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Is Conscription Back In Britain?
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It was in the BBC hit show — the house of cards — which was later adapted for the American market, in which the notion of universal conscription was memorably mooted.
Francis Urquhart — The fictional Prime Minister — thought that it would be right to have those unruly kids in Britain’s inner cities to do compulsory military service as they would in Israel or in Singapore, to ensure that the concept of discipline was drilled down in order to produce better citizens.
But The House of Cards was a TV show and no sane politician or military top brass would dare talk about drafting young or middle aged men in large numbers to fight for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s.
Things, however, have changed a great deal since then.
Austerity, the Pandemic and Brexit have all happened and the internal cohesion of the UK is under serious threat.
Vladimir Putin has found his calling as the 21st century’s answer to Adolf Hitler and is seeking to regain lost territory from the Ukrainians, Poles, Bulgarians, Belarussians, Hungarians and Germans too.
And it is against the backdrop of the grave threat of the Russian bear that news broke that universal conscription might be on its way back to the United…