UK 'citizen army': If young generation is to answer general's call to arms, they need a greater stake in society – Stewart McDonald

The UK needs to start taking the threat posed by totalitarian states like Russia and China more seriously

On the opening page of his 115-page witness statement for the UK Covid Inquiry, Dominic Cummings opened in typical style, with a single line from Tolstoy’s War and Peace: “Nothing was ready for the war which everyone expected.” This line, which could be a neat preface to almost any one of the national and international crises which regularly punctuate the weather updates, echoed in my head as I read General Sir Patrick Sanders’ call for the UK to follow Sweden and take “preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing”. As part of his statement, he argued that the UK should start ramping up its defences, including by preparing a “citizen army” for a future conflict with Russia.

I have written before about the threat that totalitarian states like Russia and China pose to our way of life, and about the urgent need for governments – in Westminster and Holyrood – to wake up to that fact before it’s too late. Long-time readers of this paper will also be wearily familiar with my call for the UK and Scottish governments to do more to build societal resilience among citizens in preparation for future crises, whether they be economic, military or anything else.

But language about a “citizen army” and conscription is entirely unhelpful. As the general himself has noted on several occasions, the actual army is grotesquely understaffed and under-resourced, with troop numbers at their lowest level since the war of Spanish succession in 1714. And as former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted late in 2022, when asked if UK Armed Forces could fight effectively and enduringly in high-intensity peer-on-peer conflict, “overall, we could do it. Could we do it enduringly? Not with the stocks we have, no.” Calls for a citizen army elide the structural problems plaguing the actual army; to form one in response to the security threats the UK faces is like trying to tackle subsidence with Polyfilla.

British soldiers take part in a Nato exercise on the Estonian-Latvian border (Picture: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Trapped in permanent adolescence

And what young person would sign up today to fight for King and country? Last week, whilst in London, I heard a young woman complain to her friend about her landlord with such anger that she filled the entire carriage. This man, she told her unwilling eavesdroppers on the Jubilee line, had four mortgage-free flats bought decades ago and was now increasing the rent on each of them by 30 per cent. Mutter all you want about market forces and supply and demand, but the simple fact is that millions of young people – locked out of home ownership and financially unable to start a family – feel trapped in a state of permanent adolescence, with no stake of any sort in the future of their country.

One needs only to look at Finland, the grand master of societal resilience, to see how bad the UK’s problem is in this regard. In Finland, 85 per cent of citizens trust the police, 69 per cent trust the media, 61 per cent trust the national government and 53 per cent trust the parliament – solid majorities on all counts. It should not surprise you to learn that the UK is somewhere at the other end of the trust barometer, with some of the lowest levels of trust in its political institutions of any developed country. While 67 per cent of citizens trust the police, only 31 per cent trust the press, 24 per cent the national government and 23 per cent the parliament. Ninety per cent of Britons believe government ministers lie to them and two-thirds of young people want to live under a socialist economic system. Good luck calling them up to your citizen army.

In one respect, however, the general was right: we do need a sustained societal shift in how we think about defence, in terms of culture but also spending. That means more politicians need to come to terms with the fact that defence spending will indeed need to increase, and then be willing to make the public case for that increase. But we also need to see smarter defence spending and an end to the culture of waste within the Armed Forces – not least on procurement failures like Ajax and vanity projects like Trident.

Making a military career more attractive

The general’s diagnosis and proposed cure, however, were almost a perfect caricature of the kind of top-down, out-of-date solutions cooked up in SW1 with not a second’s reflection – to say nothing of behaviour change – required from anyone SW1. Our society must be defended. There is no disputing that. But it must be defended abroad by an Armed Forces who serve not as a brave and distant warrior caste, but as valued and properly rewarded public servants in a modern institution.

The establishment of an Armed Forces Representative Body, following the precedent set by our Nato allies in Germany, Norway, the USA, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland, would go a long way towards that. Such a body, which I called for many times during my time as SNP defence spokesman, would allow service personnel the right to engage in collective bargaining and would be able to advocate for its members on matters such as accommodation and housing, pay and benefits, medical services, welfare provision, career development, resettlement, and equipment. This would go a long way to making a career in the Armed Forces more attractive and help with retention.

Rather than paper over the cracks, politicians must wake up to the fact that social and economic problems they have turned a blind eye to are increasingly becoming threats to social cohesion and national resilience. If the UK Government is serious about preparing to tackle the crises to come, it needs to get a grip on economic inequality and address the very real crises in the here-and-now to give young citizens a stake in the society that the general is calling for them to defend.

Stewart McDonald is SNP MP for Glasgow South