But there are two problems with reviving this particular aspect of the sainted Citizen Clem’s postwar settlement: that it would require a huge increase in defence spending, and that there is no public appetite for it.

Thus, David Cameron’s attempt to “reintroduce national service” ended in National Citizen Service, a voluntary scheme for 16- and 17-year-olds. It might be a good policy, but it isn’t national service in any meaningful sense. Nor is Sunak’s new alternative.

It does look more muscular, at first glance: 18-year-olds would be required to either do a year in the military or 12 weekends of mandatory volunteering (you know what I mean). This sounds like the way it works in countries, such as Finland, which have proper conscription but provide a non-martial alternative.

Dig a little deeper, however, and the loss of nerve is clear. The number of places in the military will be capped each year at 30,000 — about 5% of each intake. What’s more, they would all be confined to non-combat roles such as “logistics, cyber security, procurement, or civil response”. Administrative conscription, in other words.

Meanwhile the alternative, “volunteering one weekend per month […] with organisations such as fire, police, and NHS”, completely misses the point of national service (just like in Finland, according to people there I’ve spoken to).

The case for national service, beyond providing a mass of infantry, is the social dimension: the levelling, nation-building effects of a year spent away from home (even if only in barracks), with lots of other young people from diverse backgrounds, in uniformed service.

Having a non-martial option is all well and good, in principle. But it is completely pointless if it doesn’t replicate those elements, devolving merely into a way to steal weekends from teenagers to create a limited pool of unskilled and unmotivated corvée labour that the professionals can only really hope to give the lowest admin jobs and keep out of the way.

It’s especially odd because one can easily imagine voters being more enthusiastic about doing that sort of national service properly than the combat kind. There are plenty of Britons who might warm to, for example, a Royal Medical Reserve which allowed people to do a full year in uniform with the Health Service, with time to get proper training in some basic but useful roles.

Or perhaps young people might be more enthusiastic about a chance to serve in an Overseas Development Corps, modelled on the American Peace Corps, spending their year of national service in uniform supporting British aid operations around the world. Instead, the current policy is a cop out, wasting the time of 95% of young people in the hope of creating a limited but potentially useful administrative resource for the Armed Forces.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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