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.
I agree all the way around.
A military recruiter (I don’t remember which branch) spent most of one summer in the 80s trying to phone me while I was home from university. The first time, I was out but my mom told him I wasn’t interested. The second time, she told him – truthfully – that I was busy and couldn’t take his call but that I also wasn’t interested. The third time, she suggested that I tell him myself so that he could stop wasting everyone’s time. That conversation started something like “Hello, I mean no disrespect, but you don’t want me in your organization. I speak Russian for a reason.” He agreed.
Mate I think you would like the badge I have on my leather jacket which has the union flag with the caption “FUCK ME LIKE THE GOVERNMENT” across it.
Now I wonder how many grandparents out there are looking at their grandkids and thinking “these little fuckers need a bit of WAR” because that’s the only people that want this.
Fuck this jug-eared midget, I hope he gets cancer.
FUCK ME LIKE THE GOVERNMENT
Lmaooo
From a little shop in Afflecks Palace in Manchester if anyone else wants one
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.
If you made it a volunteer with benefits program that tries to offer skills based placement you could literally call it free job experience and a shitton of college grads would be thanking you for doing it, the problem is the command with nothing to gain and the implied threat of what you’ll lose behind it being mandatory.
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.
Sunak really wants out.
Wants out to help out
lol yes
The Conservative arseholes are just throwing this out to get old people to vote for them in the general election.
I think its main purpose is to turn the news agenda away from the economy.
I’m not so sure. “Vote for us and we’ll bring back national service” is the new “vote for us and we’ll give you a vote on leaving the eu”.
At this rate, they’re going to need 18-year-olds to do national service as Tory MPs.
Absolute barrel scraping nonsense. And it’s only day three of the campaign!
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.
That he’s a moron, there’s also the explanation that he’s a moron.
He’s the only idiot that could be convinced to take the ship’s wheel after everything Johnson, May, and that Cabbage put the party through.
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.
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…
Cool. There are a lot of people in the UK that have no interest in doing anything for the UK. Will be good to make people more British.
There some long running families that contribute to defence, police or firefighting. Then there are others that have never contributed and just take.
A bit rude to talk about the royals like that when the Queen has just died.
The Royal family do a lot more for the country, more than a lot of people.
But yea they get away with not doing a lot.
I contribute plenty. I volunteer for several charities including AgeUK and a local food bank and I give blood.
Want to make it mandatory? piss off.
Good for you.
A lot of people aren’t like you and I think the government should be doing more to get more out of the people. Things like happiness and wellbeing and safety is correlated with community and helping others.
Lots of this country has really gone to shit and could do with going to back to some of the ways in the past life was different.
Wasn’t it a lovely WW2?!
Would you be up for being compelled to give up a day a month to do good works? Not volunteering, mind, compelled.
Absolutely. Think it would be good for me, the community and the country.
So, if I gave you some volunteering contacts as links, would you commit to starting next month for me? Or would it take a threat of fines/court action?
For you. No.
If there was government organised work that everyone was partaking in I would as mentioned.
Everyone contributes to society by paying tax. Ordering people to do a specific job is not cool.
Not everyone contributes tax and not everyone contributes more than they get out. In fact most don’t. There is more to society than just tax and people don’t contribute to the UK.
Also it isn’t about making people do a specific job. It’s in the article.
Have you ever bought luxury goods such as most food or clothes? Well then, you paid VAT. I’d love to hear what stats you’re pulling out of your arse that say otherwise!
Most people take more from the government than they pay in.
Look it up.
No mate, you look up the outlandish claim and share it with the rest of us so we don’t think you’re chatting shit
This has the be the stupidest, most ignorant, laziest, most confidently incorrect, economically illiterate website in the world.
How is the office of national statistics okay as a source for such an outlandish claim, that I’m chatting shit about?
“The proportion of people living in households receiving more in benefits than they paid in taxes decreased from 55.0% to 53.8% in FYE 2022”
Fuck me it’s tiring coming on here and trying to talk to people. Why are people so confident and things they know fuck all about? People need to learn how stupid they are about the economy, it’s mind blowing that people don’t even know!
OK, so you are technically correct. Hey, important referendums have been decided on smaller margins than 53.8%!
So do you just hate the benefit-scrounging bogeymen, or do you think that helping people isn’t the government’s job?
Unfortunately most people only see the military side of it (as per most of the comments on here), but it’s only one of the options. Getting people involved isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn’t mind spending a weekend a month doing cyber defence or learning about logistics, but at 67 am probably a bit old for that. Although I have just completed a 3 month cyber security course ;-)
I’d rather my kids were taught to benefit the whole of humanity rather than be trained as a tool for one political parties ideologies.
Good job they have the option then as mentioned in the article that we are talking about. It’s almost like you agree with me.
Yeah well they don’t really need to put much effort into their manifesto do they.