Child free and conscription.

[JenniferBooth]

This could be just a hypothetical discussion, but according to this second in line.

Despite being last in line for a lot of other things 🤔
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/british-conscription-may-necessary-5-33180888

I actually think that would be fair enough, as long as they exempted people with other caring responsibilities as well.

Wonderful. Just another reminder that our lives aren’t as important. Or is this a sneaky way to get the birth rates back up 😂

I was just thinking the same thing.

It’s not that your lives are less important but, if you conscript people with children and conscript both males and females in equal measure then you need someone (the state, presumably) to look after those children.

there are 14.4 million children in the uk. Practically, you cannot conscript both parents in a household / single parents.

If we get to that point then the shit really has hit the fan…

Or is this a sneaky way to get the birth rates back up

First up shouldn’t be young people in general, we already don’t have enough of them!

Im sure all the single child free ppl living in HMOs who dont qualify for social housing will be chomping at the bit to help. Last in line for SH but second in line for this.

well I don’t imagine they will be chomping at the bit to look after some of the 14.4 million children who’s parents have been conscripted either.

my grandad was an accountant. I don’t imagine he was thrilled about being conscripted during WW2 either but if we’ve got to the point where conscription is needed then I can imagine it’s going to be in a long line of things you really wish weren’t happening.

What does social housing have to do with anything?

Plenty of single childfree people don’t live in social housing and don’t want to!

Quite a lot actually In the First World War it was working class officers in the trenches. Officers from higher classes often had safer roles. The former are more likely to be targeted than the latter

British Army recruitment efforts have historically and consistently focused on areas with high levels of social and economic deprivation, targeting working-class towns and cities, particularly in the North of England, Scotland, and Wales
. Internal documents and research have indicated a deliberate strategy to attract 16- to 24-year-olds from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (classified as C2DE)

Again, what does that have to do with social housing?

Working class doesn’t mean you live in social housing, and there WAS no social housing at the time of WW1.

I don’t think it will happen.

But if it did, I would imagine it would be fairly obvious that people who do not having caring responsibilities (I’d include more than just people with children) would be first up, because that means the state won’t have extra people to look after because the carer has gone.

I know that but it is ppl from lower socio ecomomic groups who were targeted.
Anyway THIS thread is about the child free being second on the list. You cant have one group coming last for the nice things yet top of the list for the shittier things or when someone else wants something. A good example of this is when child free employees are last on the list if they want to book a holiday in August but first when it comes to covering Christmas shifts. Now we have last on the list for SH but second on the list for conscription.

Maybe the Spartans had the right idea on the march to Thermopylae: sires only!

But if you’re talking about conscription, that’s irrelevant.

No, that's wrong. Middle and upper class soldiers died at a higher rate than working classes in ww1, exactly because they were far more likely to be officers and therefore were expected to lead from the front.

The idea of higher up ranks being in safer roles out of the trenches only applied to very high up, the top 1 of the army and those were almost always professional soldiers and generally older than the troops because theyd spent 10-20 years working their way up the ranks before the war even started.

Even if you were the son of a duke you couldn't go straight to field marshal, you'd start at second lieutenant like everyone else!

See point 4 here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836

Also, a lot of the public schools had active OTC units before WW1, so could provide young officers without too much extra training. Public Schools and the Great War by Anthony Selson and David Walsh is an interesting book.

Speaking as a childless person, I don't actually see the problem with being one of the first groups. I'm in my 50s so it wouldn't affect me directly, and I already work in a defence-related role, so it would just make work a lot busier. But we have a lot of ex-forces employees, so that would have an impact.

I think fitness levels might be challenging for conscription. I suppose a lot of young people are very into gym-goung, but others are absolutely not. WW1 also highlighted issues with fitness levels, malnutrition, under-nutrition and related health issues.

What’s the issue? Women were conscripted in WWII in the UK. Yes, usually to the home forces jobs that didn’t go to the front, but for a long while the front was the skies of Britain and they fought as bravely against Nazi bombers as Ukrainians are against Russian invaders,

"conscription in the event of war" doesn't make sense.
A modern war will be over long before we could even think about calling people up, let alone training them to use modern weapons.

We either rebuild our military to discourage an aggressor from attacking, or we sit back and await being overwhelmed. At the moment it seems only the second option is available.