'Election gimmick is dangerous - seeking older voters at expense of young'

26 May 2024 , 21:01

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Sunak-Service would never work (Image: Getty Images)

I just missed National Service because a Tory government abolished it weeks before my 17th birthday in 1960.

Call-up would have stopped my life in its tracks. Probably no university, or marriage to my girlfriend, with no obvious addition to the nation’s firepower. My big brother John did his bit, in the RAF, like our father did in the Second World War.

He was a bricklayer in civvy street, so they made him a post office clerk on a remote station in Wiltshire for 18 months before going back to the trowel. I’m not anti-service. All our family served in wartime, including uncles Jack in the Guards and Bob who was a tail-gunner in Lancasters. Even my Auntie Barbara served in the WAAF.

But this gimmick isn’t service to the nation. It’s Sunak-Service to win votes for the Conservative Party, seeking older voters at the expense of the young.

His cynical election stunt, launched as the nation prepares to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, is utterly shameless. And Sunak-Service would never work. His barmy blueprint for compulsory work either in the Army, the police, NHS, charity or the fire service is yet more ill-conceived Tory populism.

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More than 700,000 young people turn 18 every year. There simply isn’t room for all of them in the military or civvy service. Despite being short of recruits, I don’t think the Army would thank you for battalions of unwilling, untrained teenagers foisted on them, ditto the fire service. And the NHS needs proper nurses and hospital workers, not conscripted weekend warriors drafted in by Tory politicians.

Furthermore, it would require a huge bureaucracy to deal with demands by tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of young people for exemption. Who will be given the task of tracking down – and punishing - Sunak-Service dodgers? There must be sanctions, or youngsters will simply tell the authorities where to stick their call-up papers. And the idea is wrong in principle.

Compulsion in peacetime (we are not actually at war, last time I looked) for any group in society is totalitarian, iniquitous and totally un-British. If they are ever called upon to fight, I’m sure the younger generation will flock to the colours. They always have in the past. It’s their country, and they would fight for it.

But Sunak-Service is not the way to fire up patriotism. He has done a National Disservice to his country by floating this daft and dangerous policy.

Paul Routledge