The new military gap year could work, on one condition |
Labour is proposing a form of national service but changes are needed before it can work for the men and women who sign up, says Mark Smith
You can normally guess how strongly a person will support the idea of national service depending on their age: young people are against it, older people more supportive. This is called the inverse proportion effect: in other words, you’re more likely to support people being forced to march up and down a square if there is little or no chance of you being forced to march up and down a square. It helps explain quite a lot of government policy actually.
The effect is clear whenever there are opinion polls on the subject: when asked about national service, support for any kind of scheme, compulsory or voluntary, is lowest amongst the age group that would actually have to do the service: 18 to 24-year-olds. Support is also low across the board – generally under 30% – for a compulsory scheme along the lines of the one that was abolished in the 1960s, although people are generally much more supportive of some kind of voluntary scheme.
The levels of support probably help to explain the recent behaviour of some of our prime ministers. There’s still a residual idea among Tory leaders, for example, that talking about the reintroduction of national service is a quick way to look big and strong with their generally older supporters; it’s why, when his election campaign was going so badly for him in 2024, Rishi Sunak suddenly announced that a future Tory government would reintroduce compulsory national service for 18-year-olds. He knew the 18-year-olds weren’t going to vote for him anyway but he hoped the 80-year-olds would.
At the time, Labour condemned Sunak’s idea as desperate (which it was) but the larger levels of public support for a voluntary scheme may help explain why Labour is now suggesting a form of national service itself. The Ministry of........