The Tories are running the most inept and chaotic election campaign ever seen as they slide into electoral oblivion.
from thefreeonline on 27th May 2024 by Bella Caledonia
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In desperation they have plucked National Service out of the ether in an attempt to shore up their elderly vote. It’s a catastrophic idea described hilariously by a pliant media as “the first major policy announcement of his election campaign”.
It’s an admission that there is no voter base among young people for the Conservatives but the idea is so riddled with issues its not true. How would conscription work in Northern Ireland? How would it be enforced, if, as James Cleverley has said, no teenagers will be sent to prison for avoiding the Conservatives’ proposed “mandatory” national service. How is it mandatory then?
Of course it won’t really happen because the Tories are abut to be annihilated. It is a performance aimed at offsetting the Reform Party on the Tories right. As Adam Payne of Politico magazine said: “The National Service announcement seems squarely focused on trying to squeeze Reform. It’s a defensive move to mitigate defeat, not win an election.”
But it does show you where post-Brexit Britain is. Ideas that were once the sort of thing that would be raised at fringe meetings at party conference in the 1970s, like ‘Hang Mandela’ or repatriation or bring back hanging are now front and centre policies. Ideas that were thought to be too repulsive in 1974 are now just fine.
John Harris has called this ‘brazen populism‘ and described Tory politics as febrile and poisonous, but its far worse than that. The Tory worldview is vomited up from their own weird fears and orientations, their own psychological insecurities projected out into the real world and into grotesque policy formulations.
Sunak is playing to a playbook that seems familiar to many, this is Project Fear 2.0, in which brave Little Britain is surrounded by enemies and threats – the Chinese, the Russians, the Scots – its a continuation of the Brexit themes of False Victim Status. A large current of it stems from a set of assumptions about a false victim status that England cradles in its arms.
From Boris and his Bananas to the grand presumptuousness of ‘Thirty Years of Hurt’ to the Brexit campaigns squalid, racist NHS broadcasts – to Farage’s foul conflation of sexual and racial threats – the false sense of entitlement and idea that England/Britain has been stolen or undermined by some external force (not the failed elite they elect) is palpable and enduring.
It’s an exercise in massive self-deception foisted on the public by a governing class that have been systematically asset-stripping the NHS and the rest of the public sector for a very long time. Blaming it on Brussels or immigration is an age-old trick of the stage-hypnotists but it doesn’t stand a moments scrutiny.
The politicians conjuring this world of the 1950s will never have done National Service themselves. This is an entirely imaginary Britain they are trying to re-create in a desperate attempt to create an alternative to Starmer’s offering of a bland new order.
Casting about for the perpetrator of this great tragedy, the Tories have settled on 18 year olds as the real problem. That’s the 18 year-olds dragged out of Europe, facing climate catastrophe, job insecurity, housing crisis, and in Scotland, denied independence. These are the 18 year-olds that are the problem.
What is the remedy to this entirely false victim status that the Tories have conjured? The remedy is the military. Facing the challenges that we face today, the solution from a discredited and panicking political elite is two things: scare the public with a story about a dangerous world and force young people to join the army.
Anglo-Britain is increasingly a parody of itself. A fetid stagnant backwater shut-off from the world and descending into bitter recrimination. It’s characterised by failing public services, endemic poverty and broken political institutions. The party standing on a ticket of ‘Change’ spells out daily how it will change nothing at all.
If this tragi-comic policy were ever to come into being – and Britain is such a weird place you never know – it would surely by the recruiting sergeant of the biggest rebellion of young people ever witnessed.
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