What follows is probably the worst-case scenario. Late December 2028, an anxious Friday evening. That morning, footage confirms the entry of the enemy into Kyiv. Russian Kamov Ka-52 “Alligator” attack helicopters terrorise the miles-long civilian traffic jams on roads out of the capital. The slaughter appears on social media feeds, where the veracity of each video is debated. Accounts, themselves of uncertain provenance, suggest that the footage has been generated by artificial intelligence.
By afternoon, there are unconfirmed reports of Russian and Belarusian motorised brigades entering the Suwalki Gap between Lithuania and Poland, with North Korean assault battalions in support. In Paris, President Le Pen refuses to condemn the aggression against fellow Nato members. She says the incursions are not happening at all. In London, Sir Keir Starmer’s calls to the US president-elect JD Vance go unreturned. Washington maintains a gnomic silence.
Within hours Lithuania, Finland, Poland, Estonia and Latvia declare war on Russia. Spain, Italy, France and Ireland declare their neutrality. Romanian “peacekeepers” seize a slice of Ukrainian territory in the Carpathians. (Over in Germany, the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is mulling emergency legislation to guarantee new defence spending, expected to reach the Bundestag by mid-2030.)
• Zelensky: Putin will die soon and the Ukraine war will end
This is how Nato ends. Not with an announcement, or a press conference, or a joint statement, or a victory parade, but in confused and abject horror.
The prime minister addresses the nation that evening. Europe is at war, he announces. Britain, “working closely with our Baltic partners”, may find itself drawn into the conflict within hours or days. Keir Starmer begins to talk about service, whether nurses in the NHS or teachers in the classroom or bobbies on the beat. His speechwriters have him paraphrase an old line from George Orwell: “In moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone…”
Starmer pauses. He knows this is what he will be remembered for, if there is anyone left to remember anything after all this is over. “That is why, effective from midnight tomorrow, a general mobilisation order will be in place and enforced.”
Every unmarried male aged 18-26 receives a text. It tells them to report to the nearest MoD facility for an interview and medical examination. They are being conscripted. We all know what will happen next. Gen Z, as so many recent surveys have found, will not go to war. In one poll for this newspaper, only 11 per cent of 18 to 27-year-olds said they would fight for Britain; 41 per cent said there were no circumstances in which they would take up arms.
• Giles Coren: I fear we’ve lost our Battle of Britain bravery
Many young Britons who have been fed, watered, educated and provided for by the British state will discover that rather than being British, they are, in fact, Pakistani or Congolese or Eritrean or Indian or Irish or Rwandan or Welsh or whatever combination of words they think will relinquish them from duty. The queues at the airports will be longer than the queues at the MoD centres. Orwell’s “species of instinct” no longer exists.
What happened to national pride? The young do not have any, according to the polls. They believe Britain to be racist, they do not trust its institutions, and they have their own mental health problems to consider before going into battle against throat-slitting Chechens in eastern Europe. You need citizens for the citizen army that retired British generals make intermittent demands for, and Britain seems to have fewer and fewer of them.
Points made in debates about conscription fall into two broad categories. First, that the young are lazy, entitled, selfish, “woke” and, as one retired soldier recently told the Daily Express, “on Xboxes and PlayStations and much prefer to do whatever in their armchair”. Second, a generational refusal to serve in the military must say something broader about British identity, British values and Britain’s future during a period of unsettling demographic change.
• Poland becomes first Nato nation to give Ukraine jets
At no point have pollsters asked young people what they think “war”, or to “fight” in one, actually means. For some readers, perhaps “war” summons images of young men running towards Spitfires in a Kent airfield, camel trains following Lawrence to Damascus, half-remembered scenes from Where Eagles Dare.
If you are aged 18 to 21, the war you have grown up with, scrolled past, examined on YouTube and read about is the war in Ukraine. This war is believed to have killed and wounded more than a million soldiers. Its third year, in which a largely static front line became a laboratory for a constellation of lethal drones, desperate Russians reintroducing horses and donkeys into service, and the arrival into battle of fearless North Korean death squads, was deadlier than the first two years combined.
This is a conflict that combines recognisable elements of the medieval era, the industrial era and the era of AI into something frighteningly new. Like no other war in history, this violence has been filmed, clipped and published on open source channels. Glory and heroism do still exist in Ukraine, but in much reduced circumstances.
I suspect that the young know this better than those who do not have to imagine fighting in such a context. It’s not just a lack of patriotism or confusion about identity that make conscription unlikely in Britain. It’s fear. They are right to be afraid.
