The National Service Delusion
Calls to revive ‘National Service’ not only fail to comprehend the historical context in which it was possible, but also demonstrate a poisonously authoritarian attitude to ‘young’ people.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s regular ‘Research and Reflections’ series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.
Content warning: Suicide.
Taking time out from his budding career as professional Conservative Party prospective parliamentary candidacy runner-up, Sebastian Payne has found a solution to the wellbeing crisis afflicting young people. Writing for The Independent, Payne highlighted findings from focus groups held across the country by Onward, the right-wing think tank he is director of, demonstrating a mounting level of concern about the mental health of this demographic. Citing statistical evidence of rising suicide rates and labour market inactivity, he drew the conclusion that ‘younger people are unhappy, unskilled and unmoored’. He located the problem particularly within shortcomings in education exacerbated by the pandemic and lockdowns. ‘Spending the best part of two years caged up at home has had a catastrophic effect on the education and mental health of the youngest and continues to undermine their chances’, Payne asserted, warning that it had manifested in both rising school absenteeism and skills shortages which became evident in the workplace. The ‘tiny upside’ to the pandemic was rising participation and interest in volunteering. There is, however, a neat solution to addressing these multiple challenges and tapping into these latent needs:
The natural answer is national service – an old chestnut that comes around every few years when older generations throw their hands to the sky and ask: “What is to be done about the young?”
To many, those two words hark back to a post-war era with uniforms, drills and marching. The scheme that existed after the war dried up in 1963 and it is pointless to look back to what worked then. But with such a generational crisis, it’s time to think about what a new “Great British National Service” would look like.
A ‘Great British National Service’
Payne’s article coincided with the publication of a report by Onward advocating for just such a scheme, backed with polling (of people aged 18 and over) demonstrating apparently strong public support for it. The irony lay in the way that support skewed: whereas around two out of three people aged 66 and over favoured some form of national service being introduced, less than half of those aged 18 to 24 did – although as the report optimistically pointed out, this was a significantly larger share than those who said they opposed it. More than half of all respondents – and two thirds of those aged 25 or younger – were less likely to support a form of national service being introduced if it was mandatory, although those who did not oppose national service generally tended to prefer it being compulsory. Respondents also generally favoured a scheme that ran for at least two months and that combined military and civilian activities (rather than solely one or the other).
Onward’s own proposal is for a ‘Great British National Service’ for 16-year-olds that builds upon the National Citizen Service (NCS) introduced by David Cameron in 2010. It would be opt-out rather than opt-in or entirely compulsory – the think tank recognised that ‘a mandatory programme would generate unnecessary resistance from the public, parents, and young people’ – and comprise a two-week residential programme, a community service programme over six months (alongside attending school or college), and an optional year-long civic programme. The report’s executive summary concluded:
National service might conjure up images of the past. But in a moment with too few shared experiences and precious little to offer young people, it can be a crucial tool in building character and purpose. An emboldened scheme will require investment and focus from the Government, but offers both political and practical reward. Serving a broader cause alongside your peers was once the moment when young people became productive, happy, and proud citizens. It can be again.
National Service and the post-war settlement
While Payne dismissed the post-war model as a relevant example, the resonance of the term ‘national service’ with a British audience lies primarily with the cultural memory of a period in which young men had to do compulsory military service, for a population of whom a vanishing minority in fact did it. I do therefore think it is worth looking back to ‘what worked then’, if only to understand that nostalgia for it and the limits to its viability now.
The 1948 National Service Act was passed after the second conflict in 30 years in which the state had engaged in mass direction of labour (both in military and civilian forms), to ensure Britain had the necessary military personnel to continue to fulfil a sort of ‘policeman’ role within the post-war international order, underpinned by its status as an imperial power.1 It also must be understood as part of a broader post-war national order, whereby the state during peacetime also imposed a wide range of restrictions on consumption and imports, drastically expanded universal welfare provision, nationalised swathes of industry, and pursued full employment, creating labour market conditions ripe for trade union growth. It was, in short, a context within which compulsion by government was both ubiquitous and accompanied by equally widespread commitments to its citizenry. It was facilitated by overlapping forms of moral economy, a sense of functioning mechanisms for ensuring obligations were honoured, and a degree of trust and deference rooted in a deeply class-bound society.2 The most coercive elements of that settlement swiftly frayed: the same Conservative government that abolished remaining forms of rationing also turned from conventional to nuclear forms of military deterrence in response to changing geopolitical circumstances, but also economic and electoral ones, and accordingly wound down National Service. Most other components of that settlement were dismantled or abandoned under the Conservatives governments of the 1980s and 1990s and have not been restored.
