Bring Back National Service

I think everyone in Britain, when they turn 18, should have to spend two years in uniform. Not for the Army's sake; for society's.

If you’ve been following my posts you’ll already know that I was a professional soldier for 15 years. As a professional I tended to have a fairly low opinion of conscripts. Modern soldiering is a complicated business, and I always thought there was limited value in having a large force of troops who didn’t really want to be there and, in many cases, wouldn’t have met the high selection standards of the Regular Army. My encounters with actual conscripts, whether on various NATO deployments or the amiable but hapless boyfriend of a German acquaintance, did nothing to change my mind. Well, I’ve changed it now.

To be more precise, I’ve partly changed it. I still don’t think what the British Army really needs is a million conscripts who don’t really want to be there. From a military point of view I still think there are limits on how useful they would be. I certainly don’t think they’d be no use at all, and I’ll cover where I think they could play a role later, but I don’t see a conscript army as being a real alternative to the professional one we have right now. Despite that, though, I’m now convinced that bringing back National Service, 60 years after the last conscripts left the Army, is something we should urgently put in motion. The twist is that I’m not primarily focused on the benefits it would bring the Army; I’m focused on the benefits it would bring the country.

The UK Is In Dire Straits

Britain is an absolute shambles. Our politicians, who are the least impressive shower I’ve seen blundering around the Palace of Westminster in my entire life, are dimly aware that all is not well, but they seem completely incapable of recognising the nature and sheer scale of the problems we face. Right now Labour, desperate to get back into power, are promising to lead us to a new sunlit upland with their plans to rebuild the economy, create jobs, fix immigration and make working people better off. They can’t actually reveal any details of these plans, but they do assure us that they have plans, and would a politician lie to us?

Meanwhile the Conservatives are equally desperate to stay in power, but despite being on their fifth prime minister in 13 years and having kept up an impressive turnover rate of cabinet ministers, the whole party seems exhausted. Sunak is convinced that by reducing immigration from its current apocalyptic level to something that’s merely disastrous, and telling us that if we re-elect him he’ll suddenly discover a competence he’s shown no sign of so far, he can somehow snatch victory from what the polls are predicting will be an extinction-level event.

So both main parties seen inept and completely devoid of actual ideas; as if that wasn’t bad enough they’re also both hopelessly fractured. The Tories are split in three. There’s the hopelessly wet One Nation faction, who are basically Liberal Democrats but with just enough low cunning to join a party that has at least a hypothetical chance of winning an election again someday. Then there’s Rishi Sunak’s clique of technocrats, who pair the charisma of a suburban assistant bank manager with the gravity of a teenage prefect whose voice hasn’t quite finished breaking yet. Finally there’s a scattering of actual conservatives, who are angry and frustrated because they can’t actually be conservative without getting fired if they’re a minister and ignored if they’re not.

Just to balance the scales, Labour is also split in three. Sir Keir Starmer heads his own band of drab Blairite managerialists, who tend to be more mature than Sunak’s but somehow even less well endowed with personality (and completely indistinguishable from Sunak in terms of actual political beliefs). There’s a dwindling band of old-style centre-left social democrats and moderate socialists, basically well-meaning and not too misguided, but terminally bewildered at the bin fire of a party they find themselves stuck in. And, last and very definitely least, there’s the lunatic fringe. All parties have one of those, but Labour’s is large enough to be one of the party’s main factions. It includes unregenerate far-left nutcases like the odious and stupid Diane Abbott, plus a ragbag of terrifying monomaniacal zealots like Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum, who never talk about anything except Islam, and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who never talks about anything except LGBT rights.

There are a bunch of other parties too, of course, but none of them matter. There’s the Lib Dems, a repellent tribe of rodent-like sub-epsilon males, frumpy harridans and weird boyfriend batterers. They’re notable mainly for whiny passive aggressiveness in national politics, and vicious dishonesty at council level. There are Plaid Cymru and the SNP, who I believe will crumble to dust like vampires should they ever leave the unhappy regions blighted by their misrule. There are the Greens, as frothingly Marxist as the most extreme Labour crackpot and as underhanded and dishonest as the lowest Lib Dem. Finally there’s Reform UK, which uniquely seems to understand the mess the country’s in but, barring Tory defections, will never win a single seat.

