A national service

Let’s get some facts right about National Service in the UK. For a start it was abolished in 1960, in large part because the Armed Forces were totally fed up with spending vast resources training young men, who didn’t want to be there and who had just reached a state of usefulness before heading home. That also means that no one born after 1945 could possibly have done national service, everyone who did is in their 80’s.

To reintroduce that now when weapons and technology have marched on so quickly is military suicide. There are over 360,000 school leavers every year and the Army has, because of Tory government policy, been allowed to shrink below 70,000. The Navy and RAF have even less use for untrained squaddies, they are not going to become fighter pilots or helicopter mechanics in 12 months are they?

That is 5 recruits per soldier to train for ever, or 2.5 recruits each if you include the other armed forces. Where are you going to house 366,000 youngsters? The cost is £2.5 billion a year, you could buy a lot of tanks and ships of that money or train professionals to run them, you know the ones the Tory party has failed to recruit while in power, because it privatised recruitment.

Lucky then that the details of the plan are so vague, apparently there will be a Royal Commission to investigate National Service, so it is a plan for a review of national service, not a plan for national service. And apparently you can “volunteer” to work in the NHS for the odd weekend, presumably for free, instead; because the youth of today can afford to volunteer for free or for a pittance.

I can only think that having deliberately made it far more difficult for the young to vote the PM is not concerned with the opinions of the young. I am pretty sure that having survived covid, being home schooled, working in derelict buildings, having seen their parents dependent on food banks, getting no school meals and facing a life time of student debt; the young don’t want to waste another year of their life’s learning how to polish their boots. I doubt if their parents want them to either.

A better way of reducing the capacity of the Armed Forces by tying them up with endless square bashing it is hard to imagine.

The only national service most of us would like to see is Rishi Sunak leaving politics. It is patently obvious that he is not up to the job and that neither Truss, Johnson, May or Cameron were either.

14 wasted years and now they want your sons and daughters to “learn patriotism”, well they won’t learn it from the Tory party that is for sure.

Jonty’s Jottings

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.

By Jonty Bloom Media