A country can't assume the trust between strangers that lets it function. It has to be built, in places where people who would otherwise never meet are made to rely on each other - and Britain has quietly let most of those places close.
Crossbencher · 19 July 2026
The objections are serious. Compelling young people into a year of service is a real imposition on their liberty, and a country that reaches for coercion to manufacture fellow-feeling should be nervous about what it's doing. It's expensive. It disrupts lives just as they're starting. And the evidence that such schemes reliably produce the cohesion they promise is thinner than their enthusiasts admit. Forcing people together can breed resentment as easily as solidarity, and a badly run programme would produce plenty of the first. Anyone proposing this lightly hasn't thought about it.
Set against that's a fact easy to feel and hard to price. A society runs on trust between strangers, and that trust isn't a natural resource that renews itself. It's built. And it's built in the specific places where people who would otherwise never share a room are made to depend on one another - the regiment, the ward, the factory floor, the parish. Those are exactly the places affluence and specialisation have thinned out. The middle-class child and the working-class child now grow up, are schooled, work and socialise in almost entirely separate worlds. They never pick up the thing an earlier, poorer, more mixed society got almost by accident: a stock of weak ties and shared reference points across the lines that otherwise divide a country.
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