Greg Hibbert

This story is so delicious, it's unbelievable. It spanks the Tories so, so hard, albeit inadvertently. But it will take a little explaining, so please have patience and bear with me while I walk you through it. The Telegraph tonight is running a big splash about the first Tory pledge of the GE campaign, namely bringing back compulsory national service. Yes, they want to force all 18-year olds to spend a year in the Army, or devote a weekend a month for a year doing community service chores. (Related aside: they plan to get £1.5 billion of the £2.5 billion a year cost of the programme by gutting the post-Brexit shared prosperity fund, which was meant to replace the loss of EU structural funding. The diametric opposite of levelling up.) Now here's where things get FUN! The Telegraph embeds links within their articles to other "related" Telegraph stories to direct more traffic around their website. (I believe these links are likely inserted automatically, for SEO purposes.) So they have this big piece about national service by Camilla Turner, their Sunday Political Editor. And in it they've linked prominently to the older article that I've screenshot below... Yes. They really have chosen as a representative related story an opinion piece that spells out in no uncertain terms what an utterly idiotic idea bringing back national service would be. ("Yet once again the reintroduction of National Service is being mooted by think tanks, this time as a thinly veiled mechanism for enslaving the young.") It's like a boat-builder deliberately drilling a large hole in their new craft below the waterline, and then launching it. Sunk before it had a chance. But the fun doesn't stop there. There's a second sneaky link lurking in tonight's article too. That one leads to an older piece entitled "Why conscription would leave Britain fighting a losing battle". This second article digs into the economics and jobs aspects of a programme such as national service, and concludes that it's a non-starter. And if the Telegraph weren't so greedy for clicks, we'd never even have seen the articles that blow holes straight through the grand Tory plan! Begin long, slow clap. Link to this evening's article archive.ph/6m5qj Link to the article explaining why it's a terrible, terrible idea archive.ph/M7ZIT Link to the article about constriction being a losing battle archive.ph/hsD8w