When the Tories reach the very bottom of their bad ideas barrel, they come up with a dead rat plan for conscription. The notion is so decrepit that those old Sir Bufton Tuftons who used to rise in the Commons to declare national service had made them the fine men they were today are long retired and mostly dead, six decades after conscription ended in the UK. It’s that never-ending Tory cry of youth hate: cut their hair, square-bash some discipline into them, bring back the lash! “Toughen up teenagers,” declared the unlikely defence secretary, Grant Shapps. If Tory campaign managers still need to secure their over-80s core vote, they really are in trouble.
This dying gasp is the exemplar of their 14 years of governing. Everything has been performative – all about announcements, not reality, and moving on before anyone queries outcomes or value for money. National service swept all the Tory front pages: job done. Marching 18-year-olds into a compulsory year of service marks Tory high command’s final abandonment of younger voters. They and their media inhabit the oldie planet of the ancients, every year limping further away from modern life on earth. David Cameron’s legacy project, the National Citizen Service, had its funding cut by two-thirds after attracting a fraction of its expected participants despite devouring 95% of all the youth service funding.
Conscription ended in 1960, too expensive to accommodate the reluctant doing nothing useful, and even rejected by some on the right such as Milton Friedman. But the army has missed its recruitment and retention targets for the past five years, perhaps partly thanks to recent revelations about treatment of recruits: 267 army training centre instructors were charged with abuse and assault between 2015 and 2023; civilian police received reports of 13 sexual assaults, including nine rapes, at the Army Foundation college in Harrogate, which trains 16- and 17-year-olds, over a 13-month period to August 2023; 47 sexual offences against under-18s were alleged in the Sexual Offences in the Service Justice System statistics for 2021; there are hundreds of cases of self-harm annually among armed forces personnel; and 600 were treated for mental health problems. Is this the place to “toughen up” today’s teens?
The Tory press release says: “National service will play an important role in making sure young people not in education, employment, or training, and young people who are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, especially for gang and knife crime, are diverted away from lives of unemployment and crime.”
Before the generals freak out at becoming commandants of young offender institutions, see the small print – it suggests no riff-raff are needed, with 18-year-olds free to apply for: “a competitive, full-time military commission over 12 months in the armed forces or UK cyber defence, where young people will learn and take part in logistics, cybersecurity, procurement or civil response operations. This placement will be selective, so that our world-leading armed forces recruit and train the brightest and best.”
It may help fill the ranks of the shrunken army, the smallest since Napoleon’s time, but old military wisdom says one volunteer is worth 10 pressed men.
Military recruits under Rishi Sunak’s new national service are likely to be paid a “stipend”, not a normal wage, but the rest will presumably be unpaid, building flood defences as if on community punishment or filling in for threadbare NHS, fire, police and care services. Did they ask charities, police or the NHS if they have the staff to supervise hundreds of thousands of recalcitrants for 25 compulsory weekends a year?
If the intention were to do good, rather than to punish young people, the government would reinstate the funding for Connexions, the careers advice service for teenagers; it would open closed youth centres, rehire sacked youth workers, restart Sure Start, rejoin Erasmus, give back education maintenance allowances that kept the poorest sixth-formers in colleges and schools, and bring back all the lost apprenticeships. Most of those, with mental health support in every school, are on Labour’s to-do list, the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, told me, excoriating pointless and expensive national service. “Red wall” voters may note that the Tories plan to pay for this out of UK shared prosperity funds earmarked for levelling up in the north.
What the young lack is political muscle. If you don’t vote, you don’t count. The old and the rich get most because they vote, the non-voting poor and the non-voting young get least: in a downward spiral, they feel Westminster offers them nothing, so they vote even less. Keir Starmer’s support this week for votes at 16 could mean that from now on, political candidates will canvass in every school and college, wooing students as eagerly as they press the flesh in every old folk’s home.
I would make first-time votes compulsory, registering all students in sixth forms and colleges, with teachers taking them to polling stations to show where and how it’s done: those who vote once get the habit, while secret fears of not knowing what to do often explain that defiant doorstep reply of “I never vote”. Once the young command an extra 1.5m votes, no government will dare tip spending and priorities so far away from them and towards the old, or abandon them after they sacrificed most in a pandemic. Too stupid, too know-nothing to vote at 16? You’ve plainly never been doorstep canvassing, tempted to throttle political dunces of all ages.
“Gerrymandering!”, the Tories protest. They should know, after forcing ID for voting, barring young people’s travel cards while seniors’ freedom passes qualify. (Once young people have the vote, watch some party offer them freedom passes too.) Cameron banned universities and colleges from registering students to vote. Sunak enfranchised 3.5 million expats and hired special staff to urge them to register in constituencies favourable to the Tories. The young are overwhelmingly anti-Tory now, and 86% of 18- to 25-year-olds say they will vote this time, with jobs, housing and the NHS their top priorities.
But Labour knows this may backfire: when 16- and 17-year-olds get the vote at the following election, most will regard a five-year Labour government as the unsatisfactory establishment and Tories as forgotten history, and the Greens may beckon. Good, as that ensures that Labour keeps its promises to the young and the Tories start thinking about them. Similarly, the Tories may be disappointed if they rely on the votes of expats, blisteringly furious about what Brexit has done to their lives.
This call of the Tory wild to bring back conscription is an act of youth hate but it has done a good service to the young, and to Labour, by catapulting young people into the forefront of the campaign. All the national service tasks it offers are more than available already in job vacancies, at ordinary rates of pay. Compulsion to work for nothing will surely bring the indignant young flocking to the polling stations. This threat will be a political awakening, not soon forgotten by their generation.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
