New Model Army 

The issue of conscription is back on the books again due to our likely involvement in a war with Russia and, who knows, we may even have a go at the Iranians in due course. Since Downing Street has ruled out a return to conscription, we can assume that this is most probably going to become policy any time soon. Given our recent proclivity for war-mongering, if conscription is the policy of the current New Labour lot masquerading as Conservatives it will most likely remain a priority if the real Labour lot take over—as it looks likely they will—later this year.

So, given that we will be conscripting from the current British population, what is the British Army likely to look like in the future? Last time we had conscription, in 1960 with the final conscripted soldiers standing down in 1963, young men (the main target of conscription) were usually surprised to wake up in the morning let alone expect that anything good was going to happen to them. There was still a slightly short, nasty and brutish aspect to life, even in the 1960s (I was there).

If you were working class your horizons were unlikely to extend beyond, well, the actual horizon that you saw daily from your house or place of employment. I come from a Scottish working class background, but as my father was no ordinary man we had holidays in mainland Europe. I think only one other person in my class had been to England, let alone had left the British Isles.

My point is that conscription gave people, mainly young men, the opportunity to earn a wage, learn a trade, travel the world and, from time to time, kill people. What was not to like? My father had leant his grocery delivery bike against the wall of the shop in 1939, paid a visit to the recruiting office and ended up in Singapore, India, Ceylon, Malaya and Burma (as they were then called) and regaled me as a wide-eyed boy with stories of these places. OK, there was the occasional irritation of the Japanese who were not too pleased he was there but as RAF ground crew he was fairly safe and made it back to blighty.

Now what do we have? Several generations of pampered pooches, vast numbers of whom have had their minds polluted at university, who have taken a gap year and who, when they wake up in the morning, wallow in self-pity. If we are going to make a British Army, or any other branch of the armed forces, out of this lot we have a job on our hands.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but our armed forces have gone woke. They are more concerned with diversity and inclusion than the ability to inflict death and destruction at the behest of the state. Our illustrious editor has already referred to this recently when he said ‘the military should be selected primarily based on their ability to fight, not on their proclivity for homosexuality.’ The RAF wants black pilots, describing white ones as ‘useless.’ The MoD has issued guidance for troops on inclusive language and the Royal Navy, not content with ‘rum, bum and the lash’, has asked officers to question their (non-existent notion of) white privilege.

With a view to diversity, we may have to create a few new regiments specialising in the needs of the culture warriors, the mentally ill and the otherwise disaffected. Some possibilities include the Transgender Tank Regiment, the Non-Binary Bomb Squad and, taking up the rear, a newly reformed regiment of the Gay Hussars. You can imagine the Russians quaking in their bunkers at the thought of being overrun by that lot. Mind you, once they realise what they are up against they won’t need bullets. All they need do is lob a few racial epithets and spray them with a whiff of misgendering pronouns and the British forces will be reduced to a writhing mass of blubbering wrecks, convinced that somewhere in the Geneva Conventions their rights to identify however they wish must be protected.

We might need a special regiment for fat people. Perhaps they could be called the Slow Rangers. The PE Corps will have a nightmare as few amongst the younger generation will be up for being collectively roared at by a PE instructor. If they have ever seen the inside of a gym it will have been with a personal trainer whose vocabulary extends little beyond ‘fantastic’ and ‘well done.’ There’s nothing like a rainy winter morning on a parade ground with little more than a pair of shorts on and some brute of an army PE instructor telling you you’re a ‘useless ****’ to set you up for the day (I was there too).

In any case, why the sudden urgency to recruit people to our armed forces? It seems a surprise to some of our politicians that our army is so small. Yet they have sat there time after time in parliament and passed legislation that says it must be so. Starting with Options for Change which was formulated while we were fighting the First Gulf War in 1990 the decline in numbers of British armed forces began (under a Conservative government) until, as presently constituted, the British Army could not fill Wembley Stadium. The Navy can barely muster a couple of boats and our state of the art aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, launched in 2022, is already being stripped down for spares. The recent strike by the RAF on the Houthis required US support.

We have not just lost military boots on the ground; we have lost the culture of service that goes with it. Army towns with their unique microcosms are now few and far between, and those that remain look run down and unattractive. Our armed forces are all but invisible, but when they are, our enemy within shouts offensively at them at homecoming parades.

Perhaps we will not see conscription any time soon, but it must be a prospect. And when it comes I don’t think many people will be killed in the stampede.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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