National Service is back in a big way. Or at least, it would be if the UK Conservative Party were going to get back in power. In plans announced last week, Rishi Sunak said that should the Tories be re-elected, all eighteen-year-olds will be required to either sign up for military training or spend one day a month helping their community, e.g. By working for the emergency services. While the scheme is obviously outrageous, in principle, I’m not against the government assigning people to positions where they may be able to contribute to the society around them. I think there is a tendency for us in the modern West to read these kinds of work placements as authoritarian, but we are already forced into work in the private sector, and inevitably, there is labour that we need done for us to stay alive. That’s not a tyranny of authority; that’s a tyranny of nature. If anything, it’s alarming that “What if we had people do work that’s helpful to the community?” can be pitched as a left-field novelty.

All the same, this implementation of government work placements sits atop the two main pillars of Conservative policy: stupid and evil. Nothing the UK military is likely to do in the near future is going to be all that savoury, and the less you can do for the cops, the better, especially now that you have the police dragging refugees out of their homes for deportation. If you are a potential employer on the national service scheme, you’ll be looking at an influx of untrained eighteen-year-olds that you need to find tasks for. It’s not impossible to channel their labour constructively, but it’s also not clear how or if it will be done. What the Conservatives are appealing to here is an idealised mental image of compulsory national service rather than a set of steps they can implement.

Even if the protocol was better fleshed out, you’re taking teenagers who are mostly going to be in full-time work or education and then dumping more tasks in their laps. It’s not just unfair, but it could also impact the quality of the work or learning they’re performing outside their government-assigned duties. Like so much Tory policy, it stinks not just of callousness but also of desperation. The perennial problem for the government is that public service costs are constantly rising, but they have taken most of what they can from the poor and will only dip so far into the coffers of the rich. So, they need to start squeezing more labour out of the population. It’s why they’re throwing out ideas like “What if we cut off the medication of disabled people who don’t try hard enough to find work?”, “What if teachers also take on some building inspection?”, or “What if we made up for the lack of humanpower in the public sector by forcing people to carry out jobs for the police and the NHS the second they reach working age?”. This is what scraping the bottom of the barrel looks like.

Keep in mind that this isn’t a free lunch for the Tories or the voters; the party estimates it will cost them upwards of £2 billion to enact this scheme. And if they can’t build a few hospitals or implement a benefits system less than seven years behind schedule, I don’t have confidence they can run a nationwide scheme to transform the state of employment for young adults. It’s also a measure guaranteed to alienate the youngest adults. Turning a whole generation of voters against you like this is the abandonment of any long-term plan for electorability. It joins with the desperate wringing of labour from even the driest sources as a reminder of the government’s complete poverty of anything close to a sustainable vision for the country.

The good news is that the Conservatives aren’t going to get to put this proposal into action. At the time of writing, the party is billed to get only ~20% of the vote in the July election. There’s no way they don’t know this; the statistics have been clear for a long time. There is one advantage to being definitely about to lose at the ballot box: you can announce any crank policy you like and know you won’t have to institute it.

This national service scheme is not anything the government believes could imminently exist in the real world. It’s red meat for the perceived mean Tory voter. What’s ugly about it is who the Tories see as their target audience. It’s older voters who are detached from the realities of what it takes to run a country but who think the solution is getting those damn shiftless kids to do some work for once, forcing them into the business of fighting and killing if it can knock some sense into them. All we have to do to return Britain to its glory days is instil a fiercer nationalist sentiment and get people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I hope the Tories have misjudged the degree to which the voters want to see flagrant cruelty to their own children, but I’m not holding my breath.

Thanks for reading.