National service: how did we get here?
Rishi Sunak sprung a surprise by announcing a scheme for compulsory national service, but it has quickly run into policy and presentational problems
It would be hard to argue that Rishi Sunak’s announcement that a Conservative government would reintroduce national service has been an unqualified political success. The prime minister unveiled the idea on Saturday, apparently after a day of rest, and it certainly continued his record of surprising the establishment which he had started by calling a general election on Wednesday.
That the Labour Party has torn into the scheme we can take as read. To an extent, it almost doesn’t matter whether its critique is justified or not: it is the opposition, seeking to become the government, and its job is to oppose what the government proposes. However, there has been significant criticism of the idea from those who might naturally be expected to incline towards the Conservative cause: Sam Bidwell of the Adam Smith Institute and John Oxley, always a thoughtful and interesting Conservative voice, raised doubts in The Spectator, while General Lord Dannatt, former chief of the General Staff, did not condemn the principle but warned that the scheme as announced smacked of “electoral opportunism”.
I have my own reservations. I will try to set out the wider context and where I agree or differ, but I wrote about the proposal on Monday and it is undeniable that at the very least it has been badly mishandled, and in some ways represents a wider malaise of campaign communications at the heart of the Conservative machine.
There are other issues which fall into what we might call a category of “unfortunate circumstances”. It did not help—nor did escape anyone’s attention—that on 23 May, the day after the election was announced, Dr Andrew Murrison, minister for defence people and families, had answered a written parliamentary question in which he had stated unambiguously that “the government has no current plans to reintroduce National Service”, and then explained why it would be an unsatisfactory policy.
Then on Monday, Northern Ireland minister and “Brexit hard man” Steve Baker took to Twitter to argue that the national service scheme was not government policy (which he claimed was represented by Murrison’s written answer) but a Conservative Party proposal. The former, he explained, “would have been developed by ministers on the advice of officials and collectively agreed”, while the latter “was developed by a political adviser or advisers and sprung on candidates, some of whom are relevant ministers”. His locus, and the reason for his barely concealed irritation, is that he is minister of state for Northern Ireland, and there are obvious political sensitivities about conscription being imposed on Northern Ireland (see below for more detail).
The background
As I said in my article for The Spectator, “‘Bring back national service!’ is a well-worn conservative trope”. It invokes memories of the scheme of military conscription which the United Kingdom operated between 1939 and 1963: this began with the National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939, a response to the outbreak of the Second World War which provided for the conscription of males aged 18 to 41, and was extended after the end of the war by the National Service Act 1948. This reduced the eligibility dramatically, to men aged between 17 and 21, but was a response to the realisation by the Attlee government that it still needed armed forces much larger than voluntary enlistment was likely to provide.
In 1957, the minister of defence, Duncan Sandys, published a white paper which set out major restructuring of the UK’s defence policy and capabilities. One element of this set of changes was that National Service would come to an end; it was, said Sandys, “extremely wasteful in its use of manpower”. Consequently, those born on or after 1 October 1939 would not be conscripted, and call-up ended on 31 December 1960. The last personnel subject to National Service left the armed forces in May 1963. This is worth remembering, because it means that conscription in the UK is not a personal experience for anyone younger than their mid-eighties.
Nevertheless, National Service holds a potent place in the world view of a certain sort of conservative. I said in The Spectator:
The feeling that we have lost a sense of community and mutual responsibility, and that younger people need to have discipline and self-sacrifice instilled in them, comes together with anxiety about recruitment to the armed forces and parlously inadequate personnel levels.
The idea of reintroducing conscription is always hovering in the margins of political debate. In 2009, following the release of Harry Brown, a film about a retired Royal Marine who becomes a vigilante, its star, Sir Michael Caine, suggested National Service might benefit young people, especially those who might otherwise become involved in crime.
There should be a great plan to re-educate these youngsters. It’s such a waste—they all feel society has let them down. I’m just saying put them in the army for six months. You’re there to learn how to defend your country. You belong to the country. Then when you come out, you have a sense of belonging rather than a sense of violence.
Caine himself is perhaps the most famous surviving National Service veteran and was deployed to a real conflict: he served in the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) from 1952 to 1954, his battalion taking part in the Korean War as part of the 28th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade (August 1952 to July 1953).
In 2015, Prince Harry also advocated the return of conscription, praising the role the Army had played in giving him structure and an ordered career.
I dread to think where I’d be without the Army. Bring back National Service—I’ve said that before… You can make bad choices in life, but it’s how you recover from those and which path you end up taking. And the Army has done amazing things for me. And more importantly to me, what I’ve seen the Army do to other young guys.
