Thread 46 Sunak - don't rain on our parade

[DuncinToffee]

He called it, countdown to 4th July

Previous thread
www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5079131-thread-45-sunak-remove-one-letter-and-tell-his-future?page=40&reply=135513708

Making a bad idea even worse

https://x.com/alexwickham/status/1794837181657493854

Exclusive: Rishi Sunak is considering requiring future applicants for public sector jobs to have completed National Service

It’s one of the enforcement options that would go to the Royal Commission for consideration if he gets to enact the policy

Can't agree he's decent, sorry

His treatment of Rosie Duffield is utterly shameful

But. Decent is a fucking low bar these days 🤷‍♀️

He'll get a lot of votes from people like me. Doesn't mean we think he's great. Just marginally better than the current lot of venal arseholes.

I really don't think a 2nd term is a definite for him tbh.

Tory plans to bring back mandatory national service are in chaos after a leaked briefing paper suggested young people could be arrested for not taking part.

x.com/johnestevens/status/1794624549876867086?s=46&t=Uw4lJNwxFZFnX0Xs3doHYg

Lying truth twisters back at it.

What police, what courts ,what prisons ?

Good grief. You can't expect them to develop an entire policy in 24 hours!
They've only just pulled this together to grab some weekend headlines.
Details are pretty irrelevant anyway Reform voters only read the top line.

The depressing thing is it'll be popular with a certain type

They completely destroyed the Conservative Party. Does that count?

Actually, you've got a valid point there! Am a little worried that, as with dictators, usually there's something worse waiting in the wings...

However there is no doubt that we will have memes of ridiculous political moments for a few decades. My hope is we look back and smile with a shake of the head and say things like "My god, do you remember when Rees Moggs lay down and slept in the HoC?" or "When Boris walked into a fridge to hide from the scary news presenter!" "When they prorogued parliament to get their own way" "When it turned out Hunt's mate from the pub was the PPE supplier" etc etc.
I'm really hoping we just look back at it all as some kind of freakshow dreamland.

Me too!

Politicians are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Whatever he does regarding Duffield is going to be wrong. If he apologises, he'll be accused of u turning for votes and being untrustworthy. If he doesn't, he'll get posters like you bringing up his "shameful" treatment of her.

She's still in the party so can't be that pissed off with him.

Many won't forget his treatment of RD. I'm one of them.

Why should she leave a party she's dedicated her life to ffs?

The labour candidate here has introduced herself on FB

She doesn't live in the constituency, but seems to have experience at a local level

Very pleased it wasn't the ex mep/pcc candidate. I would not have voted for him

Rishi Sunak’s national service pledge is ‘bonkers’, says ex-military chief | General election 2024 | The Guardian

Michael Portillo said:

He told GB News on Sunday: “The way in which this policy has been produced worries me very much indeed. That is to say, I very much doubt whether it’s been thought through, and I doubt whether the armed services and all the charities that need to be involved have been consulted and are on board.

All the talk seems to have focused on the military aspect - when in reality it's the volunteering that is the main thing and that's hardly been discussed at all.

There are so many potential issues with the volunteering bit - and I am sure that some detailed questioning could expose issues with the compulsory nature of that.

If any journalists are reading this. some of the obvious questions about National Service for 18 year olds are:

1. It's supposed to help 18 year olds get a University place. But many 18 year olds will be at University when they are 18 so how does that help?

2. Are you expecting all 18 year olds to do 25 days a year volunteering whilst they are 18? How does that tie in with their studying if they are at University or their life if they have a job?

3. It's supposed to be civic duties. What do the charities say about this? The organisations who are supposed to have these volunteers? How will they organise these volunteers? Volunteer management is hard work, takes time to get them on board and is a lot of effort if a volunteer isn't there for a long time *See also 18 year olds who might move around . What do they do?

4. 18 year olds live all over the country. How do they get to a volunteering location if there is no transport? Do they stay overnight? Will anything be paid?

Any decent journalist should probe on these questions with a Minister. The Armed Forces one has its own issues but they are expecting 700,000 18 year olds to "volunteer" for 25 days in a year.

My friend knows him from when he worked in DPP.

