Talk of imminent war stalks the discourse in the United Kingdom, yet even the legacy media is reckoning with the reality that many young Britons feel the government has actively sabotaged their interests and are wondering why they ought to risk their lives for such a state.
Both NATO and Westminster have spent the past two years drumming the idea into the British public that the post-Cold War era is over and the West is now in a 1930s-like pre-war state, if not already in the prelude of ‘Hybrid war’. The leitmotif of these warnings is the coming conflict, be it successfully deterred or not, will be a “whole of society event” and young Britons will be a particularly important part of that.
Yet British society is much changed since its last mass-mobilisation events. Not just in the establishment of a considerable and ever-larger welfare state that removed the military as the employment of last resort, but also in the transformation of Britain into a multicultural experiment of so-far dubious results. Governments of various colours going back decades have pursued aggressively open-borders policies and ethnic Britons stand to be a minority in what traditionally would have been called their own country a little later this century.
Such remarkable change has evidently left at least some young people — the key demographic for military conscription — wondering whether fighting for the government is synonymous with fighting for their own interests. Remarkably, concern over war sceptics among those who would be doing the conscripting is so pronounced this talk is not confined just to the pub or social media, and has broken through into Britain’s most establishment-facing newspapers.
Standard-bearer of the centre-right, The Daily Telegraph, printed a guest article entitled Patriots Should Not Fight For The British State:
Will the Britons of 2025 rise to the call as we did in 1914 or 1939? Polling suggests not. According to an Ipsos poll in June, almost half of us “say there are no circumstances” in which we “would be willing to take up arms for Britain”, with 39 per cent of men saying they would never fight for this country, and only 42 per cent of 18-34 year olds saying there are circumstances in which they would fight.
Some of those refusing are Leftists, but an increasing number of those on the Right, especially the young, believe that to obey the British state is to act against the interests of the British people.
The nation has changed almost beyond recognition since we were last called upon to mobilise and fight a global war. We are no longer one people, but numerous parallel societies with little to no connection to one another. Presiding over this is an incompetent bureaucracy wedded to universalist ideas and chiefly concerned with its own survival.
Meanwhile, an op-ed in The Times, the UK’s newspaper of record and perhaps the closest publication to the centre of power except for The Financial Times, states:
As the military leaders keep saying, and the politicians are afraid to, defending one’s homeland is a question of societal mass mobilisation. Not in the sense of conscription (God forbid), but in the sense of a shared belief in the nation and the culture that is at stake, an awareness that it is at risk and a commitment to defend it. Without a united population it is difficult to make the trade-offs necessary to transform Britain and its European allies into thoroughly indigestible military targets for our enemies.
This, indeed, is the chief risk for Europe highlighted by the White House’s recent national security strategy, which warns of “civilisational erasure”. For all the foaming outrage about that document in polite society, I’ve yet to read a credible case against the argument that Europe is doubling down on “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife”, experiencing a “loss of national identities and self-confidence” and killing its dynamism with “regulatory suffocation”. We are paralysing ourselves on multiple fronts.
That young people aren’t yearning for the trenches has excited some, with responses to such articles, and the polling that underpins them, verging on the contemptuous. Former Infantry Officer Major Robert Lyman, now a military historian, responded with outrage and dismissed the discussion as “utter rubbish” and young people uninterested in fighting “namby pamby“.
His remarks were telling, however, as rather than calling on young people to fight for their nation (a people with common ethnicity and culture) or country (a geographic area), Major Lyman demanded fealty to the “state”. He said:
You folk are so obsessed with what you expect the state to do without once thinking about what you can do for the state. Start thinking about others rather than yourselves for a change. This is what the Greatest Generation did for us, and they fought and won the Second World War. You’re here because of their sacrificial behaviour.
Stop whining and replicate their approach to life. Blaming the state for everything you don’t like is utter narcissism and is the most deplorable of all human behaviours. Stop being utter namby pamby’s and get a grip! If war comes, you know that you’ll be lined up in uniform with the rest of us!
Former armour officer Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, now a military affairs commentator, also responded with evident frustration. He said in conversation with broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer, who clarified that many people dissatisfied with the government and not keen to fight for it will be ethnic Britons with deep roots in the country, that those who don’t want to stand up for the state should leave.
The Colonel said:
I think any citizen of this country who doesn’t want to get involved, and doesn’t want to help out providing national resilience should probably consider whether they should be here at all… I think we need to have plans for [conscription]…. because if it does all go badly, and the worst case scenario is we do get involved in a conflict in Europe, I’m afraid we’ll all be involved.
De Bretton-Gordon stated that while the government should now be focused on building a Strategic Reserve of retired troops ready to be pressed back into service at short notice, social programmes like welfare may have to be sacrificed because, ultimately, if government defence spending isn’t enhanced now there may be no government to distribute benefits at all in the future.
Driving these conversations were comments from another Colonel, the Royal Marine Alistair Carns, who is the UK Labour government’s Minister for Veterans and People in the Ministry of Defence. Earlier in December the minister said there is a “whole load of work” going on to develop this “whole of society approach” to discover “what everybody’s role in society means if we were to go to war and the build up to war.”
Colonel Carns said:
Collectively, everybody – what is their role if we get caught in an existential crisis, and what do they need to be aware they need to do and what they can’t do, and how do we mobilise the nation to support a military endeavour?
Not just about deploying the military, but actually about protecting every inch of our own territory. That work is ongoing now, it’s rapidly developing. We’ve got to move as fast as we can to make sure that’s shored up.
Days after that, the head of the UK Armed Forces Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton made similar remarks. He added: “Sons and daughters, colleagues, veterans, will all have a role to play. To build, to serve and, if necessary, to fight. And more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means”.
The same day, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 said it would now be acting like the Second World War SOE agency, which launched sabotage campaigns against enemies in Europe. The Director said: “At an operational level, we will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into – if you like – our historical SOE instincts… We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them. In every domain. In every way.”