CONSCRIPTION is the word of the day, with allusions to mandatory military service making their way back into Britain’s frothing far-right press.
For all their sabre-rattling, I’ve yet to see the case for why anyone should choose to take up arms for this poor excuse for a family of nations. Young people in Britain have known nothing but cruelty from successive UK governments.
They are a voting bloc viewed by the political elite as the nation’s punch bag, bearing the brunt of cuts and the bonfire of public services under the Conservatives and targeted once again by Keir Starmer and his faux-Labour cronies.
On Friday, Health Secretary Wes Streeting suggested doctors should prioritise the elderly over the young.
Once described by the late journalist Dawn Foster as a “right-wing lickspittle c***”, Streeting proposed relegating sick young people to an AI-driven NHS app, while the “strong family doctor relationship” is to be reserved for older patients only. This seems the prelude to the death of one great development of post-war Britain: a health service for all, paid into by everyone.
If the NHS becomes a service primarily for legacy users, while it pushes young people to become dispassionate toward an institution that treats them as second-class citizens, that will hollow out the political will to save it when the time inevitably comes when it is to be fed to the wolves.
And when it does, the number of those living with a good experience of our national health service will be a minority, and it’ll be easier to justify its end. Like many of the great institutions the Baby Boomer generation grew up with, more recent generations have only ever known their shadows; what was left after the subtle knife of neoliberalism had made its thousand cuts.
Totalled with Labour’s reticence to rule out the reintroduction of conscription – Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was called on to rule out conscription on Sky News last month, and said it may be that “decisions are needed in the future that respond to a new reality” – the call for the 18-41 crowd to grab a rifle and get ready to spread democracy comes with an entitlement that has defined the Baby Boomers.
The attitude that says we’ll take the services you need and give them to ourselves. We’ll take every little joy you have and spin it to a moral failing. Give us your avocados, and expectations of owning a home, or seeing a doctor, or retiring.
Give us back everything we were given freely. And once you’ve done all that, once every hope for a decent future has been diminished so we can sit pretty on our little gains, you can fuck off and die for us too, in a war that you don’t want. It’s always a war you don’t want – and never one that these warmongers who put bombs before bairns will ever see.
Neither McFadden (60, too old to serve), nor Paulette Hamilton – the Labour MP for Birmingham Erdington, who said in February that conscription should be on the table, who is 62 and thus too old to serve – nor the various cheerleaders for conscription published in the Daily Mail will ever be in the position of being called up to defend a country with such loathing for its young people.
And for what? For whose interests should we be forced to fight for?
The First World War sent millions to die for the colonial interests of feuding empires. The Second World War, at least, could be argued justified in a way few wars can be. But even then, mostly in hindsight – the impetus for conflict slipping through the cogs of Britain’s self-exceptionalism to be cast not as maintaining the balance of Britain’s power in Europe, but as a mythologised tale of standing for good in the face of evil incarnate.
If fighting Nazis is your bag (as it should be) you don’t even need to be forced abroad to have your chance at smashing a fascist – you can find them on the British high street on any given weekend, and in the pages of our “impartial” press Monday through Friday.
Lest we forget, the Daily Mail – a recent cheerleader for conscription – was firmly on the side of the blackshirts when the Second World War was brewing; a historical fact that would be easier to relegate to the past if its contemporary pages weren’t also riddled with fascists.
Forget John F Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you”. How about we start by asking what HAS our country done for us? And with Labour backing Israel’s genocide, slashing welfare and cuddling up to America’s fascist president, maybe the more important question is, what WILL our country do to us?
I’d sooner firebomb a conscription office than allow myself and Scotland’s young people to be used so heinously.
