Don’t let Starmer recruit our young people to fight his wars

In order to address its “shrinking personnel numbers,” the government is seeking to work closely with “the Department for Education to develop understanding of the Armed Forces among young people in schools.”

By Conor Bollins

Should we be concerned about Starmer’s military recruitment plans?

Keir Starmer claims that his “first duty as Prime Minister is to keep the British people safe.” Yet, with the release of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), his government seems to have adopted a series of proposals that may directly jeopardise the lives of our children and young people.

It is worth pausing and reflecting, just for a moment, on what it really means to be preparing for what Starmer refers to as “war-fighting readiness.” Our shared cultural memory must be wearing exceedingly thin if we, as a society, are ready to accept our sons and daughters being shipped off to fight in another brutal and fruitless war. Sadly, this seems to be exactly where we are headed.

Much media attention has focused on the SDR’s set-piece announcement that defence spending will rise to 2.5% of GDP and then eventually 3% by 2027. These exorbitant spending commitments have been made in the context of broken public services, high levels of poverty and a cost-of-living crisis. As significant as these spending commitments are, it is also vital that we consider the larger question as to whether we actually want the future of our next generation to be defined by warfare?

The SDR promises to “end the hollowing out of our Armed Forces” and to pursue a “whole-of-society approach” to rebuilding Britian’s military capabilities. It is difficult to say whether or not these phrases are meant to be deliberately reminiscent of the condition of ‘total war’ that characterised the mass, social mobilisations of the First and Second World War. If not, then this suggests an almost wilful lack of self-awareness on the government’s part.

In any case, we should be highly wary of the government’s overt pledge to “promote unity of effort across society” by “leading a national conversation to raise public awareness of the threats to the UK.” When coupled with the government’s stated intention of countering “threats to information integrity,” it seems that Starmer is comfortable with the idea of creating wartime propaganda and stifling dissent.

Educators, youth social care workers and parents should pay particular attention to the government’s recruitment plans. In order to address its “shrinking personnel numbers,” the government is seeking to work closely with “the Department for Education to develop understanding of the Armed Forces among young people in schools.” According to the SDR, this will involve expanding “in-school and community-based Cadet Forces across the country by 30%, with an ambition to reach 250,000 in the longer term.” In short, the objective appears to be to indoctrinate and then enlist thousands of young people into the military.

How can this possibly be viewed as an attempt to make our children and young people safer? Starmer is living in fantasy land if he thinks that anyone, other than perhaps war profiteers, could possibly benefit from mass military recruitment. The war rhetoric prevalent throughout the SDR suggests the government anticipates being able to deploy its new recruits in largescale, and possibly even global, warfare. Far from keeping us safer, this is a road that could only possibly lead to huge numbers of deaths.

In the months and years ahead, the UK will undeniably need to navigate a monumentally tense set of international relations. However, the government could instead choose to play a constructive role on the world stage. This would mean trying to facilitate diplomatic solutions to some of these geopolitical challenges, rather than continuing to inflame the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

More immediately, we clearly need to challenge the government’s assumption that it is socially desirable to have large numbers of young people training and then serving in the military. The SDR’s claim that working in defence is already a good employment offer is almost completely divorced from reality. In truth, the military’s self-described ‘recruitment and retention crisis’ is due to the high levels of abuse, bullying and harassment that many new recruits experience.

Reports of sexual and racial violence, poor mental health and even cases of suicide give a more accurate reflection of what one can expect from a military career. This is the reason why the majority of service personnel, especially those recruited between the ages of 16 and 19, tend to resign fairly quickly. It is not incidental that abusive behaviour is rampant in both the army and the navy. By its very nature, the military is predicated on notions of hierarchy and the idea that coercion can be achieved through brute force. This makes the military institutionally incapable of not enabling at least some forms of bullying and mistreatment.

This raises serious ethical questions as to the appropriateness of marketing life in the military as a glorious adventure, especially to children or people who have only just reached adulthood. Failing to confront even the possibility that military recruitment is insufficiently grounded in informed consent, the SDR instead chooses to portray life in the military as defined by “purposeful work” and the “opportunity to see the world.” This is a woeful misrepresentation. In order to address the problem of potential recruits dropping out of the recruitment process, the SDR also recommends “drastically shortening the period between applicants expressing interest and joining.” This could set a dangerous precedent, particularly if it was then made harder for people to leave the military later down the line.

There is a strong tradition of former soldiers developing anti-war sentiments and even joining the peace movement. In the US, military recruiters have focused their efforts on poorer areas with high levels of unemployment. These predatory practices have tended to particularly target young African-Americans. During the Cold War, many veterans came to realise that their interests were more aligned with those they had been sent to fight than the governments that had recruited them. This was usually compounded by a dire lack of welfare provision for ex-soldiers and retirees. To this day, there are severe rates of homelessness and poor health amongst military veterans. When turning to activism hasn’t been possible, disillusionment with the democratic process has followed. Expanding military recruitment in the UK would inevitably yield the same results.  

Conveniently, the SDR offers no perspective on what the effects of mass military recruitment might mean for the rest of the population. Training people to kill inevitably has an impact on their moral character and psychology. In the worst case scenarios, it can create individuals desensitised to violence and accustomed to dehumanising their enemies. Throughout human history, armies have been involved in horrifying acts of cruelty, pillage and destruction.

