Ex-PM says Britain needs universal ‘resilience corps’ as he renews national service push

Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has renewed calls for a reformed version of national service following several high-profile cyberattacks against the country.

Sunak, who served as Prime Minister from 2022 to 2024, highlighted the recent cyberattacks on supermarket fridges and said ‘we all need to become more aware of the threats we face’.

Writing in The Times, Sunak suggested that the stockpiling recommended by Prime Minister Andy Burnham wasn’t enough to keep the country going in case of such attacks in the future, and instead suggested that a new model of national service should be introduced.

Sunak said that threats to the country he saw during his time as PM meant that he felt the UK needed ‘some kind of resilience corps’ to deal with whatever may lie ahead.

National service was introduced in the UK in 1949 and required all able-bodied men aged between 17 and 21 to serve in one of the country’s armed forces for 18 months.

Rishi Sunak has said the country needs to become more resilient (Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images)

The 18-month National Service period was extended to two years in 1950.

The programme was scrapped in 1963 after more than two million had served.

Sunak explained in his Times article that it would be ‘impractical’ to try and launch a similar service to the original, but said that a reformed model could be beneficial to the country.

“Whenever I raised national service as Prime Minister, the armed forces were quick to stress that this kind of scheme wouldn’t help them: they don’t have the capacity to take on and train more than 800,000 18-year-olds,” he wrote.

“What is actually required is an updated version of national service designed to enhance our resilience, strengthen our society and remind us all that citizenship brings with it responsibilities as well as rights.”

He said a new national service could offer young people options, saying some could ‘apply for a small, selective military cadre, others serve with search and rescue, St John Ambulance or Meals on Wheels and some train in areas such as cybersecurity’.

The former PM has renewed calls for a reformed national service (Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Sunak said that when he floated the idea of re-introducing National Service when he was the Prime Minister he became the ‘butt of the joke’ but that now ‘France and Germany are both taking steps towards’ it.

He went on to say that as well as making the country stronger, reintroducing national service could help support the NEET (not in education, employment or training) crisis, while also helping to ‘unite young people from very different backgrounds’

He said: "It would make us more resilient and more cohesive, give the almost one million young people not in education, employment or training a sense of purpose, and remind us all that citizenship brings responsibilities as well as rights."

Addressing the practicalities of how it would work, Sunak pointed towards other state-enforced duties such as jury service as an example and noted the high completion rate in Sweden, where some 97 percent of 18-year-olds complete their compulsory muster assessment.

In response to Sunak’s comments, a spokesperson for the Labour Party told Sky News: "This is not a plan - it's a review which could cost billions and is only needed because the Tories hollowed out the Armed Forces to their smallest size since Napoleon."