These are recurring themes: young people are idle, undisciplined, selfish, insular, lacking structure and opportunities. A period of conscription would provide them with a framework for their development and instil in them a sense of duty and service, and an understanding of responsibility towards other people and to society as a whole.
The other factor, which is oddly secondary, is the provision of personnel to the armed forces. There is widespread recognition that we have a recruitment crisis. In February, the House of Commons Defence Committee published a damning report on the preparedness of the armed forces entitled Ready for War? The committee noted that for every eight people leaving the armed forces, only five were being recruited, and concluded “we are… increasingly concerned about the ability of the Armed Forces to attract and retain personnel… we heard no evidence that gives us confidence that the recruitment crisis will be resolved anytime soon”. In addition to a shortfall in recruitment, we are in any event in a situation in which the overall size of the armed forces is being reduced to extremely low levels: by 2025, the British Army is planned to reduce to 72,500, its smallest since the Napoleonic Wars, but there are credible reports that the real size may fall to 67,800. To put that in context, it is smaller than the capacity of Wembley, Twickenham, Old Trafford or the Principality Stadium. I have written about the dangers of this reduction, especially in the light of a volatile international situation and a growing threat to European stability from Russia.
In January, the chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, gave a speech at the Defence iQ International Armoured Vehicles conference in which he called for an army “designed to expand rapidly, to enable the first echelon, resource the second echelon, and train and equip the citizen army that must follow”. Measures for“preparatory steps to enable us to place our societies on a war footing, when needed, are now not merely desirable but essential”, he claimed, adding that the course of the war in Ukraine reinforced the idea that “while regular armies start wars, it is citizen armies that finish and win them”.
The Ministry of Defence was careful to “clarify” what CGS had said. “The British military has a proud tradition of being a voluntary force and there is absolutely no suggestion of a return to conscription,” it insisted. And there is context here. Sanders only became head of the Army in June 2022 but it was widely known within a year that he would serve the minimum term of two years and in December 2023 the MoD announced that Lieutenant General Sir Roland Walker, deputy chief of the Defence Staff (Military Strategy and Operations), would succeed him in June 2024. (I had assessed this decision in September 2023.)
There are, then, two parallel arguments running here. Until recently, by far the more powerful was the idea of military service providing discipline and opportunities for young people who lacked both, a supposed remedy for a society which had become atomised and self-obsessed. It leant heavily on nostalgia, partly a reflection of a widespread evocation of the Second World War as Britain’s “finest hour”, bolstered by cultural artefacts like Carry on Sergeant (1958), the first in the Carry On franchise. It was part of the same anxiety which led the Conservative Party to promise in its 1979 manifesto “a tougher regime as a short, sharp shock for young criminals” in youth detention centres, and which spurred the popularity of the documentary series That’ll Teach ’Em on Channel 4 from 2003 to 2006.
The military necessity, or otherwise, of conscription was at best an afterthought until very recently. It has only been since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that we have seen large-scale conventional warfare in Europe: the force assembled by Vladimir Putin for the invasion was estimated at 190,000 and is now believed to be around 470,000, while Ukraine had just under 200,000 active personnel before the invasion and reports now suggest it has armed forces numbering around one million. These are numbers of a different order of magnitude from those of the British armed forced and it would not be possible to generate forces that size through voluntary recruitment alone, although I have said in the past that simply returning to conscription may not be the best answer to this difficulty. This is the security context which has moved the idea of conscription back up the agenda.
The Conservative Party proposal
It’s important to be very clear, insofar as it is possible, about what Sunak has actually proposed. His scheme would compel school leavers to enrol in a 12-month placement in the armed forces, or to spend one weekend a month volunteering within the community. The military scheme would be open to 30,000 young men and women, and would offer them experience in logistics, cyber security, procurement and civil response operations such as flood defences, but it would not include combat deployments. It would involve residential periods at military facilities. The civilian option, meanwhile, would involve working with the fire services, the police, the NHS and local charities tackling loneliness and supporting older, isolated people. It should be noted that those who choose to enrol in the military scheme will be paid, while civilian volunteers will not.
In practical terms, the prime minister has pledged to set up a royal commission to design the details of the scheme, with a pilot version beginning in September 2025 and a full-scale operation beginning in 2029. It is a slightly unusual vehicle for such a task: royal commissions are formal bodies of experts which address major, often controversial, issues of public policy by gathering evidence and producing a report which contains recommendations for the government. They have fallen out of fashion in recent years, but previous royal commissions addressed reform of the House of Lords (1999-2000), long-term care of the elderly (1997-99) and the criminal justice system (1991-93). The Conservative manifesto for the 2019 general election promised a new royal commission on the criminal justice system but this was never established. It is therefore 25 years since such a body has been set up, and it is a surprising vehicle to design the practical details of a scheme of mandatory national service rather than to consider the underlying policy.
