“Good luck, it’s going to be a potentially tricky morning round”
I remember this sign off from a friend and colleague in Number 10 who did the usual early briefing calls with Cabinet ministers shortly before they toured studios in metaphorical flak jackets and waited to see which broadcast interviewer would go for the ‘gotcha’.
Actually we’d had trickier rounds but my colleague was right, because we had something tricky to sell.
It was just over two years ago, and the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had announced that if the Conservatives won the ‘next general election’ – at that point most people including me, assumed November 2024 – they would introduce National Service.
The idea, at a time when most assumed we didn’t have any, and any we had were bad, was straight forward enough:
It would compel people by law to complete a community programme over a 12-month period, or enrol in a year-long military training scheme, when they turn 18.
Number 10 had adopted the name is taken from the mandatory military training British men aged 17-21 had to undertake between 1949 and 1960. Which is why an awful lot of people assumed it was a carbon copy and instantly disliked it. My late father had done his in the 1950’s and enjoyed it about as much as a kidney infection.
Then, national service meant 18 months of military training and spending four years on a reserve list, meaning they could be called up to fight at short notice. ‘Made to fight!?’ was the question we knew would come from journalists.
The truth was, the scheme of 2024 was to be made up of two streams for 18-year-olds to choose from. Either community volunteering: spending one weekend every month for a year, volunteering with organisations such as the NHS, fire service, ambulance, search and rescue, and critical local infrastructure or for those who chose to, military training. This was to involve applying for one of up to 30,000 “selective” military placements reserved for teenagers deemed the “brightest and the best” in areas like logistics, cyber security, procurement or civil response operations over a year.
The vast majority of 18-year-olds would not have taken part in any military training at all and it was voluntary. Which was important as the polling amongst the younger generation was lousy. However in hindsight it’s hard to unpick if it was just a bad idea or it was a bad idea because it was a Tory idea. That still is a conundrum worth unravelling.
Honestly the one question we had to fudge an answer to was what the punishment for not doing it would be? If it wasn’t criminal prosecution then what?
Prosecuting thousands of teens was not an option either logistically or optically but there were to be sanctions, and my best guess at the time was some loss of benefits.
Well we all know this didn’t go anywhere. Six months later the electorate, as we fully expected threw the Tories out with angry vigour and the whole idea went with them. For some, good riddance to both.
Of course in January 2024, there was still an assumption that America was the guarantor of defence in Europe, Trump was in the wings but not President. The war in Ukraine was still the biggest focus of the G7 with the middle east at that stage starting to draw more attention as Israel had started its ground operations in Gaza. At that stage – and it was extremely naïve – there was still official speculation that Israeli loses in such an operation would draw it to a halt.
How the world has changed since.
So much so that Rishi’s plan which he described as trying to build a sense of ‘national purpose’, whilst also trying to tackle youth unemployment and only partially involving the military, has popped up again but in a very different guise.
Major General Tim Cross, a retired logistics officer, has said that a form of national service could help educate the nation on “the reality of the nature of the world we’re living in”.
Speaking to Times Radio and reported in the newspaper, he said:
“I understand there are something like 800,000 youngsters between the ages of about 18 and 25 who are not in work, not in training, not in education. We are short of soldiers, sailors and airmen. What are we doing paying these youngsters welfare money when we could be saying to them: ‘You’re going to join the military’?”
Now I don’t expect this concept to be adopted suddenly as government policy but it’s not the stupidest question to explore.
Rishi’s national service idea, which would not solve the fact that yes, the numbers of troops we have now has fallen to a record low, and yes, the Conservatives must own that happened under them, from 100,000 soldiers in 2010 to 72,000 in 2024. But might it at least have offered a pathway to building that back up. Today, there seems agreement that building up our defences has to happen – so is Cross wrong to float the idea?
Ben Wallace’s famous comment, about ‘hollowing out’ – so carefully edited in Labour’s constant trotting it out as to remove the line that said both were responsible – is accurate. We need more people.
It would be quite hard for Labour to touch the suggestion of spending the welfare costs of unemployed teens claiming benefits to get them into uniform and training. The much milder version of National Service suggested in 2024 was ridiculed by them.
And who should have been on hand to ridicule it that morning in the studios but one Rachel Reeves who said:
“This is just another gimmick, a desperate gimmick from the Conservative Party with no viable means of funding it. One minute they say levelling up is really important, then they raid the levelling up budget and say it’s going to be used for national service. This is just another example, I’m afraid, of a gimmick where the sums don’t add up.”
Now viewed from April 2026 there’s a lot of cheek in that. They liked throwing around the word gimmick then, but most of what might possibly be described as their plan for Government has proved to be just that, gimmicks. And as for sums not adding up, well Rachel’s the expert there. The sum they have reportedly asked the MoD to cut from defence budgets happens to be the same sum they need to fund scrapping the two child benefit cap. That adds up to welfare more important than defence, an argument today that looks shaky if not indefensible.
Interestingly Nigel Farage, then honorary President of Reform, before he simply informed the then leader he’d be coming back and replacing him, tried the same tack of calling it a gimmick whilst acknowledging his party members might quite like it. He accused the Conservatives of making policy based on “a focus group of half a dozen Reform voters” who supported national service. I’m genuinely and objectively interested what Reform supporters make of Tim Cross’ suggestion today.
I’m not arguing the Rishi plan was right. It’s not my job anymore and the electorate put a stop to the idea anyway. But it is a measure of the enormous shift in reality, of the vulnerability we have and the threat we now face that even the communitarian idea Rishi pulled out seems weak beer as an answer.
If senior military men can suggest, without ridicule, that paying benefits to teenagers out of work might be better spent on paying them to train in the military, it is a mark of just where we are in the most volatile geopolitical circumstances most of us have known. It is a radical idea, that most teens would hate, but would it not be benefit us to at least seriously assess if it has something to offer for the country for our own greater welfare.
If no, then fine, but corrosive complacency over our defence is no longer an option.