I’m far too old to be subject to this, but I cannot emphasise how strongly the government could fuck right off if they wanted to draft me.
For one thing, the government doesn’t own us. We’re not things to be deployed as they see fit. We own them. We pay for them, and their jobs come and go at our discretion.
For another, fuck all the way off with this “national spirit” shit. You know how you build national spirit? Build a nation that people are actually proud of and want to live in. If we had any solidarity amongst ourselves during the pandemic, it was because we had to band together to get through the crisis because the government was doing fuck all to help. Or was actively endangering people to generate money for business with things like Eat Out To Help Out, which was spearheaded by… Rishi Sunak.
Thirdly, fuck off even further with volunteering with the Police, Fire and NHS. AKA the services that we pay for with our fucking taxes that they’re supposed to administrate, but instead apparently the plan is to piss all the money away on nothing, make us still pay for it, and then force us to work for them for free to keep them fucking running.
Fuck. Right. Off. I will go to prison before I participate in this fucking nonsense.
plan is to piss all the money away on nothing
They don’t piss it away on nothing – they pay friends, family and assorted neoliberals huge sums of money to piss it away on nothing.
Mate I think you would like the badge I have on my leather jacket which has the union flag with the caption “FUCK ME LIKE THE GOVERNMENT” across it.
Now I wonder how many grandparents out there are looking at their grandkids and thinking “these little fuckers need a bit of WAR” because that’s the only people that want this.
Fuck this jug-eared midget, I hope he gets cancer.
FUCK ME LIKE THE GOVERNMENT
Lmaooo
From a little shop in Afflecks Palace in Manchester if anyone else wants one
I agree all the way around.
A military recruiter (I don’t remember which branch) spent most of one summer in the 80s trying to phone me while I was home from university. The first time, I was out but my mom told him I wasn’t interested. The second time, she told him – truthfully – that I was busy and couldn’t take his call but that I also wasn’t interested. The third time, she suggested that I tell him myself so that he could stop wasting everyone’s time. That conversation started something like “Hello, I mean no disrespect, but you don’t want me in your organization. I speak Russian for a reason.” He agreed.
For one thing, the government doesn’t own us. We’re not things to be deployed as they see fit. We own them. We pay for them, and their jobs come and go at our discretion.
They don’t see it that way any more.
As someone who has been through military training and national service, I do think that everyone could benefit from it, but I’m strongly opposed to making adults do things they don’t want to do. The government isn’t mommy and daddy, and adults are not children, beholden to an authority.
I’m strongly opposed to controlling minors too. 18 is an arbitrary age to suddenly give people autonomy.
Children are emotional creatures without fully developed brains. They cannot process the long term ramifications of their actions because that part of their brain literally hasn’t finished developing yet. Sometimes you need to make children do things. If they won’t put the bleach bottle down that they pulled out from under the sink, you need to make them do it, no matter how badly they want to drink the bleach.
There is also a huge spectrum of age from 2 to 17, and a huge spectrum of control from stopping them harming themselves with dangerous chemicals and forcing your religious beliefs on them.
May I respectfully ask if you have children? If not, I dare say your opinion on this might change when you hear the hare brained schemes your kids come up with.
I feel like if we want national service just make it part of scouts… in fact the UK already has a scout summer camp thing thats basically kiddies first army training. Its just rather expensive. If instead we made it free and maybe even incentivized (Army scouts = summer camp + your first part time job?) it’d firstly be voluntary and secondly we’d have a way better recruiting pool for the actual army when people get older. The lack of commitment would also mean people maybe not interested in the army but curious can give it a try and at the very least the people who went would come back moderately fitter and able to serve in a militia in the unlikely event the UK mainland is ever invaded.
The USA has a program between the Army and the Boy Scouts of America, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. When I was younger you could enlist into the Army at the rank of E3 if you obtained Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts. That’s the equivalent of a couple years worth of non-war-time promotions, so that was a pretty cool benefit.
This is death spiral shit. I probably look on national service more favourably than the average person and I know you cannot just throw it out as a desperate Hail Mary without building a huge amount of consensus.
I’m an American who doesn’t follow UK politics too much, but this feels like political suicide type stuff. Am I right in thinking that?
Like he was already polling bad, how the fuck is “You see that war to the east young people? Isn’t that scary? Anyway, you gotta serve now” supposed to gain him literally any support?
I feel like even the stereotypical old conservative would be hesitant about possibly voting to send their grandchildren to war.
They know the young won’t vote for them anyway, so they’re hoping this will do something to stem the tide with the rest of the population who would not have to do the service
What kind of older person thinks “Hell yeah! I want to send my kids off to war!”?
