What fascinates me about conscription is that it tends to be favoured by old men who won't have to serve themselves, and the justification is often about learning 'discipline', as the EFF and PA manifestos explicitly state.

There is an old joke that the military only engages in trench warfare when it's a last-ditch effort. The same might be said of Rishi Sunak's election campaign in the UK, where he announced that if the Conservatives win the 4 July election (they won't), he would reintroduce national service.

It was an eye-popping announcement, slightly mitigated by the fact that it was all but withdrawn the day afterwards. Instead of the usual national service gig, which is a year out of your life after you leave school, the Conservative plan is that only around 30,000 conscripts would actually join the military; the rest -- all 570,000 of them -- would work for 25 days a year on some project.

Sunak said the "new form of national service" would be "to give our young people the chance to enjoy new experiences, learn new skills and feel a sense of community, belonging and national purpose". Trust me, as a person who, back in the day, did national service, there was not much "enjoying new experiences", unless you regard running around carrying telephone poles as enjoyable.

Interestingly, and largely unnoticed, several of the election manifestos of SA's political parties have expanded national...