I know this has been discussed a bit in the previous post, but…
The Conservatives have set out a plan to require 18-year-olds take part in a form of national service if the party wins the general election on 4 July.
Before we go any further, this is morally reprehensible. We, the people, do not belong to the state. It has no moral right to enforce service whatsoever. It is for this reason rather than practical ones that it should be vigorously opposed.
Now lets get to the practicalities.
The proposed new scheme would not be conscription, where people are legally required to join the armed forces for a period.
But it would compel people by law to complete a community programme over a 12-month period, or enrol in a year-long military training scheme, when they turn 18.
So it is precisely conscription, FFS!
It would be made up of two broad streams for 18-year-olds to choose from:
Community volunteering: Spending one weekend every month – which equates to 25 days over a 12-month period – volunteering with organisations such as the NHS, fire service, ambulance, search and rescue, and critical local infrastructure
Military training: Applying for one of up to 30,000“selective” military placements reserved for teenagers deemed the “brightest and the best” in areas like logistics, cyber security, procurement or civil response operations over a year-long period
What exactly will the military do with a bunch of unwilling teenagers for a year? Too short a period to do anything useful, and too long to be able to train them and offload them, so they will end up as many did before them, kicking their heels at places like Catterick. What an utter fucking waste of everyone’s time and effort.
As for compulsory volunteering – again, a pressed man is a waste of time and like David Blunkett before, if it’s compulsory, it is not volunteering, the two are mutually exclusive. Are these people complete cretins? (Rhetorical question). People who are pressed effectively into taking jobs they don’t want to get them off the benefits gig, just under achieve in order to get themselves sacked so they can start the merry go round again. All this stupid idea will do – if it ever comes to fruition – will waste the time and effort of those charged with looking after these kids. They will hinder rather than help those who are trying to ruin an establishment that is expected to babysit them.
Also, expect mass disobedience. I know if I was of an age to get caught up in it, I’d flatly refuse to cooperate. The current generation is far more inclined to do so than those who resisted in 1914, for example. The whole thing is a clusterfuck waiting to happen – so not only vile, authoritarian and immoral, but goddamned stupid as well.
While 18-year-olds would have a choice in the type of national service they signed up to, participation would not be voluntary – it would be required by law.
No one would go to prison for not taking part, Mr Cleverly said, but there would be non-criminal sanctions for those who refused.
The Conservatives have not said what those punishments would be.
Of course not. Because you haven’t actually thought that far. This stupid, unworkable and morally bankrupt idea is typical of back of a fag packet thinking from a failed government that is trying to come up with an idea that might win it votes, yet lacks the intellectual capacity to actually put together a cohesive strategy to run a country effectively. It reeks of desperation and panic. It also shows us that you have no moral compass whatsoever. Let us hope that Reform takes enough votes from you to utterly destroy you in July.
For the majority of people taking part in community work, it seems unlikely there would be any sort of reimbursement.
So, slavery then. Fuck off and die, the lot of you.
aka An application to Dignitas by the Conservative Party.
As for the military, “Marching Up and Down the Square” would seem to apply. It’s on youtube.
The issues of the military draft and the Vietnam war were entangled; the draft here in the US ended shortly before the war did. Although, men still have to register with the Selective Service. From what I understand a good part of the military was relieved at the end of compulsory service, resentful draftees good soldiers did not make.
Who in government or wherever thinks that this is a good, workable, vote-winning and beneficial idea?
Please pass on their names and roles as I have this famous bridge that may be going cheap
The bulk of people, even old ones like me, are too young to remember National Service and so the idea seem foreign to our expectations.
Now make a period of Community Volunteering or Military Training as an alternative to jail time, that’s different. You could keep people out of jail or the probation service, cancel fines, and expunge criminal records as part of the deal – which might rehabilitate youngsters who might otherwise spiral down into a life of crime. Not a perfect solution but if it worked well enough…
I read a report on the Daily Fail (here : https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13456501/benefits-scroungers-Britain-deprived-seaside-town-say-election-free-cash.html) that the entire town will vote for whoever will keep paying their benefits. OK, that one could go either way as neither party will do anything about cutting the welfare bill.
