Last Wednesday, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the chief of the General Staff and the most senior military officer in the UK, described the people of modern Britain as part of a “prewar generation”. A generation who may have to prepare themselves to fight in the coming years in a war against an increasingly assertive Russia – a country suffering from its own post imperial dementia. The general looked to the example of Sweden, which is on the verge of abandoning its traditional neutrality and is set to join NATO. Sweden has just reintroduced a form of national service. He said that Britain needs to take “preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing”. The general has long complained about the falling numbers of people enlisting in the armed services, and it appears that he now wants to inject the possibility of the return of conscription into our political discourse.
This intervention appears to have been coordinated with Conservative politicians like Penny Mordaunt, who this week published an article in the Sunday Times calling for the British armed forces to “keep pace with the growing capabilities of other nations". And our favourite disgraced ex-Prime Minister attracted newspaper headlines with his "Of course, I jolly well would": Boris Johnson pledges to join Army to fight Russia if needed". Have I really gone from being post-war to pre-war in my lifetime?
If the Tories want to bring back conscription in Britain, it should be for the Brexit supporting British nationalists so that they can clean up the mess they created. Strange isn't it, that it’s always the generation that doesn’t expect to be called up themselves who are the ones who are most keen to send young people off to serve.. All those Brexiteer types can go first and, while they cower in a muddy trench being yelled at by a sadistic sergeant on a power trip while subsisting on tasteless field rations sourced from a company whose director is a school friend of the defence minister, they can tell the rest of us about ‘Brexit benefits’.
If conscription does indeed make a come back in Britain, we can expect the news to be swiftly followed by the revelation that a hastily formed company, which Michelle Mone strongly denies any connection with, has been awarded a contract for £200 million worth of body armour sourced from a sweat shop in China.
We don’t live in the 1950s any more and British deference culture now exists only in the nauseating sycophancy of a few with vested interests. The response of the average working class teenager to being told that they are being called up to fight for King and country would be to reply: Not my king. And those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would probably add "Not my country".
The only reason that the political ground is currently being prepared for discussion of some sort of national service (a phrase which itself begs the questions – whose nation? and in service of whom?) is because the British state remains hell bent on getting involved in wars in far away countries in order to maintain the British nationalist fantasy that the United Kingdom is still a global player with a significant military influence on the geopolitical stage. It’s a delusion that results in mainly young working class people killing and maiming in order to further the interests of wealthy upper middle class men, and being killed, maimed or left with mental health struggles themselves. Then they are returned to a Britain where they are statistically more likely to suffer addiction problems, homelessness, and poverty and we get the promotion of charities to step in and fulfill needs for ex service people because the state has shamefully abandoned its responsibilities for them.
They say ‘bring back National Service’. I say bring back secure well-paid jobs, final salary pensions, clean rivers, union rights, the right to protest, properly-funded NHS and social care, free tuition, student grants, affordable rail fares and social housing, and a social security system that allows everyone to live in dignity. If the state wants citizens to defend it, then the state needs to make itself worth defending. The British state fails miserably on that count.
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