Desperate Sunak Now Trying to Get Vote with National Service

Good morning, peeps. I hope you had a great weekend and are enjoying a good Bank Holiday Monday. It seems to be a mixture of weather down here in south Bristol. The sun’s shining as I put this up, but it also looks like it could rain. Just as it did last Wednesday when Sunak announced the date of the General Election.

Some of the commenters on the interwebs are asking whether the Tories even want to win the election at this stage. 73 of their MPs have stood down, but, on the other hand, the Spectator tried to raise morale last week with an article arguing that past experience has shown that they could yet turn the situation around and defeat Labour. Well, yes, I dare say that’s happened, but I definitely don’t want it to happen this time. And Sunak and his advisors have been putting their tiny minds to the problem of finding a policy that could boost their chances and appeal to the Tory-voting public. So they’ve revived bringing back National Service again. This time, it’s all about promoting national cohesion. Usually they start talking about bringing back conscription after there’s some terrible outrage of youth violence or criminality, like football hooliganism. Then someone starts advocating it as a way of instilling proper discipline into young people as well as proper values, building character and the ‘short, sharp shock’, and so on.

It’s already been discussed by the Tories in this government, or at least sometime over the past few years. There are reports that it was considered and shelved a few days before Sunak opened his mouth about it. And it’s not as if the Tories haven’t discussed bringing it back several time over the past few decades. Round about 1982, when I was in the Sixth form at school Thatcher was talking about reinstating it. It was also satirised in an edition of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, when Hacker decides that he’s going to get rid of Britain’s nuclear weapons and bring back conscription. Of course, there’s opposition to these courageous policies (civil service code for ‘Will lose you the next election’) and by the end of the episode he’s dropped them. And I’m not sure how serious Sunak is about it this time. It’s going to be compulsory, he says, but there won’t be any punishments for those who won’t do it. Which is either going to be a lie, or it means that they’re half-hearted about enforcing it. I found at least one commenter saying that he’s trying to appeal to the Daily Fail, and this is certainly how it appears. Another person commenting on a left-wing video about it said they were amazed that Sunak was borrowing ideas from ‘Yes, Minister’. But there is a difference, in my opinion: Hacker, Humphrey and Bernard would probably make a better job of running the country.

This is not a policy that inspires the country. Rather, it just shows how desperate and flailing Sunak and the Tories are.

Tags: 'Yes Prime Minister', Conservatives, Daily Mail, Football Hooliganism, General Election, Margaret Thatcher, National Service, Nuclear Disarmament, Rishi Sunak, The Spectator (magazine)