I agree, national service is a very silly policy and only likely to appeal to niche voters (The pensioners’ party plays its last moth-eaten card: national service for the young, 27 May). But is that niche pensioners? Perhaps Polly Toynbee has forgotten that she is a pensioner – as am I at 69. The old cliche of Colonel Blimps and Alf Garnetts is wearing thin. You’d have to be over 85 to actually remember the war, and over 100 to have served. Not a big voting cohort.
Pensioners these days are much more likely to be baby boomers – old hippies, lefties, ex Greenham Commoners, Vietnam protesters and ban-the-bombers (like Polly and me?) And those old souls who do remember the war have reconciled themselves to the dreadful reality of conflict these days. My old Ma – born 1926 – used to say that any war was a crime.
Wendy Shillam
London