The funding for the scheme will come from two sources. The total cost of £2.5 billion will be made up of £1.5 billion diverted from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and £1 billion from a crackdown on tax evasion and avoidance. This has raised some eyebrows. The former was launched in 2022 to provide financial resources for the government’s policy of levelling up, of which national service is not obviously a part. The latter pledge is a substantial sum to be realised from greater administrative efficiency which the government has not achieved yet.
Sunak set out the motivation as creating a “shared sense of purpose” in young people and giving them a “renewed sense of pride in our country”.
This new, mandatory National Service will provide life-changing opportunities for our young people, offering them the chance to learn real-world skills, do new things and contribute to their community and our country.
It has been suggested that participation in the scheme could entitle young people to priority entry into graduate schemes like the civil service Fast Stream. He also touched on the addition to the UK’s military capability, saying that “in a more uncertain and dangerous world it’s going to strengthen our country’s security and resilience”.
The home secretary, James Cleverly, expanded on this sense of solidarity and engagement when he was interviewed by the BBC on Sunday.
Too many young people are living in their own bubble, whether that’s a digital bubble or a social bubble. We want to get back to a situation where young people are mixing with people—in different areas, different economic groups, different religions—to try and find a way of addressing the kind of fragmentation that we see too much of.
There remain questions about certain elements of the proposal. One of the most obvious is enforcement. Sunak has been very clear that the commitment will be mandatory, but Cleverly, talking to Sky News, said “There’s going to be no criminal sanctions, nobody’s going to jail over this”, and added “nobody will be compelled to do the military element”. However, Foreign Office minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan suggested that those who did not participate in the scheme might find it affected their employment prospects.
Employers would be clear that they would look to see what you had done. This would become part of the normal toolkit that young people would present as they go through their careers.
She also refused to rule out the idea that parents could be fined if their children did not participate in the scheme. In addition, James Daly, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, said there would be “some form of sanction” for non-participation.
Connected to this issue of compulsion is the application of the scheme in Northern Ireland. As stated above, Steve Baker made it clear that he, as a relevant minister, had not been consulted about the proposal. The UK government has never enforced conscription in any part of Ireland: the Military Service Act 1916 applied only to Great Britain, and a plan to extend the obligation to Ireland in 1918 led to a political crisis which forced the government to reconsider. Similarly, as I said earlier, the National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939 did not apply to Northern Ireland.
The media has reported that the royal commission will “examine particularly sensitivities” in Northern Ireland. It is absolutely inconceivable that a system of mandatory service, even if only a small proportion of those required to do it were to serve in the armed forces, could be executed in Northern Ireland without creating a political firestorm and leading to refusal to participate on a massive scale. I recently wrote about the current situation in Northern Ireland, and the party which is in the ascendant is Sinn Féin, which has a long history of bitter and violent opposition to the state in all its institutions. If the scheme were ever to be implemented, it seems absolutely inevitable that Northern Ireland would have to be exempted.
The international context
British politics has a long and usually inglorious tradition of solipsism and insularity, and we are often staggeringly ignorant of and oblivious to what is happening in our closest neighbours and allies. (This is especially true of Ireland, the politics of which is woefully poorly reported in Britain, despite it being the only country with which we share a land border and indeed was part of the United Kingdom, however unwillingly, until only a century ago.) There has, therefore, been some extraordinarily exceptionalist commentary on Sunak’s scheme, especially protesting that the compulsory aspect is an outrageous infringement of personal liberty.
It is true that Britain has generally relied on voluntary recruitment for the armed forced, apart from the two schemes of 1916-20 and 1939-63, both arising from world wars. But we are very much an exception in that respect. I pointed out in The Spectator that Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland all impose mandatory military service on their citizens. Many other European countries have only recently abolished such schemes.
France suspended conscription in peacetime in 2001, but in 2021 the government introduced Service national universel, a pilot scheme for 15- to 17-year-olds which will be implemented in full in 2026. This lasts a month and can be performed in the military or a civilian alternative, and is not compulsory. Germany suspended its system of military service in 2011, but the Bundeswehr is currently undergoing a significant recruitment shortfall. The defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has said that the ending of conscription was “in retrospect… a mistake”, and admitted that he was examining how other schemes of mandatory service operate with a view to their potential application in Germany.
