Little blue corvée – on Sunak and the Notional Service plan

The latest astonishing(ish) brainfart to come from the Conservative Party is the re-introduction of National Service. My late father was born in July 1939, and so was in the last or second to last batch to have to do this. He always said it was a complete waste of everyone’s time, and the regular army folks loathed it. (1)

Twitter has lit up, obvs, with people pointing out that it will be unworkable, that rich people will be exempt, de facto if not de jure and that it is weird for a “small state” (sic) party to be throwing up this stuff (2). The state extracting (directly) labour? Isn’t that a corvée? As in, little blue Corvée.

day’s unpaid labour owed by a vassal to his feudal lord.

forced labour exacted in lieu of taxes, in particular that on public roads in France before 1776.

One one level, this can be read as simply an election gimmick – trying to blunt the rise of the privately-owned business masquerading as a political party that is Reform UK (3). Presumably some galaxy brains have decided that the gain in old people coming back to mama (old people who almost certainly did not actually DO National Service, btw – you’d have to be 85) will offset any further loss of the youth vote (you can’t go less than zero), or indeed any rise in the youth coming out to vote against you. And this may be true, since the young people will presumably understand this is all notional (not gonna happen) so why bother voting and in any case, voter suppression tends to work.

But I think there’s something more interesting (4) here (or else I wouldn’t have bothered to bash this out on a rainy Sunday morning). And it’s this:

Despite all the damage that has been done to the idea of collective action solutions to collective problems, despite decades of highly expensive and largely successful campaigns to demonise “the State” coming from the Atlas Network gang and so on, there is still salience in the idea of ‘putting people to work.’ Even in their own “hearts” there is still the belief that what is required is for us “all” (5) to pull together. Or is that just the belief that other people believe it and can be manipulated?

I’m a climate “activist” (sorta, not so much anymore). And one of the key problems they face is that basically, there is no other actor that can co-ordinate across borders, sectors and generations. And at the very time that climate broke through as an issue (1988), the decades of attacks on the state as legitimate (6) coming from the Atlas/Mont Pelerin crowd were beginning to work. And here we are (6).

What next?

Would anyone be surprised if a proposal to reintroduce capital punishment were thrown into the mix? Given that Starmer was involved in getting more Commonwealth states to abolish it (see his 2019 tweet here), it seems to be a likely “wedge” issue. I just googled and there are already (from January) some straws in the wind.. (here [warning, The Scum], here and here).

Footnotes

(1) Though there were some who benefitted, of course. If I recall rightly, Michael Frayn and Anthony Burgess both learned Russian… And David Lodge got an autobiographical novel – Ginger, You’re Barmy – out of it. So there’s that.

(2) People really oughta read ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ stuff by Gill. See also Disciplinary neoliberalism: coercive commodification and the post-crisis welfare state

(3) To be fair, the political parties that are set up as political parties aren’t exactly a great advert for democracy, transparency or fairness, now are they? #ItWasAScam and all that.

(4) Your mileage may vary

(5) And to be clear, the state is, how to put it, ‘problematic’.

(6) Can’t prove it, because it’s a counterfactual and all, but I suspect we’d still be toast, for deeper reasons. But you never know, a small but graduated carbon tax, hypothecated for research development and deployment of renewables – it might have led to some interesting things, bought us a few more decades in which to deal with the consequences of our foolishness. We’ll never know, obvs.