People who know that their own actual kids won’t be sent. Just the poor kids whilst their own kids get bone spurs.
People who’s kids have grown up but are too poor to be able to have kids of their own?
So they’ve decided to possibly sacrifice the young in the name of getting the middle and older aged peoples votes? And the only other policy proposal I’ve heard from him is flying people to Rwanda to “fix” immigration?
Jesus Christ your politics suck. Hopefully, yall vote them out and fix things a bit.
It’s honestly got a lot in common with your politics, in many ways. Our Labour party isn’t looking likely to do much good, but holy shit it would be nice to at least making everything worse in the sleaziest way possible all of the time. I personally put a lot of the blame on FPTP voting, although that is clearly not an instant fix in itself; the Dutch are doing a fine job of demonstrating that
It’s worse than that, they have an existential crisis due to older voters not wanting them. For decades as people got older they started getting more conservative (small c) in their views. This has stopped happening on a scale that it once did.
Their voters are literally dying and not being replaced. It’s mainly because people around the world have not been able to generate wealth and assets to the extent that generations before them have.
Good fucking riddance to them all.
Good fucking riddance to them all.
I couldn’t agree more
The point here is that the British conservatives are on the death row and they know it. They just try to break as many things they can get their hand on to a) make it more painful for the next government to fix it and b) squeeze as much value out of it for their cronies. That is British politics in a nutshell.
If you made it a volunteer with benefits program that tries to offer skills based placement you could literally call it free job experience and a shitton of college grads would be thanking you for doing it, the problem is the command with nothing to gain and the implied threat of what you’ll lose behind it being mandatory.
The cost is expected to be around £2.5bn per year.
Oh no no no. This is setting up to pay with lives.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.
Do you hear how that sounds? Or do you intend how that sounds?
Compulsory national service for some, tiny little flags for others.
The Conservative arseholes are just throwing this out to get old people to vote for them in the general election.
I think its main purpose is to turn the news agenda away from the economy.
I’m not so sure. “Vote for us and we’ll bring back national service” is the new “vote for us and we’ll give you a vote on leaving the eu”.
Sunak really wants out.
Wants out to help out
lol yes
Really going all in on making sure the youth vote for somebody else.
It’s like a political version of The Producers at this point, although hopefully without making them accidentally popular.
The cons feel they didn’t screw the young enough with Brexit, so they’ve come with this ingenious plan to actually finish them off. And some numpties will still vote for them.
At this rate, they’re going to need 18-year-olds to do national service as Tory MPs.
I remember when Carter tried to reactivate the US military draft. It didn’t go well. Young people hated it. Their parents hated it. Their grandparents hated it. Businesses hated it. Colleges hated it. The military hated it. Only Jimmy Carter seemed to love it.
Reagan won the next election in a landslide.
I mean, it is possible that Sunak is playing the long game here. That he knows without a shadow of a doubt, like the rest of us the Tories are getting wiped out, the biblical flood is about to hit their party electorally, and they’re going to lose, bad. That by floating (no pun intended) national service/conscription right off the bat, knowing it’s an absolute loser, but that you can’t divide by the zero sum gain of losing the election, he’s setting Labour up for the remote (yet ever increasing) possibility of a ground war with Russia and the future need for mandatory service, thereby making him and the Tory party look prescient and Sir Keir and Labour look woefully behind the pins. No other possible explanation for it at least that I see.
That he’s a moron, there’s also the explanation that he’s a moron.
He’s the only idiot that could be convinced to take the ship’s wheel after everything Johnson, May, and that Cabbage put the party through.
Absolute barrel scraping nonsense. And it’s only day three of the campaign!
People aren’t reading. It’s a national service where you volunteer for something. 30,000 spots are in the military but theres around 700k kids turning 18 each year, other spots are the NHS, fire service, etc.
I think it’s a daft gimmick, but it’s not a draft.
Don’t the armed forces themselves dislike conscription? Flooding in loads of kids who resent being there and are only popping in for a year can’t be good for a professional fighting force.
I suspect that they haven’t been consulted. He doesn’t seem to consult his own MPS when announcing an election so it wouldn’t be that surprising if it turns out he hasn’t consulted the military on this one either.
Good point. It makes it even more hot air. If managed to win and tried to bring it in I can see push back not just from those that would be called to but also from the civil and armed forces that it affects. It’s pulling resources away from them doing their actual jobs to childmind kids who would rather be anywhere else for 25 days.
I think a national service corps isn’t the worst idea in the world, I think it should be voluntary with benefits like military service though, not drafted unless some shit has hit all of the fans all at once and the world needs a rapid rebuild.
Gotta keep the meat grinder fed, whether people want it or not…
