Who do you think you are kidding Mr Sunak?

Politics Notebook #18: Tory plans to bring Dad’s Army into the TikTok age are doomed to fail.

In the fictional documentary Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins, 1992), a right-wing folk singer runs for the United States Senate with nothing more than a guitar, slicked-back hair and lyrics straight from the bible of rugged individualism.

Roberts is for God, guns and the free market and his songs urge a backlash against Sixties radicalism and a return to the days before pot, protests and promiscuity. As the title of one of his hit records goes, “The Times They Are A-Changin’ Back”.

Appeals to the past and to the restoration of the status quo ante have a long pedigree in reactionary politics. From De Maistre to Donald Trump, conservatives have been eternally seduced by the thought of reversing the degradations of liberalism and going back to sunnier, more virtuous times.

Roberts was pandering to the Greatest Generation, those who fought in or lived through World War II and struggled to understand the societal upheavals and changing attitudes of peacetime. They are almost all gone and it is to their children and grandchildren that populist bring-backers now must cater.

That is what Rishi Sunak is attempting to do with his pledge to reintroduce National Service. It is a pitch to baby boomers that humours their attitudes about the fecklessness and ill-discipline of today’s youth while tickling their nostalgia bone by restoring an institution they associate fondly with their parents’ generation.

It’s worth saying at the outset that while the Prime Minister is cynically targeting boomers in this way, not all boomers conform to the stereotype he and his strategists have in mind. Some look at today’s youth, with its lively social conscience and idealism for change, and experience a flashback to their earlier selves. They appreciate that their generation was uncommonly fortunate, beneficiaries of peace, the welfare state, free higher education, strong trade unions, cheap housing, and freedom of movement. They were born just as Macmillan was telling Britons they’d never had it so good and they grew up to become perhaps the luckiest generation then or since.

Boomers who recognise all this do not relish that their generation has pulled the ladder up behind them. They dearly wish their grandchildren could enjoy the same opportunities they did and lament that the UK has become no country for young men. But some of their contemporaries are less insightful, unwilling to acknowledge their demographic cohort’s unusual advantages, contemptuous when presented the facts on how much harder millennials and zoomers have it. They are particularly exercised about smashed avocado toast.

It is from this group that enthusiasm for National Service often stems, despite (or perhaps because) they didn’t do a day’s National Service in their lives. They are products, as we all are, of the culture in which they came of age. Britain’s long post-war era, in which ‘Blitz spirit’ culture suffused movies, television, publishing and advertising, contributed generously to their romanticism for the period. For a subset of boomers, it goes beyond nostalgia and into a collective false memory of service and sacrifice.

I call this the Great Escape generation: people who weren’t alive during the war but spent so many rainy Easter Mondays watching Steve McQueen tunnel his way out of Stalag Luft III that they’ve convinced themselves they landed at Normandy with Monty. They believe the wartime generation was Britain at its best and reckon National Service could whip today’s pronoun-changing snowflakes into shape. It never did them any harm, not least because they never did it.

These are the electors Sunak is trying to reach. He hopes that by indulging their prejudices he can claw back enough votes from Reform to downgrade a cataclysmic election result to a mere disaster. There is no more substance to this policy than that. Even if the Conservatives were somehow to win the election, the scheme would be dropped as soon as considerations of funding, logistics and compulsion came under the mildest scrutiny.

Unlike policy, the only metric for electoral gimmickry is whether it wins over the voters. Sunak’s intended targets might welcome the proposal and still vote against the Tories or stay home on polling day. Others may give the Conservatives another once-over after hearing the Prime Minister talk their language. Play to nostalgia and you can stir deep personal attachments to the past and a longing for reconnection. However, it doesn’t necessarily translate into votes.

We are all susceptible to appeals to sentiment, including, eventually, nostalgia. For future reference, any political party hoping to win my vote should promise to:

• Bring back dial-up internet, light-up trainers, Tamagotchis, Melissa Joan Hart, and those Kappa jogging bottoms with the snap buttons down the side.

• Rename all towns ‘Angel Grove’, all schools ‘Bayside High’, and all coffee shops ‘Central Perk’.

• Make MTV play music videos again, specifically ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something, ‘One Week’ by Barenaked Ladies and ‘The Bad Touch’ by Bloodhound Gang.

• Remake the finale of Dawson’s Creek so that — SPOILER ALERT — Joey ends up with Dawson and Jen doesn’t die.

• Replace the National Anthem with ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba.

• Make Chris Carter explain the alien bounty hunter/black oil/viral bees plotline and Scully’s hideous pantsuit choices.

• Add Point Horror to the national curriculum, reissue the Nokia 5110, and put Sarah Michelle Gellar in the Cabinet.

As for the principle of National Service, I’ve argued against it in the past as impractical, illiberal, unenforceable and more likely to disrupt than enhance our Armed Forces. I won’t go over that ground again but there are three further issues I want to raise, one of which is bureaucratic and the other two more fundamental.

First up is what little thought has been given to devolution in this plan. I have banged on for years about the need to reform devolution because it is, among other things, a roadblock to coherent UK-wide policy. But its government having opted to entrench rather than recalibrate devolution, the onus is on the Conservative Party to tailor its policies to the political realities of the UK. According to the Tories’ plans, 18 year olds who do not wish to do their service with the Armed Forces would have to ‘volunteer’ with a civil organisation such as the police, fire service or NHS.