We take an enormous amount of our political culture from the United States. Richard Nixon pledged to end conscription when he ran for the presidency in 1968, although he saw the policy at least in part as a way to undermine the anti-Vietnam War movement, and in 1971 Congress agreed a two-year extension to the draft system which was about to expire. Conscription ended in December 1972. However, the US continues to operate the Selective Service System, under which men aged between 18 and 25 have to register their details so that there is an administrative framework already in place if compulsory military service is ever necessary again.
In principle, then, it is entirely within the international political mainstream to operate a system of mandatory military service or some civilian alternative. Inevitably the details vary: some countries exempt women, though that is increasingly unusual, and, for example, Israel, Norway and Sweden conscript men and women on equal terms, while Denmark will extend its scheme to women in 2026.
(It is worth noting that our armed forces are now completely integrated in terms of sex. The Royal Navy has recruited women on the same terms as men since 2016, the Royal Air Force allowed women to serve in all parts of the service in 2017 and in 2018, all roles in the British Army were opened to women.)
Other proposals
It has reasonably been pointed out that there have been previous proposals—in some cases realised—to create a framework for young people to undertake some kind of service which contributes to the public good. It was a key element of the “Big Society”, the policy of widespread community engagement devised by David Cameron and Steve Hilton before the 2010 election which was designed to devolve powers to a local level and exploit volunteering and civic society. As part of that policy, the National Citizen Service was created in 2009 as a pilot by a charity called The Challenge and then launched formally by the coalition government in 2011. It was designed as a voluntary personal and social development programme for 16- and 17-year-olds, including residential components, community service projects and assistance towards examinations and qualifications.
The NCS has always attracted far fewer applicants than it hopes, often only a tenth of those who are eligible, although in 2017, for example, 99,000 teenagers, one in six of those who qualify, took part. It has also struggled for financial support, and its funding fell by 69 per cent between 2019 and 2023. Its critical difference from the scheme Rishi Sunak is proposing is, of course, that it is entirely voluntary. However, it encapsulates something of the same spirit, a desire to bring young people together and give them opportunities to co-operate and co-exist.
Theresa May reiterated the philosophy of the Big Society in slightly different terms early in her ill-fated premiership, reframing it as the “shared society”. Speaking at the Charity Commission’s annual meeting, she expressed it like this:
The shared society is one that doesn’t just value our individual rights but focuses rather more on the responsibilities we have to one another. It’s a society that respects the bonds that we share as a union of people and nations. The bonds of family, community, citizenship and strong institutions. And it’s a society that recognises the obligations we have as citizens—obligations that make our society work.
She mentioned the NCS specifically, saying the government wanted to make participation in it “a rite of passage for every young person in Britain”.
The idea was also proposed last year by the centre-right think tank Onward. It published a report entitled Great British National Service, by François Valentin and Adam Hawksbee, which proceeded from the assumption that “Britain’s youth face three pressing challenges—they are unskilled, unhappy and unmoored”. It proposed a Great British National Service scheme for 16-year-olds which would not be mandatory but would operate on an opt-out basis, with the default being that all 16-year-olds are enrolled. It would be “a two-week residential programme, a community service programme over the course of six months alongside school or college, and an optional year-long civic programme”. The report acknowledged that the idea of national service was often seen as harking back to a lost age (indeed one that may never have existed) but argued that the principle remained sound.
National service might conjure up images of the past. But in a moment with too few shared experiences and precious little to offer young people, it can be a crucial tool in building character and purpose. An emboldened scheme will require investment and focus from the Government, but offers both political and practical reward. Serving a broader cause alongside your peers was once the moment when young people became productive, happy, and proud citizens. It can be again.
It may not be coincidental that the man who served as director of Onward from 2018 to 2022, Will Tanner, is now Rishi Sunak’s deputy chief of staff in Downing Street.
Presentation and framing
One of the difficulties with Sunak’s proposal—though by no means the only one—is that its has not been set within a straightforward, explicit message or clearly framed. What is its fundamental goal, its motivating principle? Is it one of obligation to the state to provide a capability, especially in military terms, which is desperately needed? Is it a mechanism for fostering social, economic, cultural and generational cohesion to address the challenges of a fractured, polarised and anxious society? Or is it essentially a device to empower young people and give them an opportunity to perform service to their community but by doing so to gain valuable skills and qualifications which will benefit them throughout their professional lives? The prime minister might argue that it encompasses all of those things, but that is not how political communications work.
