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
• There’s something of the kneejerk in the dismissal of the proposal to reinstate national service. Although of course we need a properly funded professional military, we would be blithe to assume we are not now also going to need a skilled and motivated reserve. Might not a freshly elected Keir Starmer take a leaf out of Attlee’s book and reintroduce it himself? It is communitarian, inclusive and patriotic. It may prove a timely remedy for the dreadful isolation imposed on the young by the lockdowns and “chosen” by them in the cynically marketised smartphone universe whose damaging effects are increasingly recognised and documented.
And perhaps a few years of such purposeful and mutually dependent social integration would render the egregious income differentials that increasingly divide the rich and “successful” from the rest distasteful and implausible, as well as unjust.
Lorne Denny
Oxford
• The Tories’ view of all young people seems to be that they lack skills, opportunities and social cohesion. As well as being unfair to the many young people for whom those things are untrue, it is also a damning indictment of the government in charge of education, economic and social policy for most of the last 18 years.
Daniel Owen
Torrington, Devon
• Talking of national service, how about a law that no one can become an MP unless they work for a year in a care home? It would give them valuable life-experience to inform their subsequent lawmaking, and would be for their own good by counteracting the deracinating career path of university-spad-MP that leaves so much of their human nature underdeveloped.
Paul Brownsey
Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire
• As a teacher for many years, I know that the vast majority of young people do have the discipline, respect and understanding of team-playing that Jonathan Longstaff thinks they need national service to instil (Letters, 27 May). What Longstaff needs is a less prejudiced attitude to young people.
Elaine Luke
Fairlight, East Sussex
• Discipline, respect and an understanding of team-playing – the benefits ascribed to national service by Mr Longstaff from Buxted – could just as easily be gained by learning bellringing, and these benefits are open to recruits of all ages.
Bruce Purvis
Ringer, Winchester Cathedral
• £2.5bn on bringing back national service? Let’s spend it on the NHS instead. Write that on your bloody bus.
Michael Gray
Lincoln
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