It is the utmost naivety to assume that it is always possible to simply compartmentalise murderous instincts after returning to civilian life. The British and American veterans of modern wars, such as those waged in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, include many who committed war crimes and many more who returned home deeply traumatised or psychologically unstable. Over a decade of austerity has already left our social fabric in tatters. Placing the burden of ‘war-fighting readiness’ on the next generation would only add fuel to the fire.

Is there an alternative to having militarism as the organising principle of government?

Perhaps unintentionally, the SDR offers a valuable insight into what Starmer’s government thinks a state can accomplish. Its focus on well-established policy areas, such as its relish for nukes and NATO, is hardly illustrative of forward-thinking. However, the scale of its spending commitments and its conviction in being able to change national mindsets implies that the government accepts it is possible to use the apparatus of the state as a vehicle for change. It is just a shame that Starmer has decided to make militarism and warmongering “the fundamental organising principle of government” rather than the promotion of people’s health and wellbeing.

If the government is able to find the billions of pounds it has allocated for investment in the military, despite its self-imposed fiscal rules, then it can surely have instead used this money to fix our broken NHS or education system. Both sectors are not only more socially useful but far more ‘jobs-rich’ than defence. Insultingly, many of the problems the SDR identifies as an impediment to working in the military also apply to being a junior doctor or an early career teacher. To take education, as an example, there has been a ‘recruitment and retention crisis’ festering away for years now.  

The SDR claims that: “Young people today want different things from their employers, including more flexibility and hybrid working.” It goes onto suggest that young people expect to “to change jobs multiple times throughout their careers.” This is a misrepresentation, because it implies that young people expect to change jobs out of choice rather than because increasingly insecure, precarious working conditions have made it very difficult to hold down a job for any significant length of time. Regardless, its aim to take a “more modern, accommodating approach” to what is expected from service personnel includes measures that would greatly alleviate the pressures on working in other areas of the public sector.

Across schools and colleges in the UK, an exceptionally high number of teachers report expecting to leave the education sector within one-to-five years. Increasing workloads has been overwhelmingly cited as the reason why teachers feel unable to stay in the profession. The demands placed on teachers will also only increase over time, because, as more members of staff resign, those who remain in post will be left with even less resources. Teachers have also reported struggling to pay bills, as pay has failed to keep up with the pressures exerted by the escalating cost-of-living.

The National Education Union (NEU) successfully convinced the government to offer teachers a 4% pay rise. Yet, this has only been promised on the basis that the money for the pay rise is taken out of existing school budgets. The government’s refusal to properly fund the pay rise, or the education sector more broadly, speaks to how confused they are in their priorities. If the measures and money that have been promised to the military were diverted to the education sector, then this would go a long way to solving some of these issues.  

Egregiously, the SDR argues that the military plays a role in “advancing social mobility.” If lifting children out of poverty and improving life-chances was truly part of the government’s legislative agenda, then they would surely instead guarantee free-school-meals for all, consider more targeted forms of wealth redistribution and solve the funding crisis in education. Likewise, rather than chasing an elusive “defence dividend,” fixing the UK’s collapsing Higher Education sector would be a much less risky way to secure economic growth. As it stands, at least one-in-four universities are currently pushing through staff redundancies with whole degree-courses and subject areas being closed down as a result.

The SDR contends that there “should be greater focus within the Cadets on developing STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) skills.” As it stands, the scale of the Higher Education funding crisis means that STEM subjects are almost just as much at risk as the arts and humanities. Developing STEM within universities, rather than the military, may also ensure that scientists produce breakthroughs that are beneficial to humanity rather than destructive of life. Clearly, for example, STEM skills should be put to use trying to find ways to alleviate the climate catastrophe unfolding around the planet rather than experimenting with new forms of AI-controlled drone warfare.

It would also be misguided to assume that the arts and humanities should not be nurtured alongside STEM. Investment in the arts and humanities could bring about cultural innovation and prosperity through artistic exports. However, it is likely that improvements in the military and improvements in the arts and humanities would act as countervailing forces in society. One of the goals of a humanities education is to help students to develop independent, critical thinking. These are probably not personal attributes prized by a government intent on mass military recruitment.

Is it ‘sweet and proper’ for our children and young people to die in Starmer’s wars?

The arts have also played an important role in keeping alive our memory of the horrors and futility of war. As schoolchildren, many of our generation first encountered the world wars of the twentieth century through poetry, plays, novels and films. Although there has been a tendency to glorify these wars, there has been an equally strong push to remind us that global warfare should be avoided at all costs. It is literature and history, for instance, that help us to remember the hundreds of thousands of young people who died during the Battle of the Somme, only to win a narrow strip of land.

Starmer and his government ministers would do well to reflect on Wilfred Owen’s account of serving on the front lines of the First World War. If brought face-to-face with the disfigured corpses on the battlefield, Owen writes,

“you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria more,

(it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country).”

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• Conor Bollins is a Lecturer with the School of History at UEA and the Anti-Casualisation Officer for UEA UCU. You can follow Connor on Bluesky and Twitter/X.
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