She said he's a thoroughly open and honest man with a fantastically dry sense of humour.

Oh and this friend is a die hard Tory!

It would be nice if they considered a scheme to help disabled people into work and funded that rather than forcing 18yo that already can and do work into volunteer roles a weekend a month.

I'd like to see opportunity for those who don't get it.

Also scheme for those from poverty backgrounds in big tech etc with funded opportunities.

£2.5bn could do so much to support people into work roles. National service is not the right programme as it isn't targeted to make a change.

I am far more concerned about the treatment of Diane Abbott than Duffield.

If Duffield had wanted to cross the floor, she has had ample opportunity. Some of her Tweets and posts have been very unguarded, imo (she is very much not alone in this and I do wish they would be more professional on Twitter). Notwithstanding, she remains in the Labour Party, has the Whip, and is standing. She must think, even herself, that there are bigger issues to resolve and that she can continue to campaign from within. Meanwhile, JKR seems to have abandoned any pretence of being left wing. Only the other day she referred to a poster with fewer than 200 followers as a 'tofu eating Guardian reader'. Hello? Liz? Is that you?? I am one million percent more inspired by Diane Abbott than either or them, for myself. But the Labour party is a broad church.. Or should be.

I have heard tell that Duffield isn't actually all that popular in Canterbury but happy to be corrected on this.

I used to think there were politicians form every party that I liked, and plenty of Labour MPS I didn't. But my list of Tories I quite like has declined to maybe one and a half. And my list of labour MPs I really like and admire has shrunk. But I still think Labour, Green and the LDs have the upper hand on common decency and inclusivity, which are two very important things to me.

I am fascinated to see what will happen in Scotland.

That's OK. The young people can all volunteer to arrest each other.

Another practical one - if you have a large university city with a lot of 18 year olds, what happens with the volunteering then?

Durham has 20,000 students. So a lot will be 18.

Do they all volunteer with the police or the NHS at the weekend?

I can see that being a logistical nightmare.

The conversation has just been about the military aspect

Presumably only those who are not going to university are meant to be doing National Service otherwise there will be for one year a big hole in university recruitment and finances. Which of course is not too much of a problem because university finances are in such good shape at present.

I am going to be marginally contrary and suggest that there is a germ of a good idea in Sunak's idea. (I was about to call it plan and realised it wasn't). The war in Ukraine has shown that numbers of trained troops are important. A full time professional army is expensive to maintain. There is some merit in having a larger pool of somewhat trained people who could be called upon in a time of crisis and retrained more rapidly. Allowing soldiers to sign on for a shorter period of time maybe a year, maybe 18months is probably not such a daft idea. But first one has to have a plan in place so that the endless problems with military recruitment since it has been outsourced are solved, one has to have a plan as to who and where they are going to be trained and one has to fund it and the rest of the military properly.

No - it's all 18 year olds.

And most will be doing volunteering. Mandatory volunteering for 25 days a year.

Maybe but whilst other crucial services are struggling I think it's ridiculous to plough however much money it will cost to even set up a royal commission.

Particularly given that this money was intended to be spent on deprived areas.

I agree the Tories have decimated the military and we should have seen off Russia when they started this war by occupying Crimea in 2014. We knew what they were doing. Imagine how much we would have saved if we had acted on it then (cynical me says we let it unfold to sell weapons).

If anyone actually wanted to do something useful about this they would work on the admittance aspect of signing up to the forces - a long a tedious nightmare with 3 in 4 giving up, apparently. Also clubs such as DofE would be funded, clubs for drone flying, engineering - there are ways to teach skills needed in the army before teens are admitted. Sadly as our govt can't even provide schools with SEN or ceilings that aren't full of asbestos and had Gove making it so that no two school reports are the same and kids are judged on their KS2 SATs marks for 4 years of their school life. They clearly think they can just dump kids on already stretched services and they'd be thrilled. Like Brexit, it shows the foresight of someone with cataracts.

Excl: Domestic abusers are being let out of prison early despite concerns being raised by probation officers about their threat to the public, whistleblowers have revealed:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5d209466-2d2e-46b5-a2ae-6246eefa2583?shareToken=48f6cea74cfad47e93db81622799c2e5