, so if you can corral them, and use crowd control in the education system for another two years (even though you’ve slashed funding in real terms by a third or more, just like for everything else), then you can pretend large scale youth unemployment isn’t really a problem any more.
So let’s assume this was some kind of plan, not some kind of Truss-style feverish cheese dream, and say that there is some underlying thinking here. It’s still hard to see how it makes any sense. The forces don’t really want a massive influx of unprepared, and largely unwilling, recruits to pour in, because what are they actually going to do with them? The best bet is a year or two of mostly pointless square-bashing, and would overstretch their limited capacity as it is. Any marginal gains for the forces retaining any remaining motivated recruits would be better spent targeting the ones who have an interest in the first place. And what use would a mass of under-trained (and likely poorly resourced) ground troop grunts be in the modern theatre of war? Defence planning, and funding needs some real thought, but this feels like yet another half-arsed brainfart that no one told him to clench and keep in.
Now, of course you might reasonably say they also put out some other options. Instead of doing the full two years of military service, you could perhaps do “weekend” community projects, which feels a bit like being handed a Community Service Order without the actual conviction. But even this feels like a cack-handed sop to the middle class Tory voter. The military option is clearly intended, in Willie Whitelaw style, provide a “short, sharp shock” to all those urban, ne’er do well poor types. All the nice offspring of the nice middle classes can do their nice projects, and mummy and daddy will be happy in the knowledge that their dear progeny aren’t being hazed, or used as target practice in a conflict zone. The lesson here is that if you have enough cash, your kids will be comfortable enough. From here though, the optics of favouring the children of the better off doesn’t look all that great.
We also know how the modern neo-liberal, price of everything-value of nothing, mind thinks. If there are going to be “projects” for the youth to do, then surely there is an opportunity to make some money! How long would it take for an announcement about National Service “providers” being brought on board? How convenient to have companies underwritten by government, but owned by any number of hangers on and parasites who fancy making a quick buck. If not them, then it’s a way of farming the less monetisable things out on the cheap to the already struggling charity sector, palming off on them what the state might usefully have done. It feels like another potential method of abrogation of responsibility by a party that seems to have a phobia of public service³.
But all of this keeps coming back to a deeper idea that as a country, Britain (or certain people in it) still seem to be obsessed with the imagery of World War II and the mindset that goes with it, and it’s really not at all healthy. It’s the reason why a swivel-eyed duffer like Iain Duncan Smith has in the past found it easy to chunter on about the Blitz Spirit. And that’s quite odd, given that he was born in 1954⁴. It’s also an easy win for columnists in the more unhinged parts of the press to drag some column inches out of too. For example, the ever reliable⁵ Jane Moore, back in 2022 on a previous occasion when this stuff did the rounds last, decided to bang on about “the kids”. Moore was born in 1962, and would have turned 18 around a month after Johnny Logan won Eurovision in 1980. Her closest approach to a war zone was probably going out to the pub on Saturday night in Cardiff as a journalism student.
Back in October 2021 (when I last looked at these numbers in any detail), according to the ONS’s own UK population demography statistics, approximately 6.2% of the UK population was of age 78 or over. Why was this relevant? Well, if you were around that age at the time, you were likely born at latest in 1942–43. This means that you would have reached the age of 17 on or around the cut-off point for the end of compulsory national service in 1960⁶. For most of the period following World War II, national service only applied to males above the qualifying age, so all the ladies can take a step back here for now. It means that if you hear some dreary old fart banging on about how wonderful national service is, and how young people could do with it to teach them some discipline, do feel free to ask whether they are part of the approximate 3% of the current UK population who actually had to do it. If they’re not, please feel free to tell them to shove an army issue sock in it, and then proceed to go somewhere (anywhere) else in an orderly fashion. Further, 7.7% of the population at that point were born in or before 1945. To have any real, first-hand memory of World War II as it happened, you’d need to be 80 years old or so - about 5.0% of the population, if we’re assuming most people’s firm memories start at around school age or just before. It means that only about one person in twenty alive in this country right now can even remember WWII first hand, not that you’d be able to tell. It does make you wonder what Sunak’s announcement is all about, and who it’s even trying to appeal to. It’s not like this is a hugely growing sector of the electorate, is it? It’s even funnier when you see that, earlier this week, they were saying it was a terrible idea.
But the wider war allusions are still everywhere. One of the after-effects of Brexit is the continuing political attempts, from multiple sides, to wrap ourselves in the flag, and think of ourselves as nation standing alone, proud and defiant, as we stood against Hitler. That’s all very nice, except it isn’t entirely true. We only had the resources of the largest empire the world had ever seen, and allies who fought alongside us. So those who talk about The Few often forget that some of them were Poles, or Czechs, or Canadians, amongst many other nationalities. They romanticise the British effort, and forget to mention the fact that during the Battle of Britain we were technologically superior, tactically more adept and simply better organised than the German forces attacking us. But it’s convenient, because in doing so you create a story for yourself, a picture of the country you want yourself to be. The problem is that this picture isn’t complete, and in some cases isn’t even true. But you need to create the myth, if only to justify a current course and set of actions, however insular, backward looking, and against our wider strategic interests and needs in the longer term that may be.
To create the myths you need to attack anything that even attempts to explain or contradict those them. This is another plank of the Conservative right’s fascination with, and deployment of the US right’s “culture war” instruction manual. Any suggestion that the British Empire wasn’t an entirely pure and shining citadel, or deeper analysis of its actions, is dismissed as unpatriotic; any thought that the British aren’t somehow exceptional is dismissed as whining; any complaint that the huges structural inequalities in our society are damaging and cancerous are dismissed as “wokeism” by the very people those inequalities are designed (by themselves) to most benefit. There are media outlets aplenty for columnists in the pay of exactly those people to crank out lazy, half-arsed opinion like some discussed earlier, and doubtless they will trot out the copy to order asking what is so bad about Sunak’s national service announcement. This sort of generational division is one of the attack lines that the Conservatives will fight this election on, but it seems that Sunak is so utterly inept that he’s bungled this one too, and we’re not even through the first week yet.
Still, if the coming election campaign feels like it’s going to be interminable, just remember, it’s only about as long as Liz Truss was actually Prime Minster, so it’ll soon be over. That seems almost comforting until you release she managed to do a lot of fucking damage in such a very, very short time. Bon chance, kids, see you on the other side, and don’t have (too many) nightmares.
¹ He also forever looks like a man on whom a small child has attempted to draw a beard with a Sharpie. Badly.
² Everyone a winner, eh? And I say that as someone who was good at maths at school, uses a fair bit of mathematical thinking in his daily job, and has a degree in Physics. It was an utterly mad idea for so many reasons that I wrote about how mad it was back when he first suggested it.
³ Which was exactly what the dish-faced ethical void, David Cameron, had in mind with the execrable Big Society. A way of camouflaging austerity, and making a having a conscience elective. On the whole I side with Attlee. Taxes are a moral obligation. They are the subscription fee for living in a civilised society.
⁴ Sweet and sugar rationing had ended by the autumn of 1953. He was born in April 1954, three months before the last meat rationing finally ended in July of that year. One assumes this would have been around about the time his mother considered starting to wean him onto solid food, so he will have known precisely no direct after-effects of wartime rationing.
⁵ You can rely on her to be utterly appalling.
⁶ At this point, only males over the age of 17 were required to do this, though you could defer due to commitments like being a student in higher education, or in an apprenticeship. This had been the case since 1949. The last deferred national servicemen were discharged in 1963. The UK Parliament website has more details.
