Lieutenant General Sir Charles Collins, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, said national service is not being considered “at the moment”. Instead, senior defence officials have told the House of Lords national resilience committee that top brass are looking at ways to increase the number of regular troops, reservists and civilian volunteers who would be encouraged to help respond if conflict ever broke out. The UK has only used conscription twice in the modern era, between 1916 and 1920, and 1939 and 1960.
And while conscription, and hopefully another large-scale war, appears unlikely, many have still called for national service to be reintroduced to ease military manpower concerns.
If it was to ever happen again, we don’t know exactly what it would look like today, but we do have some historic precedent from the last global conflict, the Second World War.
At this time, there were some crucial jobs which were deemed too important to be conscripted. Those in key industries were spared conscription – bakers, farmers, doctors or nurses and engineers in particular.
Those who objected to fighting, known as ‘conscientious objectors’, were sent to tribunals and then made to work non-combatant jobs that helped the war in other ways.
The National Service (Armed Forces) Act imposed conscription on all males aged between 18 and 41 who had to register for service, although those deemed medically unfit were exempted.
Conscription played a key role in the conflict, helping to significantly bolster Britain’s mass.
It continued in the years as national service, a standardised form of peacetime conscription, ran from 1949 to 1960.