Unhappy, Unskilled, and Unmoored
Back to the Future. Anglo-Britain as it dissolves under the weight of its own crumbling mendacity is pushing back. What the country really needs we’re told, is a return to National Service. This is not just a government running out of ideas it’s a generation running out of excuses.
Like most of what makes up ‘British’ political discourse today – National Service is the remnants of bad 70s memes – a sort of shorthand joke for a parody nation.
David Cameron dusted off the “national service” nonsense in 2007 and again in 2010. Now it’s being resurrected by the execrable Penny Mordaunt in an exquisitely coordinated drive with some outfit called Onward (more of which later). Interestingly the people behind the new National Service plan include: Ben Riley Smith (Political Editor, the Daily Telegraph.), Penny Mordaunt (Sword Carrier/self-styled Hammer of the Scots), Rory Stewart (cairn-enthusiast, not-a-spook and bro podcaster) and Labour’s Dan Jarvis.
Onward explain that “Young people in Britain today are unhappy, unskilled, and unmoored – and national service could be part of the answer.”
Writing on her own, er, blog, Mordaunt lays it all out: “I’ve often thought about what makes someone take personal responsibility. For some, it’s a necessity. For others, it’s personal pride. For me, it’s duty. You can’t grow up in a naval town and not understand this.”
I mean, sure Penny.
She continues: “The belief in taking personal responsibility for yourself and others, is what took me into politics. I believe it defines Conservativism. Socialism dilutes personal responsibility. Conservatism concentrates it. A responsible state needs responsible citizens.”
But this isn’t just about smashing the scourge of Socialism which has been undermining Britain for years, its about blaming young people for the mess the country’s in. Climate change, Cost of Living, Brexit, who’s to blame? Bloody young people of course with their unhappiness and their lack of skills. It’s obvious, right?
For a nation (sic) who has perfected wallowing in Spitfire Nationalism we are now in new territory. The Blame Game of diverting attention away from those in power, diverting attention from those culpable for the atrocious state of affairs is complete. The poor, the feckless poor, single mums, immigrants, socialists, the EU, Bloody Foreigners and various scum of the earth are all, of course responsible and now of course young people.
In a moment when everything might point to generational abuse and disavowal the Tories and their outlier allies in the Labour Party are now, seriously, putting forward the idea that the disaffected young people are the scourge that needs lanced. The ‘unhappy, unskilled, and unmoored’ are the problem. Got it?
At first this is just part of the Tory Playbook, clickbait for the culture wars but there’s more. As Richard Vinen author of National Service: Conscription in Britain 1945-1963 shows conscription emphasised the mirage of a nation’s importance on the world stage. Sound familiar?
Let us count the ways young people have been abandoned and consider this grotesque misdirection.
In housing the pathways to an affordable home are perilous. Private renting is extortionate, largely unregulated and tipped massively in the landlords favour. Council housing has been abandoned and stigmatised and housing association’s are over-subscribed. Few but the wealthiest can afford to get on the ‘property ladder’. There is no route to decent hosing for young people in this country.
If the absence of access to a home is one thing, another parallel crisis is the climate catastrophe inherited by young people. It is not just the tragedy of the environmental crisis and what it means for our future, our current mental health and our children’s children but the ongoing discourse of denial and complicity that we can witness. ‘Unmoored’ is perhaps the best description of this inter-generational phenomenon.
As young people live through the Brexit debacle (a vote they overwhelmingly rejected) the sense of abandonment is palpable. The vision of being part of a vibrant continent with opportunities for travel work and cultural enrichment has just gone, rejected on the back of a weird English counter-culture, a spasm of bigotry and racism manipulated by a political elite utterly alien to young Scots.
But there’s a hauntology to all this. As Jonn Elledge observes: “National service is mainly considered a great idea by those who will never have to do it.” The policy is most popular with a generation who are too young to have been called up after the Second World War, but are now too old to participate. Penny Mordaunt is living in a phantom Britain she has conjured from the vapours of Brexit and amid the debris of actual existing Britain. This is the decline Tom Nairn called ‘the older, more genteel form of putrefaction’ that Britain has been experiencing for decades. The difference is that when the far-right in Britain drew on these ideas in the 1970s clinging to Union Jack’s and marching with Enoch Powell and John Tyndall and listening to Norman Tebbit, these were ideologues but people steeped in 1950s Britain. Their experience of Empire Britain and White Britain was real, if grotesque. Mordaunt and the clandestine forces around her summonsing national service and framing young people as a problem are drawing on ideas they have never experienced.
