National service for the over-65s: now there’s an idea

Penny Mordaunt has 16-year-olds in mind when she suggests bringing it back (for two whole weeks a year!). But she’s missing a trick, writes Tom Peck

Penny Mordaunt has launched a new campaign to bring back national service (PA)

Nothing is more rewarding than serving your community and nation,” well known sword carrier Penny Mordaunt has said, by way of launching a new campaign to bring back national service.

The national service she has in mind, it turns out, is a voluntary programme for 16-year-olds who would go on a “civic exploration” programme lasting two whole weeks.

Now, this is not to say that you can’t serve your community and nation in just a fortnight. Bringing back national service is an idea that is itself brought back as regularly as the Mission Impossible action movie franchise, but with a lot fewer people actually seeing any action. Bringing back national service is extremely popular with the generation who have collectively convinced themselves they fought in the Second World War, despite being born several years after its conclusion.

For those people – and I have encountered hundreds upon hundreds of them, mainly at Nigel Farage’s rallies – everything went wrong when young people had the temerity to stop shooting each other to bits on foreign beaches and coming home in boxes.

Of course, you don’t need to be too much of an expert on either of the world wars to know that serving your nation for less than a fortnight was not exactly uncommon, but it doesn’t appear necessarily to have been all that rewarding, certainly if you believe what you read in the poetry of the time.

This most recent iteration of the idea that refuses to die has not actually come directly from Penny Mordaunt herself but rather a leading Conservative think tank called UK Onward. For those not hugely familiar with Westminster life, a “Conservative think tank” is best understood as a kind of holding pen for ambitious but demonstrably talentless people who are desperate to be in the cabinet but equally desperate not to have to do a single day’s work in any sort of proper job in order to get there. They are, very clearly, the sort of people breathlessly keen to write a report about bringing back national service, but who would then stampede over each other’s bespectacled faces to be first in the queue to get out of actually doing it.

In some strange way you almost have to admire the audacity of it – the sheer courage not just to commit electoral suicide, but do it with such bravura. You would think that the most pressing question for Conservative think tanks might be what exactly they are meant to do about the fact that somewhere in the region of 99.9 per cent of people under the age of 35 would rather die than vote Tory. And while I admit I might not have the data to back this up, I do suspect, at least a bit, that forcing them to do national service because their grandparents think it would be good for them might not be the answer.

A recent YouGov poll gave a truly breathtaking insight into the British national psyche, when it revealed that all age groups in the UK were in favour of a bank holiday if England had won the Women’s World Cup, apart from the over-65s. In other words, only the people who don’t work were against a day off for everybody else.

In much the same way, bringing back national service becomes more and more popular the older the people you ask, which you would have to think is more than a little bit correlated with the likeliness of actually having to do it yourself. National service is apparently character building, but the people who find it most character building are the ones who are most sure their own character is built enough already.

If voluntary national service is brought in for 16-year-olds, why not a similar fortnight of “civic exploration” for the over-65s? It could include, say, how to reset a broadband router, or how to transfer an existing user profile on to a new iPhone without asking your grandchildren for help.

Or, for the really daring, how to understand the difference between things you’ve been forwarded on WhatsApp that are true and things that are not.

A noble idea, but it’s never going to happen. You don’t even need a Conservative think tank report to tell you that if you go too far down that route, it won’t just be the young that never vote Tory again.