Sunak’s not so cunning plan

Published by The i paper (27th May, 2024)

Right you ‘orrible lot, fall in. Our forces are staring defeat in the face. Our officers look useless. Their strategies have all failed with terrible losses. The enemy has surrounded us. Some of our own troops have defected. But Sergeant Major Rishi Sunak has a bold plan: bring back national service to shore up our defences and restore national pride. Never mind he said this was bonkers in April. This will teach those woke teenagers some bleedin’ respect. Now fix bayonets and charge.

It is all too easy to mock Sunak’s latest effort to win support from voters desperate for change after 14 dismal years of Conservative rule. Was this cunning plan drawn up by Baldrick from Blackadder? Will they follow up restoration of conscription with the return of rationing, hanging and corporal punishment in schools?

One thing is clear: this is a despairing roll of the dice after a dreadful election launch, symbolised by the sodden Prime Minister speaking over the sounds of a ghetto-blaster pumping out a Labour anthem after hastily rushing into battle to the dismay of his troops.

It works on one simplistic level as a headline-grabbing “dead cat” stunt – like Boris Johnson’s gimmick of sending refugees to Rwanda, tossed out to divert attention from his Partygate fiasco.

This latest proposal is intended to shore up support from older voters flirting with Reform. It is a crass attempt to underline Sunak’s central message: that he offers more trustworthy leadership in tumultuous times than Sir Keir Starmer. The Tory leader wants a presidential-style contest, an odd stance when his personal ratings are dire and his conflict-ridden party keeps changing prime ministers without consulting voters.

This reactionary idea underscores much that has gone astray with the Tories. The party that likes to talk about freedom and choice wants to force younger citizens to “volunteer” for charities and community roles. Sunak insultingly says that “our young people must do more for our country” having helped impose the disaster of Brexit on them and our wider nation.

The full details are sketchy – betraying how the idea was snatched hastily from one of their pet think tanks – with waffle about a Royal Commission to design the programme before a pilot next year.

Behind this proposal lies serious concerns about the country’s state of readiness to defend itself in this alarming era of escalating confrontation between democracies and autocracies. I have been warning Britain is too blasé about these threats since reporting on Vladimir Putin’s initial invasion of Ukraine a decade ago, then seeing how China crushed Hong Kong’s  protests.

The idea is modelled on schemes used by Scandinavian nations to bolster their armed forces – although they have smaller populations and more perilous locations closer to Russia on the Baltic Sea. Only last month, however,  Sunak’s spokesperson insisted he had “no intention” of considering conscription. This followed the intervention of army chief General Sir Patrick Sanders calling for a “citizen’s army”. He was not arguing for conscription, however, but rightly warning of the need to lay foundations for voluntary call up and national preparedness if war breaks out – as anticipated by many senior officers.

Yet the general’s key point was to highlight how Westminster has shrunk the military so drastically, although applications were at their highest level in six years. There are only 73,000 full-time troops, down from 108,000 when the Tories came to power in 2010. Defence spending was cut every year under David Cameron while he was cuddling up to China, his party taking donations from Putin-linked figures and our country earning global infamy for laundering dirty money.

Now Sunak suddenly seeks to create a dividing line with Labour by ramping up defence spending while Cameron tours the world as his foreign secretary warning of Kremlin dangers. Both are right – but their stance is wrecked by their party’s past misdeeds.

Is it any wonder there is so little faith in this flip-flopping party? The day after Sunak called the election, a defence minister even ruled out conscription by arguing that Britain’s security was best provided by a professional army of volunteers. “Unwilling National Service recruits…could damage morale, recruitment and retention, and would consume professional military and naval resources” said Andrew Murrison. This has long been the view of most military chiefs running highly-trained modern forces reliant on sophisticated tactics and weapons systems.

Senior Tories are selling the scheme as some kind of social engineering to break down bubbles. Party aides have even pointed to younger people supporting radical causes, claiming sinisterly that they need “British values” drilled into them. Yet the Tories cut youth services funding by more than two-thirds, and while he was chancellor Sunak slashed funding for Cameron’s National Citizenship Service after complaints that it was a wasteful flop.

Studies have also found institutional trust in European countries to be higher among citizens who are exempt from conscription, casting doubts over claims that conscription offers a magical method of social cohesion. Unsurprisingly, polling indicates Sunak’s idea is very unpopular with younger voters, who already feel let down by older generations failing to build sufficient homes and being dismissive of their concerns.

The whole thing would be funded by cutting a post-Brexit scheme to replace the loss of European Union structural funding, which was promoted as a “central pillar of the UK government’s ambitious Levelling Up agenda”. Once again, the party exposes how it has lost direction as it keeps switching track in frantic search for populist causes. Then home secretary James Cleverly claims there are billions available from a crackdown on tax avoidance. But this only begs the troubling question: why has nothing been done on this front over the past 14 years?

It would be good to think this stunt might at least provoke some serious debate over some of the most important issues confronting our country: defence, societal fragmentation and generational inequalities. Yet it seems more likely to spark only fresh concerns over Sunak’s generalship as he sends his battered forces into battle, armed with weapons from the past  in the fight for our nation’s future.

Categorised in: Defence, home page, Politics, Public policy