Under the National Service Act, introduced in 1947, healthy men aged 18 or over were obliged to serve in the armed forces for a year and a half (later raised to two years). Its abolition was announced in 1957, though it continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not demobbed until 1963. After being discharged, these conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and were liable to recall in the event of an emergency.
It’s a full sixty years since National Service ended and what is being proposed by this group is the re-militarisation of society. It is a re-imagining of Britain to yesteryear – a tragic farce of an idea proposed by people unable to face the reality of the debacle they have created. But if we think that this is just the next stage of the culture wars fought by the Conservatives in place of a real policy programme, we’d be wrong. So empty and unhinged is this government that ideas that emerge from the fringes of the far-right very quickly settle into the mainstream.
Mordaunt and Onward are imagining a country that no longer exists, and transposing an imagined England onto a deceased Britain, one in which deference, fealty and the military are respected institutions and cultural norms. That so desperate an idea has surfaced at this time is a sign of their lack of ideas but also of how dangerous they remain: unhappy, unskilled, and unmoored indeed.
Wait till some civil servant reminds these petty Tories how much National Service costs, they’ll quickly shut up.
Even when the wages were below the national civilian average, it was never a cheap option.
Industry complained because it took potentially skilled workers out of employment;
the army complained because it took relatively highly trained or experienced soldiers out of service to train all the recruits;
MPs in Parliament complained because the pay was sufficiently low that many draftees had to claim extra financial assistance, the old equivalent of Universal Credit if you like.
And I doubt these days we have all the uniforms, old rifles, spare barracks, training grounds, firing ranges that we used to have. Most appear to have been privatised and/or sold off. Or weren’t they using barracks to hold undocumented migrants anyway?
Penny Mordaunts home town was no stranger tp prostitution. A kinda duty ah suppose?
@Wullie, that is what sprung to mind to me, having covered in a course Josephine Butler’s campaigning against the abuses against women enabled by the Contagious Diseases Acts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_Diseases_Acts
Women in ports and garrison towns ‘suspected’ of being involved in prostitution (another kind of national service) could be dragged off the streets, forceably examined and locked up in special hospitals to “reduce the spread of venereal disease”, itself largely one of the gifts of European colonialism that kept giving.
This is a campaign by Mordaunt to become leader of the Conservative Party if/once Sunak loses the next General Election. She has had her eye on leadership since Theresa May resigned and was touted by various of the right wing press. She proved fairly popular with a section of the Tory Party, the kind of people who subscribe to the National Service ideas you set out in your article. She remained on the sidelines for the subsequent leadership elections, but managed to obtain fairly prominent positions in the various governments. She milked her role at the Coronation and this was publicised pretty strongly by various media groups, with features on how she had designed her outfit and an admiring Tweet by Labour MP, Emily Thornberry.
I have little doubt that she and the group supporting the idea are, to an extent committed to it because their views of the people in society you have listed is as contemptuous as you say – these people need to ‘know their place’.
There are arguments for a service which offers young people (and, perhaps septuagenarians like myself) the opportunity to do various things for the common good, but this is not one of them, nor would the Tories or Labour invest the funding in enabling an effective, sustainable service to be delivered. Spending money of the common horde, when it could go to cronies for spurious contracts???? Are you mad??? Lady Mone needs another yacht.
If I recall the Services Heads were not keen on the reintroduction of National Service- I think they believed in the old dictum of ‘one volunteer being worth more than ten pressed men’ .
I think the problem is that we don’t know what to do with the mass of unskilled labour that has been left wallowing, unemployable, in our sump estates following the fourth industrial revolution (the underclass we used to call the ‘lumpenproletariat’). A case could be made for harnessing that resource through a national service scheme that recruited and upskilled conscripts to all the public service sectors of our economy and not just to its security sector.
I suspect you’d get a lot of resistance from the unions, if conscription to public service were to be mooted. They would say it was a cheap way to replace skilled staff on union wages.