The Disunited Kingdom

We are, basically, leaderless. This is unfortunate, because while the condition of our political class is dire, the rot has spread through every level of society. Nothing seems to work anymore. The sacred National Health Service ravenously devours an ever-larger share of the economy, while treating patients as an inconvenience to be avoided wherever possible. The Civil Service barely comes into work at all and, when it does, seems determined to actively block anything from happening. The police will send 30 men to pepper-spray Tommy Robinson for the crime of eating breakfast, while letting masked Jihadists desecrate our war memorials. The BBC is every bit as greedy as the NHS; it employs radio presenters who hate white people, TV newsreaders who hate the public and of course Gary bloody Lineker, who gets paid £1.5 million a year to hate everyone except Hamas. The only people in the public sector who actually do any work are the Armed Forces, whose reward is an endless series of redundancies in exchange for new equipment that rarely arrives and doesn’t work if it does, and nanny state busybodies who doggedly churn out lists of new things we’re not allowed to say, do or eat.

Meanwhile the private sector is struggling under the twin cudgels of a crippling tax burden and a workforce that doesn’t want to work. Greedy shirkers boast on social media of being a “quiet quitter” or having a “lazygirl job”. These are both euphemisms for lounging around at home when possible, lounging around the office when unavoidable, and in either case doing as little as possible consistent with not actually getting sacked. And that’s the people that allegedly want to work. Five million or so don’t even make that minimal level of effort; they’re entirely supported by government handouts, because they either avoid ever actually getting hired or have a diagnosis of some allegedly crippling but conveniently nebulous medical condition like “anxiety”. If any business somehow manages to make a profit despite these headwinds, the government has awarded itself the right to swoop in like a thieving magpie and snatch itself a “windfall tax” to shovel into the insatiable gullet of the NHS.

All that isn’t bad enough for you? Never fear: The country’s falling apart, too. The separatists in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland hate the unionists and of course the English. The metropolitan elite hate suburbanites, the North and in fact pretty much everything outside the M25. Disgruntled remoaners hate Brexit voters, non-graduates, the working class and anyone who isn’t furiously indignant that we don’t have a national delegation at the European Domestic Radiator Fittings Regulatory Agency anymore. Skilled workers hate the metropolitan elite, Muslims hate Jews, lesbians hate trans rights activists and trans rights activists hate everyone, but especially JK Rowling.

Luckily people under 40 never have to speak to - or even see - everyone they hate, because they walk around with their eyes glued to their phones all day. Of course they’ve mostly forgotten how to interact with other human beings, but that still puts them ahead of people under 20, who have never even learned to. A large percentage of the population, almost all on the left/remoaner end of the spectrum, have elevated self-segregation to an art form. It’s no longer enough to simply disagree with people who voted for the Tories, or Brexit, or for Nigel Farage to win I’m A Celebrity; you have to loathe them with a passion, even if that means breaking up relationships, families or the entire country into a patchwork of mutually hostile camps. It truly is the most godawful mess.

I think National Service would go a long way towards fixing this.

You’re In The Army Now

I’ve already said I don’t think a conscript army could replace today’s Regulars. The ideal solution would be to combine the two. The Regular Army would still exist, somewhat larger than it is today - I’d probably restore it to its pre-Blair strength of 100,000 or so, Anyone who wanted to become a regular soldier, sailor or airman could apply as soon as they left school, go through the selection process as now, and start their professional Army career. As well as this core I think there would also be a considerable number who, after their National Service, decided to stay on for a few more years as a Regular. Soldiering can be a hard life, but it can also be a rewarding and enjoyable one.

The path to an officer’s commission would need to be tweaked somewhat, because today almost all officers join after university. As it happens I think far too many people go to university and the country would be a lot better off if the proportion of graduates fell from its present level of around 40%, back to around 15% or so where it used to be. Most people who get degrees nowadays simply don’t benefit from them. So what I’d do is offer any 18-year-old who wanted to go to university the chance to attempt one of the service commissioning boards first. If they passed they could go to university at public expense (to be repaid in full if they dropped out or failed their finals, of course) on condition that they joined the University OTC or its Navy or RAF equivalent for the duration of their degree and, on graduation, went through Sandhurst or one of the other military academies and served for at least a five-year short service commission.

Everyone who opted not to become an officer or Regular would, unless they had a genuine medical condition that made them incapable of serving, be called up for National Service at the age of 18. If they wanted to do a degree without commissioning they could do it at after their two years’ national service; I’d be open to a discount of perhaps 50% on tuition fees for anyone who satisfactorily completed their service. Any potential officers who dropped out of university or military academy, or Regular volunteers who dropped out of training, would be conscripted for two years. You don’t get out of it that easily.

