VIEWPOINT
Keep out the draft
GEORGE GALE
Conscription, or forced labour, or press- ganging, is a method of compelling people to do something they do not want to. The principal reasons why they do not want to do it are that the job is uncongenial and dangerous and morally offensive and, above all, ill-paid. There are those who find serv- ing in the armed forces congenial enough and who enjoy the cossetting of discipline. They are brave or foolhardy enough to dis- count the element of danger. Far from re- garding their occupation as morally offen- sive, they regard themselves as an elite who protect and defend the lives and liberties of their fellow-countrymen. And, adding all this up and looking at the rates of pay, they then volunteer.
If the policies decided upon by a govern- ment require an increase in the number of soldiers, then more soldiers must be re- cruited, and the way to do this is to make the job more congenial: that is, if necessary to pay them more. If, as frequently happens, government policies require an increase in the number of its civil employees, then the appropriate civil departments go out and recruit these people in the market place. No government department seeks to conscript civil employees. Likewise, if a military de- partment is required to have more military workers there. seems to be no good reason why it should behave differently: it should recruit in the market place as well. Conscrip- tion means soldiers on the cheap. It also means unwilling soldiers.
There may be brief exceptional occasions in the existence of civilised countries when the threats to their civilised existence are such that their rulers had no choice but to decide that the direction of labour was essential, and that so many men must be compelled to shoulder arms, or to plant potatoes, or to get coal, else their countries could not hope to survive. But for much of the time rulers have hired their soldiers, just as they have hired their other servants. And while it may be seemly for a country in direst danger to direct its people to fight for, that is, to defend, their lands, it must even here be observed that a country in such danger would not be worth much in the minds of its countrymen if its rulers found it necessary to compel those countrymen to fight in its defence. However, I would admit that, very exceptionally, conscription could be justified in time of full-scale war.
I fail entirely to see any worthwhile, reasonable, just, humane or liberal defence of conscription in time of peace or in time of minor war. It may be that men and women could be required to undergo some elementary part-time training in their home
districts to fit them to withstand as well as possible a nuclear attack and to resist as well as possible an enemy's territorial occupation. Such a defence policy, if also associated with a possessed nuclear deterrent of second-strike capacity, would make much sense. This is not, however, a policy de- cided upon by any post-war Minister of Defence, despite the fact that it is the only policy which would offer some hope of success in the event of major continental .war.- British tlefence . policy since the war has been decided upon the premise first that there ain't gonna be no war no more, except little wars a long way off involving natives, and second that if this unfortunately proves false then Britain is finished anyway. It is a peculiar defence policy in that in an either/ or fashion, it combines blissful optimism with total pessimism. It is an essentially un- serious policy, since following it British governments abdicate from a decisive role in favour of a few minutes' chat on the hot line to Washington before the final cata- strophe. It is a popular enough policy, since it leaves everyone to his garden. It is cheap.
It is not really a defence policy at all. - Now if the British public wants a British government to go round the world showing the flag and occasionally teaching the natives a lesson, doing a bit of riot-control here and a bit of target practice there, occasionally even toppling a regime or propping another one up, then all right. To do this, we need armed forces •to carry out such popularly desired policies. The people who desire the policies must pay for the men to carry them out. If they pay enough, there will be enough volunteers coming forward. We can easily afford to do this if enough of us want to. We can afford such extravagances as Concorde. We could easily manage a few aircraft carrier-strike forces, if we wanted to patrol the oceans and to throw our weight around. We are not heavyweight any longer; but we are still far bigger and stronger than most.
For what it is worth I can detect no powerful desire among the British electorate to pay for, such policies, even if otherwise they would be attractive. To seek alter- natively to conceal the proper cost of such policies by making them-cheaper, by using forced labour for them, would be econ- omically wasteful, politically retrograde, and morally improper. If it's cheap labour we want, we can import it 'by the shipload, voluntarily, eagerly indeed. That no such desire in Government or electorate exists is evident. For a country fortunate to have no strong tradition of compulsory national service now to reintroduce it would un- doubtedly be to increase greatly the amount of political disaffection among those likely to be compelled to serve, however much it might gratify the crankier of their elders and betters. But the impropriety of con- scription is the worst about it. It can really be no part of a civilised state's need, to compel its young men to take up arms and go thousands of miles into foreign parts, there to seek to kill men with whom they have no quarrel, whether this be done in the name of democracy or freedom or in any other name whatever.
I am myself quite certain that Conserva- tive policies do not mean conscription; and what is more, that if they were found to mean it, then the policies would be promptly changed. Thus when Defence Secretary Healey makes this accusation, he is smear- ing the Opposition. When Edward Heath furiously replies that the accusation is 'a deliberate electioneering trick, false in sub- stance, unjustifiable in argument, squalid in motivation and comparable only to the libel on Mr Churchill at the beginning of the 'fifties, "Whose finger on the trigger?"'
although perhaps he does protest4too much, he as much as Healey assumes that the British electorate will have nothing to do with conscription. For this assumption among both parties, we may all be pro- foundly grateful, middle-aged disciplinarians excluded,
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