cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15826549
Ruling Conservative Party says it will bring back national service if it wins the July 4 general election.
Eighteen-year-olds will have to perform a mandatory national service if the Conservative Party is voted back to power in the United Kingdom’s July 4 election, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced.
The prime minister’s plan would entail young people being given a choice between a full-time placement in the armed forces for 12 months or spending one weekend a month for a year volunteering in their community, the party said.
Confusing thing #1 was actually a smart move.
Reform party, who has been a bunch of useful idiots and have been diluting the Tory vote significantly have not got enough members in place to stand in every location as this will be their first general election and they are a new party.
The SNP has only just picked a new leader after the previous one stepped down and they have fallen out of favour in recent times.
Labour (main competition) was not expecting anything until November time as the running theory is that the Tories would wait for a bit to see if something would “come up” and rescue their awful polling (as per your suggestion). So even they were caught off guard and now have to scramble to organise everything. This shit isn’t easy, even for established parties.
Hell, even the Tories were caught off guard by their leader doing this.
Sunak has played an interesting card here. I doubt it will make any difference but at least he is being somewhat clever with the surprise timing of this.