18 year olds being made to do national service

Wibbles

"The Conservatives say the scheme would involve 30,000 selective military placements where "the brightest and best" volunteers would get involved in cyber security, logistics, or civil response operations full-time for a year.

Everyone else (another 670,000 - 18 year olds per year) would do 25 days, or one weekend a month for a year, with non-military organisations including the fire service, the police, the NHS or charities."

I bet absolutely ZERO thought has gone in to how to treat disabled 18 year olds ?

And would you really want an 18 year old trainee to come and put out your house fire, or to help in a hospital operation or even deal with a burglary of your property ?

michael57

https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/118380/18-year-olds-being-made-to-do-national-service

most 18 year olds have a job to keep there trousers up so its a none starter before it starts but never say never

Meg24

It's ridiculous and completely ignores the financial position of many poorer teenagers. Unless they are in full time education, most teenagers will have zero hours jobs or full time jobs and either have to pay their own rent or contribute to their parent's rent. So are in the ones in full time education, either that or they use their weekends to study.

Who is it then that they envisage has all this free time to commit to volunteering one weekend a month?! It's not the poor or middle classes is it?!

It reminds me of an old hippy I knew who for a time lived in a caravan in the grounds of a stately home with her son. The Lord kept her there as a sort of curiosity and used to pop round for chats occasionally. Once when her son was around 7 he casually referred to how her son was going to be sent away to school the following year, he had absolutely no clue that firstly, we don't send our children away from us like that but secondly that she didn't have access to the kind of funds necessary to send her son to private school, he just assumed that she would have 'family money' somewhere. This lot genuinely have no clue how we live.

66Mustang

One of my issues that I've had since I was a child is overwhelming obsessive dark thoughts where I worry about, and almost feel compelled to, do something inappropriate that I don't actually want to do. This could be something relatively harmless like blurting out a rude word but some of the more disturbing ones are things like crashing my car on purpose or doing something silly when I am using a knife

I'm basically saying if they think giving someone like me a machine gun is a good idea I think they maybe need their heads looking at even more than I do

Wibbles

https://forum.scope.org.uk/discussion/comment/868579#Comment_868579

It reminds me, slightly of the, then governments attitude to the millions of deaths in WW1 as canon fodder

No thoughts at all as to whether they were doing the right thing - just a conveyor belt - feeding young men to their deaths !