What about alternative service options for people who didn’t want to serve in the military? Germany offered this when they had conscription; many young Germans did their service in hospitals, care homes or other menial but essential jobs. In my new model National Service, though, it wouldn’t be an option. The only way to avoid service would be a permanent, disqualifying health condition. Those with non-permanent health conditions would be conscripted when they recovered; those with permanent conditions who made a miraculous recovery at some later stage would have some questions to answer, with two years in prison as an option if their answers weren’t good enough.

Why not allow the option of cleaning hospitals or picking up litter for two years though? Couldn’t we use the manpower to do those jobs? Yes, we certainly could - but the point of this National Service isn’t to provide manpower; it’s to fix our poor sick country. Every healthy school leaver in the country who wasn’t already on the path to Regular service would, at some point in their 18th year, be called up for basic training and enlisted in the Army.

Setting up the facilities for basic training would be a drain on the Regular Army at first, because it would absorb a lot of junior to mid-ranking officers and NCOs. On the bright side it would mean accelerated promotion for a lot of people, because large numbers of corporals, and smaller but still significant numbers of sergeants and lieutenants, would be needed.

Rebuilding The Nation

The biggest problem we have in our fragmenting and, increasingly, mutually hostile society is that we don’t have much in the way of shared experiences. The deprived urban underclass live a life that has almost nothing in common with the one the metropolitan elite live. The child of immigrants from an enclave where immigrants dominate knows next to nothing about the lives of the native working class. We can’t relate to many of our fellow citizens because, bluntly, we don’t understand them. That’s what the new National Service would fix.

On arrival at basic training, the conscripts would be broken down into sections, each consisting of ten young men or women - not mixed - under the command of a corporal. The corporals would be selected for their motivation, force of personality and, in a controlled sense, aggression. The recruits within each section would be carefully mixed by social class and ethnic origin, deliberately taking them out of their comfort zones. If the privileged child of wealthy left-wing human rights lawyers, a handful of offspring of the skilled working and lower middle classes, and a sprinkling of young people from deprived housing estates and self-segregated immigrant communities aren’t happy at the idea of spending the next three months together in a ten-man barrack room, well, that’s just tough.

Actually no, it isn’t “just tough” - it’s the whole point of the exercise.

The day they arrive, each recruit might not have much in common with the nine others in their barrack room. No problem. That’s going to start changing, quite quickly. In fact it will start changing immediately, because now the ten recruits have something in common already: They’re all in an unfamiliar environment, each standing next to a bed whose bare mattress is piled with stacks of newly issued bedding, uniforms and equipment, while a brisk, efficient corporal launches into the first of a long, long series of instructions. Those instructions can’t be debated or discussed, because the corporal doesn’t have the time or the inclination. They can’t be ignored or challenged, because the corporal does have the full power of the military discipline system behind them. The recruits are going to have a lot to do, and they’ll soon discover that they need to work together to do it.

There’s no place for loners in the Army, especially in basic training. Some of the recruits may well be loners by temperament. Tough. They’ll have to work together with their section, because every morning before breakfast the barrack room, the toilets, the showers, ablutions and corridors all need to be cleaned to a very high standard. Everyone’s locker has to be perfectly laid out for inspection. Everyone’s uniform has to be immaculate. Getting that done takes teamwork. You might not like the young man from a completely different background who sleeps in the next bedspace, but if you’re rubbish at ironing trousers and he’s rubbish at folding T-shirts you’ll very quickly find that working together to cover each other’s weak spots makes both your lives much easier. And who knows - you might even find that behind his brown skin or Belfast accent or air of metropolitan sophistication, he’s not actually that different from you.

It’s a long time now since I went through basic training, but I remember the way it slowly welded the section into a team. The required level of effort stayed pretty constant, but as the weeks went by we were able to carry out more complex and strenuous tasks, to a higher standard, for the same amount of exertion. That was partly because we were acquiring and practicing skills, and partly because we got better at working together to get things done. When nobody has the option of quitting, and the relentless corporal can always send troublemakers off to the guardroom for half an hour’s attitude adjustment, you will get better at working together. You don’t have any choice. Mavericks or loose cannons don’t prosper in that environment. In civilian life, very often, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In the Army, the proud nail gets hammered down.

