This is death spiral shit. I probably look on national service more favourably than the average person and I know you cannot just throw it out as a desperate Hail Mary without building a huge amount of consensus.
I'm an American who doesn't follow UK politics too much, but this feels like political suicide type stuff. Am I right in thinking that?
Like he was already polling bad, how the fuck is "You see that war to the east young people? Isn't that scary? Anyway, you gotta serve now" supposed to gain him literally any support?
I feel like even the stereotypical old conservative would be hesitant about possibly voting to send their grandchildren to war.
They know the young won't vote for them anyway, so they're hoping this will do something to stem the tide with the rest of the population who would not have to do the service
So they've decided to possibly sacrifice the young in the name of getting the middle and older aged peoples votes? And the only other policy proposal I've heard from him is flying people to Rwanda to "fix" immigration?
Jesus Christ your politics suck. Hopefully, yall vote them out and fix things a bit.
It's honestly got a lot in common with your politics, in many ways. Our Labour party isn't looking likely to do much good, but holy shit it would be nice to at least making everything worse in the sleaziest way possible all of the time. I personally put a lot of the blame on FPTP voting, although that is clearly not an instant fix in itself; the Dutch are doing a fine job of demonstrating that
It's worse than that, they have an existential crisis due to older voters not wanting them. For decades as people got older they started getting more conservative (small c) in their views. This has stopped happening on a scale that it once did.
Their voters are literally dying and not being replaced. It's mainly because people around the world have not been able to generate wealth and assets to the extent that generations before them have.
The point here is that the British conservatives are on the death row and they know it. They just try to break as many things they can get their hand on to a) make it more painful for the next government to fix it and b) squeeze as much value out of it for their cronies. That is British politics in a nutshell.
If you made it a volunteer with benefits program that tries to offer skills based placement you could literally call it free job experience and a shitton of college grads would be thanking you for doing it, the problem is the command with nothing to gain and the implied threat of what you'll lose behind it being mandatory.