The Onward report preferred to emphasise contemporary examples from overseas, highlighting firstly the ostensible social benefits of national military service in countries where it remains, but also what it deemed to be positive examples of civic models introduced elsewhere, namely Switzerland, the US, Germany, and France. It gave particular focus to the French model, the Service National Universel (SNU), as ‘Given similarities between the challenges facing young people in the UK and France, the experience of introducing the SNU is worth examining in depth’. First floated by Emmanuel Macron during his candidacy for the 2017 presidential election as a response to the recent series of Islamist terror attacks in the country, it was rolled out in 2019 with the aim of transmitting ‘Republican’ values, improving cohesion, encouraging civic engagement, and integrating young people into society and work. The report’s rather favourable analysis of the scheme did include the caveat of very low participation rates in it to date, and the French government’s logistical and political difficulties in moving to a mandatory version. Payne’s article nonetheless offered one note of caution about copying too closely from the French example:
What works for France, however, may not be entirely the same for here. Macron’s scheme has an explicit militaristic element, with uniforms and a daily flag-raising ceremony accompanied by the national anthem. Such overt patriotism is not in the British tradition and would probably backfire.
This claim is of course nonsense: quasi-militarism and overt patriotism are absolutely the staples of several still hugely popular youth organisations in Britain dating back to the nineteenth century. The questions of comparison that the report missed are, rather, where do forms of national service – civic or military – sit within the broader alignment of political, social, and economic systems in other countries, which render them viable, never mind successful? What are the relationships between citizenry, state, and other institutions that lend them a necessary degree of legitimacy, such as that possessed for a time by the mandatory, military form of National Service existent in Britain after the Second World War?
The rise and fall of the ‘Big Society’
As mentioned, Onward’s domestic paradigm for a Great British National Service is the NCS introduced during David Cameron’s premiership. As the report admits, it has not been the success that Cameron had hoped for, attracting only a fraction of its target recruitment, suffering from shortfalls in funding and rising costs, and ultimately lacking legitimacy with other providers of youth services due to it monopolising government funding at a time of severe spending cuts. Payne lamented in his article that ‘as with too many policy initiatives, it was overly reliant on the patronage of one person’.
The NCS’s shortcomings however had their roots in that one person’s vision. David Cameron had floated the idea of the ‘Big Society’ both before and after becoming prime minister, as an alternative to ‘Big Government’. His argument was that an overly large state crowded out voluntary action, and that weening Britain off its attachment to the former would let the latter flourish. This was, however, rather an opportune claim to make given his government’s commitment to slashing public sector spending on the grounds of shrinking the deficit, adding a new moralising basis to combat warnings about the social harms this would cause. In any case, it fundamentally ignored the actual history of Britain’s voluntary sector since the Second World War, whose expansion has often been symbiotic rather than in competition with government activity.3
The ‘Big Society’ concept was also part of a wider set of discussions present in government policy framing and media debates. One the one hand, there was self-congratulatory celebration of civic nationhood and participation surrounding events such as the 2012 Olympics. There was the spread of austerity chic, consciously echoing the wartime and post-war eras with its ‘Keep calm and carry on’ mantra, encouraging people to present themselves as polite and orderly. On the other hand, there was divisive rhetoric about ‘shirkers’ and ‘strivers’, pushed by government ministers, but that also underpinned programming like Channel Four’s Benefits Street, or the contrasting of racially mixed rioters in London and other cities during the summer of 2011 with White middle-class volunteers who tidied up afterwards.4
Onward’s vision demonstrates some significant shifts from as well as evident continuities from conservative thinking a decade or so ago. It acknowledged the cost of expanding NCS into the Great British National Service would be upward of £1 billion per year, although it did also suggest this might be partly through private investment and reduction of government spending elsewhere. In any case, it is a departure from the notion of the state crowding out volunteering, to one where the state spends more to push people into it. Yet it also illustrates a failing in its understanding of voluntarism that is also in keeping with that trajectory. The government’s 2014 Lobbying Act significantly limited charities’ capacity to campaign, while the 2023 Public Order Act has substantially restricted protest movements and activism. Seeking to check the evolution of civil society into looser, more networked forms or prevent it from intervening areas the government deems ‘political’, while adopting a heavier handed approach to directing activity into what it considers virtuous, significantly deviates from voluntarism in any meaningful sense. It also seems unlikely to provide a sense of agency and involvement among the people whose desire to volunteer Onward claims to be tapping into.
