The army is not enthusiastic about the prime minister’s electoral power. The opposition plans to give 16-year-olds the right to vote.
20:43•Updated 21:23
LONDON In Britain, parties start their election campaigns with big promises that are guaranteed to divide voters even more. Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak intends to order all young people over the age of 18 to conscript service. Nowadays, the country has a professional army. The leader of the Labor Party, which is predicted to win the election Keir Starmer again promises the right to vote for 16-year-olds.
According to Sunak’s plans, 30,000 young people will be sent to the army every year. Most of the 18-year-olds would have to do free volunteer work in communities for a weekend once a month for a year.
– Britain faces an even more dangerous and divided future. There is no doubt that our democratic values are under threat. That’s why we are introducing a new brave military service model for 18-year-olds, said Sunak in his press release.
According to the British broadcasting company BBC, the conservative party estimates that the project will cost nearly three billion euros.
According to Sunak, the reform would be financed in part with money recovered from tax evaders and with funds originally intended to be used for the development of poor areas in the north of England.
Sunak hopes for pressure from the community and urges companies to favor those who have completed military service in their recruitment. According to current information, there would be no penalty for refusing military service.
My own minister shot down the idea
Sunak’s idea is also against the wind in his own party. Minister of Defense Personnel Andrew Murrison has shot down the idea. Financial Times -magazine, among other things, he warned about the decline of morale and the lack of resources when possibly unwilling young conscripts were brought into the ranks of professionals.
Murrison told parliament a couple of days before Sunak’s promise of conscription that the Ministry of Defense had no plans whatsoever to bring conscription back to Britain.
In Britain, military service was valid after the Second World War until 1960. Since then, the country has had a professional army. In January of this year, the Commander of the Ground Forces, General Patrick Sanders called for a citizen’s army to be established in Britain because of the growing threat of war against Russia.
At the beginning of the year, the Prime Minister’s office dismissed the general’s assessment as a “useless” prediction of future conflicts. Now he wants to revive military service.
The number of soldiers in the army has shrunk. There are only 74,000 soldiers left in the ground forces. The navy and the air force have the same amount of workforce in total. The number has been decreasing for decades. Last year, the number of soldiers decreased by more than five thousand.
In January, interviewed Londoners about their desire to participate in military service. Back then, many people thought the idea was foreign.
16-year-olds need the right to vote, the Labor Party believes
The Conservatives, who ruled Britain for 14 years, are predicted to lose the July parliamentary election to the Labor Party. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the election unexpectedly last week. A twenty percent vote share is predicted for the Conservatives, over 40 percent for the Labor Party.
Leader of the Labor Party Keir Starmer again considers it important that 16-year-olds get the right to vote.
– If you can work, pay taxes and serve in the armed forces, you should also be able to vote, Starmer said at his campaign event in the West Midlands region of central England, according to The Guardian newspaper.
Lowering the voting age would increase the number of voters by an estimated 1.5 million people.
Asylum seekers’ flights to Rwanda may be cancelled
According to opinion polls, the most important issues for voters in the upcoming elections are the cost of living crisis, public health care problems and immigration.
The Conservative government’s Rwanda plan, intended to stem immigration, has been left hanging over the election, even though it has been considered an election theme. The British government has paid hundreds of millions of euros to Rwanda so that Britain can send asylum seekers arriving there. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vowed before the election that the flights would start during the summer.
Now he announces that the flights will be able to travel in July after the parliamentary elections, if the party wins the elections. The Labor Party has said it will cancel the transit of asylum seekers into Rwanda if it wins the election.
Despite the threat from Rwanda, the number of asylum seekers who came to the country by boat across the English Channel has risen to a record high this spring. This year, more than 10,000 asylum seekers have come to the country by boat.