However, in Scotland all of those institutions are fully devolved to the Scottish Parliament. What happens if Police Scotland says it doesn’t want young civilians getting in its officers’ way? (Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol is due a remake, mind you.) What if NHS Scotland says its doctors and nurses are sort of busy saving lives and don’t have time to babysit bored teenagers? I suppose Scottish ministers could compel them to participate but why would an SNP government help the Tories implement a scheme the Nationalist core vote despises?

Point number two is about intergenerational fairness and respect. Tory deputy chairman James Daly says:

If you are fit and healthy and you are able to make a contribution to your wider community to do something for your area, I have faith that young people will take that opportunity.

A contribution to their wider community? Healthy young people spent long stretches of 2020 and 2021 in lockdown over a virus which predominantly threatened older and health-compromised people. Their education, careers and lives were put on hold and instead of commending them for their sacrifice the Tories wish to dragoon their eventual children into a cross between Dad’s Army and Bob-a-Job Week.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to encourage civic responsibility and social participation, but there is a better way to achieve it than by turning teens into the TikTok Territorials. You create a society based on Burke’s ‘partnership… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’, one in which young people have more opportunities to work, own a home and start a family than their parents and grandparents. In today’s Britain, the opposite is true. As the Daily Telegraph’s Sam Ashworth-Hayes points out:

People now in their 30s are the first generation to earn less than those born ten years before them since the 1930s. Record numbers of young people live with their parents, trapped by a dysfunctional housing market and unstable employment. Millennials spend a far higher proportion of their income on housing costs than the Boomers did at their age, with spiralling rental costs largely to blame. The typical family headed by a thirty year old today would take 19 years to save a deposit for a home. In the 1980s, it would have taken three years. Young people are finding things previous generations took for granted to be effectively out of reach.

This is not about individual baby boomers, many of whom are alarmed at the dire situation in which young Britons have been placed. They would like to see things change but have no more power than the rest of us to bring that change about. This is a matter of generational trends and public policy choices, choices made not in the national interest or that of the general welfare but in pursuit of narrow electoral advantage. It is no coincidence that bringing back National Service has been followed promptly by a promise to strengthen the pensions triple lock by raising the tax-free personal allowance. The Conservatives are buying votes from baby boomers with promises that would have to be paid for by young workers. The effect would be to entrench intergenerational injustice.

If you want young people to feel a sense of duty and belonging, you don’t pack them off to play toy soldiers or do Meals on Wheels. You show them that Britain isn’t rigged against them and they can have a future here. Otherwise, prepare for an ageing society in which the young, the strong, the skilled and the smart leave early and mass immigration is all that keeps Britain from keeling over. Perhaps we do need to foster a sense of patriotic duty and self-sacrifice but the young aren’t necessarily where we ought to begin.

Third, and most difficult of all, is the least discussed flaw in National Service: not the noun but the adjective. Whose nation exactly? Since the policy’s unveiling, there has been some throat-clearing about Northern Ireland but the fault-line runs much deeper than that. You needn’t cross over to Ulster to find sizeable populations of UK citizens who will not now or ever serve in the British Army in any capacity. These people, in places like Liverpool, Glasgow and the west of Scotland, reject the British Army because they regard its legacy in Ireland as one of bloody oppression.

This is not a phenomenon unique to the UK. Most of Israel’s Arab citizens do not serve in the IDF for ideological and nationalist reasons. The Israeli government cannot very well imprison one quarter of the country’s population and so Arabs are exempted from mandatory military or national service. The UK, with significant localised populations that disavow a British national identity, would have to hope that these objectors agree to undertake non-military service because an exemption based on national identity, ethnicity or religion would not only be unworkable in Britain but almost certainly unlawful.

Proponents of the scheme say it would contribute to a more cohesive society by giving young people a sense of common purpose and national identity. But plenty of young people already have a national identity that doesn’t align with the one that would be encouraged by National Service. Sixty-seven per cent of Scots aged 16 to 24 describe themselves as Scottish only, with just 16 per cent identifying as British in any way. This is in line with the 65 per cent across all age groups who identify as Scottish and nothing else. Perhaps frog-marching them to a barracks or a care home and calling it National Service will convince young Scots to allow a sliver of Britishness into their identity but I suspect it is more likely to have the opposite effect.

Then there are considerations of multiculturalism. Britain enjoys close defence cooperation with Israel, seen most recently in the RAF’s participation in the Iron Shield operation to shoot down Iranian drones bound for the Jewish state. What impact might this have on convincing, for example, young British Muslims to volunteer for National Service with the Armed Forces? In the context of the current Israel-Hamas war, with large demonstrations against the UK’s support for Jerusalem, this is no mere hypothetical. A poll in March found that 53 per cent of British Muslims aged 18 to 34 were more sympathetic to Hamas than to Israel. It seems probable that this would cause trouble for a National Service scheme during a future Middle East war.

Notice something? Devolution. An anti-opportunity economy. National disunity. Rishi Sunak’s scheme trips up on three stumbling blocks that trip up so many other policies, three running themes of Britain’s dysfunctional politics. All three present systemic challenges to any effort to get the country back on track, all three involve difficult choices and have therefore been left to fester by governments Conservative and Labour. That is how resolved our political elites are to the country’s decline: the governing party’s grand idea for the future is to retreat into the past and pretend the times are a-changin’ back.