Problematising youth
The source of this authoritarianism I think is really the crux of the issue. Returning once more to Payne’s article, what is striking is the way it skipped between addressing actual problems facing young people, such as mental illness, and seeing young people as the problem: not skilled enough, not patriotic enough. The categorisation of ‘young people’ was also pretty loose. Payne switched between talking about ‘the young’, ‘younger people’, ‘the youngest’. Certain figures he mentioned related to under-18s; others to age brackets spreading into the mid-twenties. Some might say that, at the age of 34, Payne is rather young himself to be engaging in the ‘What is to be done about Kids These Days?’ talk. Yet this slipperiness of definition is integral to the process of political infantilisation. Whether welcoming the presence of ‘adults’ whenever describing politicians who are performatively serious and professional (see below), or questioning whether someone is too young to be elected an MP at the age of 25, identifying binaries between being young and being a grown-up is a useful tool for setting the boundaries as to who can and cannot meaningfully participate in in politics.
It is worthwhile then considering the relationship between this language and the direction of education policy. The latter is frequently presented by politicians in utilitarian and economistic ways: its purpose is to provide the skills that employers need, and bigger salaries for the employee, and in the process counter the impacts of deep-seated socioeconomic inequalities that exist beyond the classroom. Adolescence is seen as a problematic phase, and those people going through it to be both incapable of knowing and making the best choices for themselves: essentially incomplete adults whose worth is calculated according to their rate of progress towards adulthood. This then informs zero-tolerance behavioural policies which as well as being essentially hostile towards their subjects, are especially racist, classist, and ableist in their effects. University students, meanwhile, are depicted as coddled and close-minded, largely because of their distaste for the current government and social illiberalism more generally. Such perceptions are given credence by a handful of high-profile academics with media platforms talking up the need for a more adversarial approach to teaching.
Underpinning this is the increasing managerialisation of education provision. Both at school and university level, the trend has been towards giving high-level administrators within these institutions an increasingly free hand in their running, providing they can demonstrate their achievement of government-set targets around cost cutting and achievement levels. Academisation of schools has released headteachers and school trusts from accountability to local authorities and created scope for takeovers of other schools. University leaders have been tasked with distributing shrinking budgets and removing posts and closing departments while experiencing a considerable increase in their own earning power. There can hardly be a better illustration of how such a setup facilitates an increasingly strongarm approach to pupils and students than Education Secretary Gillian Keegan’s recent nomination of Sir Martyn Oliver – the head of the Outwood Grange Academies Trust, which runs 41 schools across the Midlands and North of England and has a reputation for high levels of suspension and exclusion – as head of Ofsted.
Neoliberalism, as an ideology and system of governing, erodes forms of democracy to ensure the right to manage. It breathes new life into social hierarchy and expectations of deference by justifying their existence in terms of expertise rather than status. It is a political-economic settlement and moral order than requires certain forms of self-management. In Britain, it is increasingly taking on the trappings of ‘adultness’ as a justifying logic because of the decaying sway of technocracy on its own, and because of a perception that new generations are especially resistant to its appeal and influence. In the wake of a recession, austerity, and stagnation, it cannot maintain the necessary concord between government and citizens. This is because it struggles to persuade people who were not of working age prior to the late 2000s to internalise its self-image, and to provide rewards accordingly if they do. The result is an increasingly desperate and coercive approach to the problematised category of ‘young people’, and that is what calls for a new form of National Service really are about.
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For an overview of the politics of implementing, administrating, and abolishing National Service, see S. J. Ball, ‘A Rejected Strategy: The Army and National Service, 1946–60’, in Hew Strachan (ed.), The British Army, Manpower and Society into the Twenty-First Century (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 36–48.
On the nature of the post-war settlement and the moral order underpinning it, see Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Penguin Books, 2007), Ch. 1; Jim Phillips, ‘Industrial Relations, Historical Contingencies and Political Economy: Britain in the 1960s and 1970s’, Labour History Review, Vol. 72, No. 3 (2007), pp. 215–233; and Jim Tomlinson, ‘Re-inventing the ‘Moral Economy’ in Post-War Britain’, Historical Research, Vol. 84, No. 224 (2011), pp. 356–373. On the relationship between the development of both the military and welfare aspects of the state, see David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
On the shortcomings of the ‘Big Society’ concept, see Ben Kisby, ‘The Big Society: Power to the People?’, Political Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4 (2010), pp. 484–491; M. J. Smith, ‘From Big Government to Big Society: Changing the State-Society Balance’, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 4 (2010), 818–833; Pat Thane, ‘The ‘Big Society’ and the ‘Big State’: Creative Tension or Crowding Out?’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2012), pp. 408–429.
On the broader moral climate underpinning austerity, see Laura Bramall, The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); John Clarke and Janet Newman, ‘The Alchemy of Austerity’, Critical Social Policy, Vol. 32, No. 3 (2012) pp. 299–319; Rupa Huq, ‘Suburbia Runs Riot: The UK August 2011 Riots, Neo-Moral Panic and the End of the English Suburban Dream?’, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2013), pp. 105–123; Imogen Tyler, ‘‘Chav Mum Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain’, Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2008), pp. 17–34.
Excellent piece of writing as ever.