On Friday, the Times published an interview with Danny Kruger. In the course of what seems to have been a wide-ranging discussion, one proposal leapt out: “He thinks a year of service on the local council should be compulsory, as a way of fostering human connections.”
Overall it’s been a fairly newsy summer, and thus we’ve been deprived of the usual laxity to indulge in silly-season stories. So let’s talk about the idea of Municipal Service.
In fairness to Kruger national service is not, in the abstract, an inherently silly idea. And as one of the prime movers behind the New Social Covenant Unit and latterly the New Conservatives, he deserves credit for at least trying to inject some new ideas into the atrophied veins of Tory policy thinking, even if a few of them are, inevitably, not winners.
But come on. If there was ever a policy proposal to warrant the meme that graces the top of this post, a year’s national service on the local council is surely it.
For starters, it suffers from the usual problem of various attempts to come up with an inoffensive, non-military analogue to national service, which is that many of the benefits of such schemes are derived in large part precisely from those martial elements such schemes leave out: deployment away from home, uniformed service, bonding during intense physical training, and so on.
Some countries with military national service, such as Finland, do offer a non-military alternative, which usually comprises day service somewhere near home. According to ex-national servicemen I’ve spoken to about it, it does not have the same social effects. And how could it?
It wouldn’t be impossible to design a non-military national service scheme which retained those elements. But at that point, you’re keeping most of the things opponents of national service object to (combat deployment being an extremely remote possibility today).
Then there’s the political and moral bargain involved. It is one thing to ask citizens to serve in their country’s defence, not least because it creates a strong pipeline into the voluntary Reserves and could thus serve a useful role in recruiting to a professional, non-conscript Armed Forces. Military-run schemes can also more obviously offer rewards, such as useful qualifications and opportunities to travel overseas (in a non-combat capacity) which at least offer conscripts something in return.
But it is surely quite another to levy young people to serve as corvée labour to try and shore up crumbling state capacity at home, which is what Municipal Service would amount to.
Young people today already face a grossly unequal bargain. The essentials of what Conservatives traditionally considered the good life – a home of one’s own, the means to provide for a family – have exploded in price due to artificial shortages created by state regulation. Many need to delay earning by three years to get a degree, just to get what would have been a school-leaver’s job a generation before. For the privilege, they pay marginal tax rates much higher than many older and wealthier workers, whilst forking out for historically-high rents.
Municipal Service would be the state staking a claim to yet another year of their life, deferring the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood by yet another year. Absent a sustained fall in the growth of prices for childcare, housing, and so on, that probably pushes back the start of independent and family life by even longer.
That might fit with what seems the increasingly widespread view that some form of adolescence should now extend to 25. But unless the State can readily tack five years’ onto conscripts’ life expectancy – not to mention their fertility – it will command a heavy price regardless.
Worse, many Municipal Servicemen and -women will surely end up having the generational iniquity of it rubbed in their faces. For what is one of the heaviest burdens shouldered by our creaking councils? Social care, of course.
This is not a recipe for social cohesion. It is taking the current, grossly unequal bargain between the generations to cartoonish extremes, and giving those conscripted a year of direct experience in which to truly appreciate what might still, for now, seem a fairly abstract problem.
Perhaps it could be the launching point for a broader renegotiation of that bargain – a major housebuilding push, perhaps, advanced under the banner of Lloyd George’s famous pledge to deliver “Homes fit for heroes”. Or if we instead want to steal Labour’s clothes, enact the Rooker-Wise Amendment to index-link tax thresholds. Call it the Incomes Single Lock.
But the chances of any of that seem vanishingly small. Absent it, Municipal Service cannot be justified and, even on its own terms, would not work. An enduring social covenant needs to be fair to all parties, and it is not the young who are getting off lightly under our current arrangements.