Very soon the political leaders of this country will start to have a frank conversation … they need to consent to allow us to do that – which means sacrifices by them.” — General Sir Roly Walker, Chief of the General Staff, speaking at Catterick Garrison,
The Daily Telegraph, 16 October 2026

And here we go again. Last year it was General “Sir” Richard Shirreff, formerly of NATO, a retired general with a hard-on for conscription, demanding that young people be handed over to the State for a bit of “character-building.” This year it’s the man who actually runs the Army. General Sir Roly Walker stood in front of seven hundred soldiers at Catterick and told them, “our nation is going to need you.” Then he told the rest of us that we’ll soon be asked to “consent” to “sacrifices.” He was careful not to say the word conscription, and he didn’t need to. When a serving Chief of the General Staff says the politicians are about to have a “frank conversation” with us about what the nation “must be prepared to do,” and adds that the burden of fighting falls on “our most inexperienced and junior soldiers,” you don’t need a degree in Whitehall-watching to see how that conversation ends. The old do the consenting. The young do the sacrificing.

Look at that word “consent.” In this country, consent is what you’re deemed to have given once something has been said often enough on the BBC and nobody important has objected. Walker didn’t say what we’d be consenting to. Higher taxes, for a start. Worse public services, probably. And then, once the ground has been prepared, our bodies. It always goes in that order: first they come for your money, then for your children.

None of this is about defending Britain. Nobody seriously believes the UK is about to be invaded. The Russians have spent four and a half years grinding through eastern Ukraine a few miles at a time. In June, General Walker himself told a conference at RUSI that the Ukrainians were killing seven Russians for every Ukrainian they lost. If that’s true, the Russian army isn’t about to come marching up the Thames Estuary. If it isn’t true, why was he saying it? Meanwhile the Chinese have trade deals to sign, and the French can barely invade their own suburbs. The real threat to Britain isn’t tanks across the Channel. It’s the people running this country into the ground and demanding more power while they do it.

That hasn’t stopped the calls. Germany has already brought back compulsory registration for its eighteen-year-olds and is keeping the draft in reserve in case the volunteers don’t turn up. So the usual British fossils, Shirreff and Dannatt and the rest of the polished skull collection, have spent two years demanding that we catch up, and now the serving brass have joined in. Meanwhile the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Rich Knighton, tells us that “civil society” will have to help defend the country, and Parliament has an inquiry running into our “civilian readiness” for war. If young people aren’t terrified of war yet, they soon will be. Nothing screams “freedom” like being made to march up and down a parade ground for six months while some deranged corporal screams at you about punctuality and gender-neutral latrine etiquette.

The awkward thing for the generals is that the public isn’t buying it. Ipsos published a poll this week finding that 48 per cent of adults would not take up arms for Britain under any circumstances, against 36 per cent who would. Most women said no, and so did most people aged 35 to 54. This isn’t a generation of snowflakes refusing its duty. It’s half the country, including the middle-aged taxpayers who’d be footing the bill. A man from RUSI told reporters that the Army’s problem isn’t finding willing volunteers but training and equipping them. That rather kills the case for conscription. If you can’t train and equip the volunteers you already have, what exactly are you going to do with several hundred thousand sulking eighteen-year-olds, apart from photograph them for recruitment posters?

Then there’s the money. In June, John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary because the government’s plan gave him £13.5 billion of the £28 billion he thought the forces needed. A month later Andy Burnham made him Chancellor, so the man who said the money wasn’t there now controls the money, and when Kemi Badenoch asked at PMQs when defence would reach 3 per cent of national income, the Prime Minister told her to wait for the Budget. His Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, says he inherited “the smallest army since the Napoleonic Wars.” This is the same political class that has had thirty years to pay for the army it now says we need, and spent the money on everything else. Now the bill is coming, and they’d like a large part of it paid in kind. Conscription is the cheapest army there is, because the soldiers don’t get a market wage. It’s a tax paid in time and blood by the people with the least money and no vote that counts for anything.

It’s always the same play. They start with “national unity” and “resilience.” Then they move on to “Russia might invade” and “sacrifices,” and before you know it they’re drafting legislation to stick me in a uniform and fly me to Estonia, so I can die for a country that can’t even secure its own borders or get you a GP appointment in under three weeks. No thanks.

Last year I said I was nearly of age to be conscripted. Now I’m exactly the age they have in mind. I’m the target demographic for their nation-building experiment, and my reply is the same as it was:

Fuck off!

If General Shirreff wants to “serve” some more, he’s welcome to grab a rifle and jog his way to the Donbas, and I wish him the best of luck. The offer stands for any of his friends. But I won’t be turned into cannon fodder for a State that has never once acted in my interests and never will.

The British Army doesn’t exist to defend Britain, and it hasn’t for decades. It spent twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan achieving nothing except dead soldiers and dead civilians, while the State that sent it lectures its own people about hate speech at home. It exists to serve a ruling class that is “British” only in the sense that its mansions are inside the M25 and its children still put on public-school accents between internships at Goldman Sachs. This is the same regime that locked us down, printed money until the economy imploded, and then blamed us for not working hard enough. Now it wants our bodies, and it would like us to call that consent.

They’ll say conscription is good for discipline, good for skills, good for social cohesion. What they really mean is that they’ve run out of willing fools and need a fresh supply of unwilling ones. They say we must “defend our values.” What values are those, exactly? The right to be spied on, silenced and taxed until dead? The value of never apologising for a war, however catastrophic? The value of doing whatever NATO, Washington and whichever think-tank currently has the Defence Secretary’s ear decide is good for us? Call me unpatriotic. I call myself sane.

So yes, I’ll be staying out of your “resilience corps,” and I’ll be withholding my consent to your sacrifices. I won’t train to kill strangers on behalf of investment funds and focus groups. I won’t carry a rifle for a country that has already sold its soul and is now after its children.

Your war is not my war. Your State is not my State. Your uniforms do not fit me.

Sources:

• Conservative Post: Half of Britain says it will not fight…
• Brit Brief: Britons must prepare for sacrifices, army chief warns
• Daily Times: Britain’s army chief warns citizens to prepare for sacrifices