The call for compulsory national service is guaranteed to have suchlike people never voting Conservative until the sun goes supernova and the vast majority of people not far behind. There are not enough old people left alive that remember or who had served as conscripts under the last bout of National Service to sway the voting figures even if they did think it was a good idea either back then or now.
This is the Conservatives putting a gun to their heads and pulling the trigger.
In the late sixties a colleague made the point that when called up for national service he chose the army as he would be taught a useful trade. He spent it in Malaya and when he returned to the UK he became a secondhand car salesman.
Doesn’t seem the Tories are taking the election any more seriously than they have taken running the country.
Things are in a really bad way when Labour is looking sensible by comparison (and no, l won’t be voting for them either).
Outside possibility.
This is the Conservatives deliberately crushing their electoral chances.
See Andrew Bridgen MP who said on a podcast that we’re already at war with Russia and just haven’t been told. And the Dishi Rishi doesn’t want to be a wartime PM, so he had to do snap election.
May be the Tories don’t want to be a wartime govt either.
Don’t know how true that all is, but it makes a kind of sense…
Wartime governments have a habit of being dumped immediately after. Tories let labour take over now. Labour is wartime govt. Then after the Tories can rebuild and take all the credit for rebuilding.
It really does look as if the Conservatives are trying to lose the election on purpose, it is also possible that they really are so stupid that they think that this is a vote winner.
“The bulk of people, even old ones like me, are too young to remember National Service…”
I’m just short of 66 and I am aware that my dad did a spell in the army but I was a baby so too young to remember. I think that he found it a generally positive experience but it was a totally different era, life in 2024 is not remotely like it was in 1958.
A friend of mine joined the HLI out of school saying “I want to be in the biggest gang in the country”.
That’s how you sell it!
That assumes people want to be in a gang. Some people feel that need. Others – like – me don’t. I have walked my own path through life without wanting to join a gang. I did a little service with the Naval reserve back in the eighties. It told me that I wasn’t really suited for that life.
Yet, without Cleverly and his ilk forcing me to be a part of a community, I have gone through life being productive. Cleverly has shown that despite inheriting Burke’s principles, they have squandered them. This idea is so far removed from his little platoons that he would not recognise the Conservative party of today. The whole point – that he got and Cleverly doesn’t – is that community is a voluntary arrangement. People do things because they choose to, not because the state has forced them. If I was eighteen and this scheme was in place, I would not consent and simply refuse to comply. The conscientious objectors went to prison for it, because there are always people who will not be used by the state. If there are enough, the whole thing becomes unworkable. Let those who want to join the biggest gang do so, and those who want to walk alone do so too.
Why have British governments been obsessed with trying to turn us into Prussia for the last century-and-a-half? If it’s not welfare states, it’s national service.
How about supporting the existing voluntary youth organizations instead of regulating them into oblivion? Who’s going to stay on as a Boys’ Brigade Officer or Scout… whatever-it-is-they-have after his 18th birthday when you have to go through criminal background checks and take a bloody exam to prove to the state that you’re not about to start fiddling with your mates?
But hey… I’m sure the government that’s been encouraging boys that they’re really girls for the last decade but can’t teach them to read and write will do a bang-up job.
By some bizarre double-think, some Tory idiot suggested today that, if the youngsters refuse, their parents will be fined. These young people are 18, they are legally adults, so their parents have no legal responsibility whatsoever for their compliance.
And another branch of the Uniparty is planning to give the vote to 16-year-olds – so we’ve got one branch suggesting that pimply adolescents are capable of voting, but another branch suggests that parents are legally responsible for 18-year-olds.
None of these fucking idiots deserve our votes – only Reform UK can save us now.
The Tories clearly haven’t bothered to think this through, and why should they – they know they aren’t going to be in government in five weeks’ time. On the other hand they have managed to create a manning crisis for the armed forces which could well be about to bite the new government, so in a few years they will be able to wave this and say “see? We had a plan to fix this, vote for us next time”.