Commentary: Why is UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proposing mandatory national service?

LONDON: The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I very much hope this is the fate of Rishi Sunak’s idea of compulsory national service for school-leavers.

Sunak’s first big announcement of the election campaign was that a re-elected Conservative government will oblige all 18-year-olds to take part in a form of national service. This will come in two forms: A minority will serve full-time in the military for a year while the majority will be expected to do voluntary work for one weekend every month for non-military organisations such as the fire service, the police, the NHS or charities.

“BASICALLY BONKERS”

Enter the predictable ridicule. Keir Starmer, Labour’s leader, denounced the idea as a "teenage dad’s army". The twitter mob lambasted the Tories for pandering to the Colonel Blimp brigade, engaging in geriatric nostalgia, scapegoating the young, engaging in social engineering, playing politics with national defence and launching a £2.5 billion (US$3.2 billion) initiative without working out the details.

There is a striking imbalance, for example, between serving in the military full-time for a year and volunteering for just one weekend a month. And there is no clarity about what sanctions people will face if they don’t turn up (Home Secretary James Cleverly says no one will go to jail for refusing to participate), or how national service will affect the now sacred British tradition of the gap year. Fleet Street went to town on the fact that the veterans minister, Johnny Mercer, himself a former soldier, dismissed the idea just four days before Sunak’s announcement, on the grounds that "being in the military is very different now".

There are signs that ridicule will harden into sustained opposition, in the unlikely event that the Tories win the coming election. Senior military figures vented their longstanding hostility to conscription. Admiral Alan West, a former First Sea Lord, proclaimed that the idea is "basically bonkers". Richard Dannatt, a former Chief of the General Staff, went with "electoral opportunism".

And there are certainly legitimate objections to the Conservatives’ big idea - from lack of detail about what it will cost and how it will be paid for, to failure to prepare the public for their new thinking. The Conservatives foolishly reinforced the impression that they are pandering to older voters by then announcing they are upgrading the triple lock on pensions to a quadruple lock.

But none of these criticisms is dispositive. The fact that the Tories are embracing a new policy after 14 years in power is a sign they are continuing to think. 

NATIONAL SERVICE AS A COLD SHOWER

I will have plenty to say about Sunak’s failures as a campaigner in the next day or so. But his idea for national conscription is an exception to what has otherwise been a mess - it needs to be subjected to serious debate rather than asinine ridicule. He has recognised that we live in a very different world from the one we inhabited after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Today, Russian troops are rampaging through Ukraine; Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are pledging eternal friendship; Iran’s proxies are stirring up trouble across the Middle East; and British allies in the Nordic countries, France and the Baltic have either reintroduced some form of national service or are thinking of doing so. 

The strongest argument in favour of national service is that it will engineer a change in public attitude toward military risk. The public has not yet woken up to the full extent of the danger from the autocratic powers: People still regard the war in Ukraine as a humanitarian catastrophe rather than a strategic risk and China’s sabre rattling as noises off the stage. National service would act as a cold shower for people who have been wallowing in the warm bath of the peace dividend long since it has run out.

We can no longer afford to contract out warfare to a professional cadre of soldiers while leaving the population at large to go about their business in blissful ignorance. Even the restricted military service that Sunak envisages will help to create a reservoir of skills in the population that can be called on in future conflicts.

In Switzerland and Norway, the 18-year-olds who serve become a trained reserve that can be used to expand the professional army when needed. The Conservatives are frustratingly vague about the relationship between volunteering and military service. But even people who don’t go down the army route could be given instruction in the dangers of information war and cyberthreats.

NOT ONLY MILITARY BENEFITS

National Service might also help Britain address three other pressing problems. One is the mental and physical health crisis among the young. Fully one in eight 16-to-24-year-olds claim to be suffering from long-term health problems - and the growth of health problems in this group is worse than any other group within the working-age population. This is largely driven by mental health issues - often associated with loneliness, alienation and screen addiction - though rising levels of obesity among the young also play a part.

Hardcore military service would obviously be good for physical fitness, but even volunteering would help to reconnect young people to the wider society. Contrary to Labour’s insistence that national service represents a conspiracy of the old against the young, a survey for the think tank Onward, laying out the case for national service, found that two-thirds (66 per cent) of those aged 18 to 34 wanted to help out locally.

The second problem is social fragmentation. Britain is increasingly a class-bound society in which privileged young Britons only meet their less-privileged contemporaries when they receive their Amazon parcels or decaf lattes. The higher-education system only reinforces such social division. National service would force people from different backgrounds to engage in a common experience directed at a shared aim: Defending the country from anti-democratic enemies.

The third is opportunity. Britain’s last great attempt to improve upward mobility, by expanding higher education, was only a partial success, in part because middle-class girls did so much better than working-class boys. Military service could create a new avenue of upward mobility that might appeal to people who demonstrate practical skills and team leadership more than academic virtues.

Here Sweden’s example is both instructive and encouraging. Only people who can pass rigorous mental and physical tests are allowed to choose the military rather than the civic option in Sweden’s compulsory national service. They are then trained in warfare and leadership for 15 months and enrolled in Sweden’s reserves for another 10 years. Sweden’s annual armed service-recruitment rate now tops America’s, and the products of the enlistment system are routinely showered with job offers from employers.

Election campaigns being what they are, we can expect nothing but ridicule from the Labour Party on Sunak’s grand idea. But for how much longer?

David Lammy, Starmer’s shadow foreign secretary and one of the party’s biggest beasts, has vigorously advocated "a form of compulsory national service", though of an exclusively civil variety. Even if Sunak is not around to implement his big idea, I have no doubt that it will eventually become self-evident.