I’d estimate that from a section of ten conscripts you’d have one or two who adapted quickly and helped carry the others, five or six good solid recruits who would do well with varying degrees of encouragement, and three problem children who couldn’t or wouldn’t succeed without a great deal of pushing. Some of that pushing would come from the corporal and other staff. Most would come from the others in their section. When someone else’s poor performance has consequences for you - whether it’s coming last on a team stretcher race or missing sleep because the corridor floor has to be polished again - you have an incentive to help them with the things that are letting them down. After three months, out of the original ten, probably one would have been discharged as unsuitable, one would have been backsquadded to try again until they got it right, and eight would have been forged into a team capable of working together to get things done. More importantly, they still might not all like each other, but they’d understand each other. The original differences in behaviour, work ethic and culture that had baffled them on day one would now be familiar - and most likely they’d also be a lot less pronounced than they had been, underlaid by a new culture that they all shared.

The Virtue Of Uniformity

Modern society worships individuality and difference. They have their place; life would be a lot less interesting without them. I think we’ve taken it too far, though. Many people are so desperate to be unique and special that, in the absence of anything real that sets them apart, they’ll invent a new gender for themselves or turn to extremes of politics or religion. Perhaps our society would be less of a disaster area if we focused a little more attention on what we have in common rather than what makes us different.

A section of newly trained National Service conscripts would have a lot in common. They’d all all be team players, because that would be an essential part of their lives. They’d all talk in a way that let them understand each other easily, without peppering their speech with foreign words or niche jargon, because good communications is a part of teamwork. Most importantly they’d all have a degree of pride in what they’d accomplished - both as individuals and as a team.

After basic training the sections would get broken up. Some would be trained as clerks, drivers, vehicle mechanics and all the other jobs required to support a National Service unit so it wasn’t too heavy a burden on the Regular Army. Any with moral objections to combat could become cooks or medics. Most would spend another couple of months learning to be light infantry, before going off to spend 18 months with a battalion. This is the point where we’d need to find something for all these new soldiers to do.

For one thing, we could play a much more active role in global disaster relief or peacekeeping, because we’d have a deep pool of manpower that, right now, we just don’t. High intensity warfighting would be the Regular Army’s job, with National Service units taking over peacekeeping in low-threat environments, providing security for lines of communication or delivering emergency aid after a disaster.

Perhaps, in a conscript’s 18 months with their unit, we could aim to have them spend six months abroad peacekeeping or doing some kind of aid task, and gaining experience of the world while they were at it. For the other year they’d be in the UK. Some of that time would be spent training, with both other National Service units and Regular ones. Some would be adventure training, perhaps sailing or mountaineering, and some more set aside for personal development - learning skills that might be useful after their service. If the country had an emergency, like a flood or blizzard, there would be no shortage of trained, disciplined people ready to be deployed to help out. The constant theme would be working together, strengthening the team, learning to get things done together.

Civvy Street

And then, eventually, the two years would be over. Our conscript soldiers would hand in most of their kit, pack a couple of sets of uniform into their bag and clean their room for the last time. Then, carrying their luggage and clutching a rail warrant, they’d be bused to the nearest railway station. A few, who’d enjoyed it more than they’d expected, would have volunteered for Regular service and be heading off for advanced training. Perhaps some would linger for a few pints in the station bar, or share a train part of the way home, but one by one they’d peel off and eventually they’d all go their separate ways. Their National Service experience would be over.

But, really, it would never be over. Yes, they’d each go their own ways in life. One goes to university to study human rights law, a second qualifies as an electrician and a third becomes imam at his local mosque. Their lives settle into the paths that, most likely, they’d have gone down anyway if their two years in uniform had never happened. But slowly, bit by bit, slightly more obviously every month as a few thousand more conscripts returned to civilian life, society would begin to change. More and more people would have that shared experience. After five or six two-year cycles a significant percentage of the country would have it. The damage done by decades of social fragmentation would begin to heal.

The human rights lawyer, the self-employed sparky and the robed imam would still lead very different lives, but they’d no longer be alien to each other. If the three of them found themselves sitting in a doctor’s waiting room or airport departure lounge they wouldn’t sit in awkward silence, unsure of what to say or even whether they wanted to say anything at all. They’d all have a shared experience, and a shared culture and vocabulary to help them communicate. And they can sit there, telling each other exaggerated stories about their National Service days, until the doctor calls for the next patient or the gate attendant announces that the flight is boarding. Because although they might be different now, the memory of what they once shared will always be there.