OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Sunak’s Campaign: From Bad to Worse.
The Conservative Party has said it would bring back mandatory national service if it wins the general election.
It said 18-year-olds would have a choice of either joining the military full-time for 12 months, or volunteering one weekend every month carrying out a community service.
The party is proposing a Royal Commission to consider the details but would plan for the first teenagers to take part in September 2025.
The cost is expected to be around £2.5bn per year.
Under the plans, young people could choose a full-time placement in the armed forces or UK cyber defence, learning about logistics, cyber security, procurement or civil response operations.
Their other option would be to volunteer one weekend per month — or 25 days per year — in their community with organisations such as fire, police and the NHS.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.
In response, NRO’s Andrew Stuttaford writes at the above link:
Sunak wants to bring back the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic, does he? The spirit of an overmighty state, hysterical overreaction, and petty denunciations.
If Sunak had any sense, he would keep very, very quiet about the behavior of the Tory government during the pandemic.
It’s worth adding that national service has, for good reasons (individual liberty and all that), played a very small part in British tradition, existing for only two periods in its history. The first was 1916–19, when having entered (unwisely) into a voluntary war in 1914, it ran out of volunteers to fight it. The second time was 1939–60, understandably enough, at least, during the Second World War but decreasingly so thereafter. The last conscript was discharged in 1963, ridiculously late.
The Tory party, the party of lockdowns, net zero, penal taxation, and social-media censorship has already shown itself to be a party, like its rivals even further to the left, of the authoritarian state. Now we have this. . . .
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Sunak has, of course, now made it easier for the coming Labour government to introduce some sort of (voluntary) eco corps or the like. But then thinking ahead is not his strongest point.
In 2022 at the American Conservative Jason Garshfield wrote that then-conservative PM Boris Johnson Missed His Churchill Moment in 2020:
When Johnson’s idol, Winston Churchill, first came to power in 1940, France was in the process of falling to Nazi Germany. Most of the other great European powers had already fallen. For a time, Britain stood alone in the world, the sole defender of the West, with Churchill at its helm. Even when his own ministers urged him to accept Hitler’s peace offer, Churchill held firm to his convictions and chose to fight on.
This is the laudable mantle that Johnson has, all his life, aspired to shoulder. He faced just such a defining moment in March of 2020. The entire world had surrendered to the People’s Republic of China, adopting its totalitarian disease-control strategy, and unlike France or Poland in World War II, we surrendered without a shot being fired. If any man in the world was well-positioned to stand against this, it was the garrulous British renegade, Boris Johnson.
Instead, the United Kingdom became a police state.
As Stuttaford noted above, “If Sunak had any sense, he would keep very, very quiet about the behavior of the Tory government during the pandemic.” Since he doesn’t, in response, Tom Slater, the editor the conservative-themed Spiked Website in England is concise: Bring on the bloodbath.
UPDATE: UK Tories: Life Imitates Art. “Seriously, Tories? You’re now lifting campaign ideas from 35-year old episodes of Yes, Prime Minister? Will it really be ‘the Grand Design’ for real?”
“The Labour Party will be terrible in office, but the Tory Party deserves to lose,” Steve Hayward writes.