There is something chilling about the ease with which Liz Kendall, the Labour Work and Pensions Secretary, proposes to funnel unemployed youth into the Armed Forces. With a casual nod to Tory MP Mark Pritchard in the Commons, she “absolutely agrees” that conscripting young working-class people into the military might be a neat solution to rising unemployment figures. Not job creation. Not investment. Not a plan for social housing, apprenticeships or green industry. But khaki.
It’s a grotesque inversion of social responsibility: unemployment is now to be solved not by giving people lives worth living, but by giving them orders. The armed wing of the state is now to become the welfare wing. A jobcentre with rifles.
This is not policy.
It is punishment.
The logic of the poorhouse in camouflage.
Workfare in Uniform
We should call this what it is: a form of coerced labour masquerading as opportunity. A new iteration of Thatcher’s Youth Training Scheme, but with live ammunition and PTSD at the end of it.
The proposal is not about offering exciting careers or fulfilling service. This is about managing surplus labour. William I. Robinson calls it the logic of surplus humanity: the growing segment of the working class rendered redundant by automation, austerity, and capitalist overproduction. Unable to employ them, the state must now find ways to discipline them.
What better discipline than the military, that most hierarchical and unquestioning of institutions? The implication is simple: if you’re young, poor, and jobless, your choices are shrinking. You can either hustle in a failing economy, navigate a gutted welfare state, or die in a foreign desert serving imperial interests.
No Money for Welfare, Billions for War
This comes, of course, as Kendall fronts a benefits crackdown totalling £5 billion in cuts. Mental health claimants are to be harassed back to work. The disabled will be reassessed under a regime of suspicion. Young people under 22 are to be stripped of the health-related Universal Credit element. A move affecting 66,000 people. What isn’t being cut is military spending. What isn’t being questioned is Britain’s endless readiness to prepare for wars it cannot justify.
There’s money for new submarines. Money for a new nuclear deterrent. There’s money for NATO sabre-rattling. But if you’re a 21-year-old on PIP, you can now expect a knock on the door and a pamphlet on joining the infantry.
This Is Not a Jobs Plan. It’s a Recruitment Drive
Let us be absolutely clear: this is not about unemployment. This is about empire. The British Armed Forces are facing a “manpower crisis” because young people are rightly refusing to sign up for a career in death-dealing. Britain is struggling to maintain a military force capable of projecting power alongside the US in an increasingly unstable world. The Afghanistan generation saw what happened to the ones who went. And they are saying no.
What Kendall offers now is a rebranding. The military as social mobility. The barracks as job training. But it is the same old bargain: your body for a wage. Your loyalty for survival. If you break, if you suffer, if you come back wounded or ill? The same Department for Work and Pensions that sent you there will interrogate your claim, cut your payments, and sanction you for non-compliance.
Labour’s Betrayal
This proposal should be a breaking point. Labour was not elected to become a more competent manager of poverty and militarism. It was elected (if it was elected in spirit at all) to repair a broken society. Instead, it is hardening the state’s boot.
Starmer’s Labour is not just retreating from its radical pledges. It is inventing new forms of cruelty. A party that once promised dignity for all now offers young people a rifle instead of a future. Universal Credit cuts and army recruitment are not separate policies. They are two sides of the same punitive coin.
Kendall? She stands at the despatch box smiling, treating the militarisation of the unemployed as if it were a graduate scheme. A future of war for a generation robbed of peace.
We Need a Different Kind of Fight
There is a fight to be had, but not against the unemployed. It is a fight against the forces that have engineered this crisis: landlords, arms dealers, profiteers, corporate backers who bankroll both the Tories and the new managerial Labour elite.
The young people of this country deserve jobs that do not involve killing, housing that isn’t exploitative, and lives that don’t require marching to survive. They deserve a government that doesn’t treat them as cannon fodder for NATO or bureaucratic inconveniences to be cut loose from PIP.
If Labour truly wants to reduce youth unemployment, it should start by taxing wealth, breaking up monopolies, and building a welfare state that lifts people up rather than disciplines them.
Until then, this plan belongs where it came from: the reactionary imagination of those who believe the poor should earn their bread in uniform or not eat at all.
Let’s call it what it is.
Conscription by stealth. Militarism in place of welfare. A Labour government drunk on power and empty of purpose.