I have said several times, and I will keep saying, that the Conservative Party needs a vision for the future which is based on optimism rather than one which simply seems to dislike elements of the modern world. One of the more successful attempts to promote the national service scheme was by the leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, in The Daily Express. She framed it in positive terms, as an opportunity “to give every young person the chance to serve, and reap the rewards to doing so”.
We are going to introduce a new form of National Service designed for today’s Britain. This will help teach our young people new skills, make them active members of our society and open their eyes to new possibilities. These experiences will also encourage the attitude and resilience needed to thrive and build their capabilities as they are starting out in life.
Rather than castigating young people as self-absorbed, distant and irresponsible, she argued that “they have huge potential and care deeply about their communities and the world around them. Whenever we give them opportunity they show us that they want to do their duty.” And she touched on the fact that civil society in the UK is in some ways strong and thriving, with 13 million people regularly undertaking some kind of voluntary activity.
The government’s messaging has, however, been confused. This has been exacerbated by the lack of details and consultation: ministers have been forced to respond to questions about the scheme to which they clearly do not know the answer, and to which in some cases the answer is not just unknown but unknowable. This is why Cleverly, Trevelyan and others have provided evasive and sometimes contradictory indications about how the scheme will work.
Conclusion
We may not know for decades, until memoirs are written, serialised, read and forgotten, exactly how the proposal to introduce compulsory national service came about. It certainly seems that it has been devised within a narrow circle of advisers: that much is demonstrated both by the written answer from the Ministry of Defence published last week, and by Steve Baker’s remarks on social media. A prime minister is under no obligation to consult widely about policy proposals: in constitutional terms, the Conservative Party is relatively autocratic, with a board headed by the party chairman responsible for operational and administrative issues and a policy forum which “develops and advances Conservative ideas and policies within the Party and in Government for the benefit of the whole nation”, neither of which exercise any real restraint on the leader.
I don’t object to this autocracy. Although their influence is now much diminished and a great deal of power lies with the leadership, the Labour Party has, I think, often been held back and hamstrung by its bureaucratic system of a National Executive Committee and a National Policy Forum, as well as a participatory role in policy-making for the party conference. I am relaxed about the idea that a leader is selected, however that process is carried out, and is then given considerable leeway to create, refine and, when necessary, change policy as he or she sees fit. However, that can lead to practical and presentational difficulties if the policy-making process is secretive, hasty or ill-judged.
The principle of requiring young people to engage in some kind of activity which benefits the nation as a whole, while also giving them the opportunity to learn new skills and broaden their horizons, is not a bad or objectionable one. Many countries have some kind of scheme which attempts to serve those purposes. It is also true that one of the more positive aspects of our national experience during the Covid-19 pandemic was a sense of solidarity and mutual enterprise, and we did see for a time a spontaneous blossoming of voluntary service. It is a perfectly sound objective to try somehow to tap into that spirit and make it systematic and universal.
Conflating those notions with an attempt to address recruitment problems in the armed forces, or even to lay the foundations of a substantially larger military footprint if it were ever required, is a mistake. The two ideas may be complementary, and their separate implementations may be intimately intertwined, but they have sufficiently distinct features that are lost or confused if they are combined. There is no evidence that this has been devised in close consultation with the armed forces, and it is not at all clear that its creation of a group of 30,000 conscripted teenagers would address the main problems the armed forces are facing.
A policy which is not fully defined, and with which senior members of the government and party are unfamiliar, is bad enough: but it has been launched ineptly, and we are left with a situation in which as much debate is focused on the mechanics of how the policy has been communicated as on the merits or demerits of the policy itself. That is both bad and a self-inflicted wound. Worse, it may have made any sensible, coherent examination of any scheme of national service virtually impossible now and perhaps for some time. And in campaigning terms, the prime minister has essentially given the opposition an opportunity to accuse the government of being chaotic, reactive and focused on issues which seem secondary to the priorities of the electorate.
This did not need to happen. As I have said, the principle at the heart of Sunak’s scheme is not a discreditable or a ludicrous one, but that argument has been lost in multiple layers of error and misjudgement. There is a wider lesson here: in the heat of a general election campaign, when partisan feeling is especially acute, and you are competing for the attention of an electorate which is impatient with politics and devotes very little of its time to political news, launching a brand new policy is fraught with hazards. New ideas, pledges for a notional re-elected Conservative government, have to fulfil a number of criteria: they must be straightforward and easy to explain in brief and unambiguous terms; they must be consistent with what the government has been doing for the past 14 years; they must have carefully prepared answers to obvious questions about why or how they will be implemented; and, fundamentally, they must pass a ‘sniff test’ of being sensible, rational, relevant and proportionate. I find it hard to argue that the national service scheme passes any of those tests.