UK Politics

I'm far too old to be subject to this, but I cannot emphasise how strongly the government could fuck right off if they wanted to draft me.

For one thing, the government doesn't own us. We're not things to be deployed as they see fit. We own them. We pay for them, and their jobs come and go at our discretion.

For another, fuck all the way off with this "national spirit" shit. You know how you build national spirit? Build a nation that people are actually proud of and want to live in. If we had any solidarity amongst ourselves during the pandemic, it was because we had to band together to get through the crisis because the government was doing fuck all to help. Or was actively endangering people to generate money for business with things like Eat Out To Help Out, which was spearheaded by... Rishi Sunak.

Thirdly, fuck off even further with volunteering with the Police, Fire and NHS. AKA the services that we pay for with our fucking taxes that they're supposed to administrate, but instead apparently the plan is to piss all the money away on nothing, make us still pay for it, and then force us to work for them for free to keep them fucking running.

Fuck. Right. Off. I will go to prison before I participate in this fucking nonsense.

This is death spiral shit. I probably look on national service more favourably than the average person and I know you cannot just throw it out as a desperate Hail Mary without building a huge amount of consensus.

The cost is expected to be around £2.5bn per year.

Oh no no no. This is setting up to pay with lives.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the "national spirit" that emerged during the pandemic.

Do you hear how that sounds? Or do you intend how that sounds?

The Conservative arseholes are just throwing this out to get old people to vote for them in the general election.

Sunak really wants out.

Really going all in on making sure the youth vote for somebody else.

It's like a political version of The Producers at this point, although hopefully without making them accidentally popular.

The cons feel they didn’t screw the young enough with Brexit, so they’ve come with this ingenious plan to actually finish them off. And some numpties will still vote for them.

At this rate, they’re going to need 18-year-olds to do national service as Tory MPs.

I remember when Carter tried to reactivate the US military draft. It didn't go well. Young people hated it. Their parents hated it. Their grandparents hated it. Businesses hated it. Colleges hated it. The military hated it. Only Jimmy Carter seemed to love it.

Reagan won the next election in a landslide.

I mean, it is possible that Sunak is playing the long game here. That he knows without a shadow of a doubt, like the rest of us the Tories are getting wiped out, the biblical flood is about to hit their party electorally, and they're going to lose, bad. That by floating (no pun intended) national service/conscription right off the bat, knowing it's an absolute loser, but that you can't divide by the zero sum gain of losing the election, he's setting Labour up for the remote (yet ever increasing) possibility of a ground war with Russia and the future need for mandatory service, thereby making him and the Tory party look prescient and Sir Keir and Labour look woefully behind the pins. No other possible explanation for it at least that I see.

Absolute barrel scraping nonsense. And it's only day three of the campaign!

People aren't reading. It's a national service where you volunteer for something. 30,000 spots are in the military but theres around 700k kids turning 18 each year, other spots are the NHS, fire service, etc.

I think it's a daft gimmick, but it's not a draft.

Don't the armed forces themselves dislike conscription? Flooding in loads of kids who resent being there and are only popping in for a year can't be good for a professional fighting force.

I think a national service corps isn't the worst idea in the world, I think it should be voluntary with benefits like military service though, not drafted unless some shit has hit all of the fans all at once and the world needs a rapid rebuild.

Gotta keep the meat grinder fed, whether people want it or not..

Yeah well they don't really need to put much effort into their manifesto do they.

Ha. I ain’t fighting for this shit hole, unless we getting invaded and even then I see if the invader might be better than what we got now.