Indeed! The unions would have to be included in the design and ongoing monitoring of any such scheme to help ensure that it operated justly and we, the public, didn’t exploit the conscripts as their employer, just as they were included when conscription was widely used to meet labour shortages in key industries during the Second World War. My aunt was conscripted to work in a munitions factory in Gretna, where she was trained in light engineering (it was she who taught me how to use a metal lathe); another aunt was conscripted to work in an asylum for children with learning disabilities, where she learned nursing. Conscription rescued them both from lives of unskilled domestic and outdoor service.
Interestingly, the combination of conscription and rationing under war communism made them (and millions of other men and women who experienced near absolute poverty before the War) better off than they’d ever been before in terms of wages and diet.
I think you need to be looking. at the green shoots rather than this dark side all the time. It is useful to know what ‘they’ are up to, but today there are green shoots to contemplate. Yesterday’s march in Edinburgh was welcomed by many as marking the taking up the baton of the independence movement by a new generation, not leaving us oldies behind, but younger people taking responsibility for the outward face of the yes movement. It was full of hope and a new perspective. Please immerse yourself in that just for a while, I’m sure you’ll feel more optimistic. Despite the impact of the years of Tory rule, younger voices are making themselves heard. We need to respond with encouragement and I for one welcome them.
@Cathie Lloyd, I think today’s youth have acquired many skills they likely couldn’t have been taught in early school because technology has moved on so fast. One of the most important skills is to distinguish between reasonably reliable and fake material, and the bar on that is changing all the time. On the other hand, most young people will know that the practical skills they may most need to acquire in everyday life are often the kinds that they can pick up by watching a few YouTube videos. This applies also to advanced creative skills, like learning how to use the free and open 3D modelling and animation tool, Blender.
However, I am concerned that information skills and critical thinking are not being given the teaching priorities they should. I have recently been impressed by social collaboration skills in online user-generated content forums (yes, there are a few griefers and egotists, but in the examples I have seen, co-creation is the norm, which seems to justify games theorist Jane McGonigal’s optimism).
The move towards open hardware and legal requirements for the right to repair could open up very encouraging avenues for widespread skill-acquisition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_repair
Although the UK Government’s ‘Repair or Die’ motivation for English schoolchildren seems to take encouragement rather too far.
“Bloody young people of course with their unhappiness and their lack of skills. It’s obvious, right?” Why not just erm…… train them in a skill (try getting a plumber or electrician). There is a shortage of skilled people (i.e. people with a craft skill). But to do this would require a fit-for-purpose craft training scheme with the prospect of jobs at the end of the apprenticeship (because that is what we are talking about). Won’t happen. The vile-tories have no interest such a course. Of course, I would be in favour of National Service for all those mental titans that have done PPE @ Oxford etc. Having had a priviledge education – perhaps they could “do something for their country”.
As a teenager in the 60s I was spared National Service, but it felt uncomfortably close. Those proposing it always talk about “discipline” and now “responsibility”. What the military actually tried to instil in its conscripts, it always seemed, was mindless obedience. This is the precise opposite of personal responsibility. In any case, how can you engage constructively with a large group of people who just don’t want to be there?
This is all true, Robert; as is the equation of national service with militarism.
But state has a problem with those generations of citizens who have been lost to social production; those whom we used to call the ‘lumpenproletariat’, who languish in our peripheral ‘sump’ estates.
One way of getting them back into economic activity would be for the state to conscript them into social production, in sectors of the economy in which we are experiencing labour shortages, rather than leave it to the ‘hidden hand’ of the labour market to rebalance itself through the so-called laws of supply-and-demand that, under capitalism, are supposed to regulate that market.
Liberal economists keep telling us that the way to overcome labour shortages in particular sectors is to raise wages (or improve the terms and conditions of employment more generally in those sectors) and thereby attract labour away from other, ‘competing’ sectors. A socialist alternative would be to allocate the surplus labour that’s currently sitting redundant/inactive on the margins of our society to where its needed through a regime of conscription to national service. In a thoroughgoing socialist society, all the factors of social production – land and capital, as well as labour – would be similarly conscripted to the service of the nation.
The complexities of the so-called ‘polycrisis’ (or ‘world revolution’, as we auld communists used to call it) are too great for the hidden hand of the free markets in land, labour, and capital to respond to effectively. Recovery from the polycrisis requires a concerted socialist response, a reconstruction of society along socialist lines.