There has been a call made by a serving UK general for the creation of a ‘citizen's army' in the UK. Such is the size of the army that he suggests to be required to supposedly face Putin that conscription would probably be necessary to find the 500,000 soldiers he thinks to be necessary.
Let's leave aside for a minute whether Russia is really a threat when it is already stretched to its apparent limits in Ukraine, also noting that Putin appears unpopular with his own population precisely because of conscription and instead wonder why any young person would want to respond to a call to arms?
Would they really want to fight for an establishment that has delivered them austerity, denying them the education that they deserve whilst leaving far too many of them in childhood poverty?
Would they feel inclined to defend student tuition fees and the excessive tax that this unjustly imposes on so many of them?
Will those on zero-hours contracts and the prospect of the minimum wage for life really want to fight to defend that?
And I think you can be sure that they will have noted how their chances of owning a property have been made remote whilst the state has virtually withdrawn from social housing.
There is also the small issue of climate change to consider. Almost no leading politician from a major political party is taking this issue seriously, and yet it is a reality that today's young people know they will have to manage this situation, which is being made very much worse by current political indifference.
Then, accept that quite a lot of young people would like the place where they live to not even be a part of the UK and are being denied the chance to make that choice by Westminster.
Note, too, that young people deeply resent being sold out on Europe.
Put all that together, and does any politician really think that today's young people would be willing to fight for the UK, let alone be conscripted to do so?
If they do, they are living in a fantasy world.
Now, of course, we know that politics exists in a fantasy world: its near-universal belief in neoliberalism guarantees that. But this call, if anyone endorsed it, would bring the person doing so face to face with the reality that the current leading political parties of the UK are totally failing the young people of this country and their views.
No one is going to fight for something they do not believe in, and the reality is that many of our younger people have no good reason of any sort to believe in the UK.
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A very pertinent post but unfortunately some will fight. And some will because it will be the only job going – I mean, that is the basis is it not now of the U.S. army now manufacturing has been hollowed out in the shining city on the hill. Maybe the good general is sensing an opportunity?
There is a lot of cap-doffing in this country – we English were taught initially to respect station in the class system. Now we are just taught to worship wealth, but it is basically the same principle.
The rich ‘huntsmen’ I saw acting illegally and cruelly last night on C4 news (they must be rich for who else can afford to run horses) were also helped enthusiastically by those lower down the social pecking order. Why? Because they are getting paid no doubt and have their own blood lust but also they know their place don’t they, like so many others.
At a council meeting the other night, I sat there whilst two youthful and confident Tory councillors basically told the officers what to do completely ignoring the havoc that their brethren at Westminster had caused. Their sense of who they were was palpable; their sense of superiority was sickening.
I had to ask myself – nearly 15 years of austerity, BREXIT, Covid, CoLC – what the hell has to happen before people begin to refute the Tories and what they stand for? How can two admirable youthful individuals be attracted to such a redundant and morally void political ethos?
We must not forget that the Tory party are extremists, and like all extremists, when the chickens comes home to roost rather than go through a period of reflection they just double down on what they do worst.
So, I think that you are right but with caveats. My children have been told not to fight for this place and that I’d be happy to see them in prison instead if it came to that. Their future lies abroad I think. But no doubt they could still get caught up in conflicts.
The other thing that got me was the general’s view that we are in a pre-war situation. That could be true. And if it is, I see no reason to back a country whose politicians (all authorised apparently by a ‘King’) have put us there.
In short, screw them. They’d better sort it out hadn’t they? Isn’t that their job? My kids are not being sacrificed because of a bunch idiot politicians can’t make peace.
But its not about peace is it? Politics has been repurposed by the rich to create havoc and opportunities to create rents or big windfalls to keep the rich at the top of the heap. And war – after all – is rather profitable.
Thank you and well said, PSR.
I have observed similar.
With regard to your last sentence, at all of the town halls last year to discuss my bank employer’s results, it was explicitly stated how good the war in Ukraine has been for us, especially commodity trading. The profit from commodities exceeds net interest income from rising interest rates. The firm has been questioned in the home state parliament for not passing on savings interest, but the politicians won’t force the issue.
Indeed, who needs Putin as an enemy, poised to undermine ‘our’ way of life, when we have the Tories already making every effort to make life worse for the vast majority in this country? With a government like this, who needs the Russians?
Yes, my thoughts exactly.
The twitter reaction to Nicola Sturgeon’s twitter descriptions of various Tory figures yesterday was far more supportive, than the faux horror that the Tories often display: “oh why are they so nasty and rude towards us?” I wonder.
The Tories live in thier own sealed bubble – they don’t have to use public services (NHS hospitals, state schools etc), so they don’t know how everyone else lives and experiences life. The rotten FPTP electoral system has sustained and skewed elections to their advantage for far too long.
I think a lot of Tories and Tory inclined people (usually older men) like the idea of militarism and national service as “it will knock the young [who are all wrong-uns] into shape”. Penny Mourdant had a “national service” proposal not so long ago, and she is one of the supposed “moderates” (which shows you how far right to fascist adjacent the Tories now are).
(In fact, I find Mourdant more scary, as she has a veneer of respectability and moderation that hides someone who is in fact rabidly right wing. With Badenoch, Braverman, Anderson, Frost – the list sadly could go on – you know front and centre that they are absolute nutters.)
At least – even the militaristic Tories – slapped the suggestion (for conscription) down very quickly.
Meanwhile BBC Scotland is spinning the proposition that the Scottish Government was politicising the pandemic in its management of Covid. This is, of course a Unionist trope. The Enquiry is perfectly capable of exploring the issues without the BBC acting as a summarising judge; it adds nothing to understanding for the BBC to direct and indeed focus public attention, particularly on what is quite obviously the politically exploitative case being made by the Scottish Conservatives in an election year. The BBC knows exctly what it is doing.
A caller on the BBC Radio Scotland ‘Mornings’ phone-in, has articulately challenged the BBC take, and ended in a debate with the BBC correspondents trying to defend the BBC’s spin; which ended with the discussion being cut short, quite obviously because the caller had trenchantly, and courteously ‘found them out’. Hat-tip to him.
When conscription was introduced in 1939, it was found many young men were physically unfit to serve. The result of the Depression, inequality and poverty. I expect this would be repeated albeit to a lesser extent. Despite this in 1939 most accepted the decision to go to war even though Britain was not being directly attacked.
By the end of the war there was a determination not to repeat the aftermath of WW1 with unemployment, Geddes Axe and so on.
There is no way Russia would want to occupy most of Europe, let alone the UK. They don’t have the capability. There would not be a need for force to protect British soil. I think he means that the conscripted would be trained to be able to go on to serve in Europe with the professional forces. This takes time and massive expenditure.
He is correct is saying that the former Soviet Baltic republics whose population is less than that of London, may well be vulnerable. It is quite conceivable that he could occupy them and ask what we wanted to do next? With Trump in the White House, the answer would probably be ‘nothing’. How long the Putin regime will survive is up for debate but the General does raise a valid question, unwelcome though it may be.
An alternative question is -would we-and Europe- be prepared to go to war for the Baltics and possibly Finland? The NATO forces are probably not fit for that purpose. If they were, the likelihood of war is probably diminished. Europe has the numbers and ability to have forces which would be effective and in lesser numbers than during the Cold War when we deployed three divisions in Germany and the Germans twelve.
Conscription in the UK was introduced first in 1916 – with conscience clauses. There were as many men going to appeal tribunals as those who were willingly conscripted.
I doubt the truth of this claim
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_Tribunals
A very large number of men applied [to the Tribunals]: by the end of June 1916, 748,587 men had applied to tribunals.[4] Over the same period around 770,000 men joined the army.
Ref: J.E. Edmonds, Military Operations: France and Belgium: 1916, vol. i (London: 1932), p152.
You surprise me
I stand corrected
In the 30’s, my father had done an apprenticeship as a turner, but there was no work in Ashton-under-Lyne. So he joined the Army. Accommodation and food certain. Well before WWII. I’m not sure that young people who are homeless, hungry and cold now wouldn’t make the same decision. Then it’s someone else’s responsibility to provide these necessities.
I am not convinced…
Well, it’s not just bread and board, is it? It also includes the possibility of being blown to bits in stupid wars created by politicians who don’t give a fig about the ordinary people they send to do their dirty work.
I think there’s a lot more awareness now of what actually being in a war can mean. Yes, there’ll always be some who are happy to take the Kings shilling for the benefits you describe, but many will think about the possibility of being blown to pieces by a drone or whatever, or getting into asymmetrical situations; and coming home, whether physically injured or not, having seen their mates die and themselves suffering PTSD and struggling to have any kind of normality ever again. To defend what and who?
If I learned anything from the Corbyn phenomenon it is that a large number of young people, previously not engaged in politics, were minded to become enthusiastically active in their support of his ideas, joined the Labour Party, making it the largest party in Europe, and got out campaigining. They have since disappeared, along with the enthusiasm and energy, leaving the party moribund and ineffective.
Whatever the world may think about Corbyn (and I am an unashamed Corbynista) it is undeniable that the young people who supported him, and who continue to think and question and care about society, are beig ignored by bothmain parties. They deserve better, and Labour is foolish to ignore them.
If the cause is compelling enough, you don’t need to conscript. For example, if your country is invaded, your young people will naturally join in the fight against the invader. If, on the other hand, your country invades another country for no compelling reason, such as pre-emptive self-defence or on humanitarian grounds, then you will struggle to recruit and might resort to conscription.
and if a big country invades a neighbour and attacks our values (Stalin is being rehabilitated in Russia) and it requires going to their assistance? I would guess many might agree while others do not.
I suspect most will not when they are being shafted
I’m talking about conscription, not the rights and wrongs of interventions.
There’s always the possibility that the armed forces have been struggling to recruit and by stirring up a bit of fear and hatred by using the likes of Putin’s Russia, they hope to appeal to more people. For this to be effective it does not matter if Russia is absolutely no threat to the UK or not: what matters is if enough people believe this claim and act on it.
Then of course there’s the possibility that by banging this particular drum the population’s attention is being diverted away from other events that are actually happening. The armed forces are part of Britain’s establishment (which seems to be increasingly regarded as untrustworthy and reviled by many across the political spectrum) and still regarded by a good-sized proportion of the population as much more preferable and trustworthy than say those sat in the HoC. Talking of war that has yet to happen is easy and likely to draw positive reception from those that have been affected by the pro-militarism messages from the extreme right.
People with rose-tinted and nostalgic views of WWII (or wars in general) or those that had relatives that served in the armed forces might yet consider voting for politicians advocating such a policy. In a GE year this might prove to be an effective ploy at least to some degree and even if it does not, making this claim has only cost the general some of his time.