The New Statesman.

Hello, I'm Hannah Barnes, associate editor at the New Statesman and you're listening to the New Statesman

podcast.

For the next six weeks, we're bringing you new episodes every

weekday with updates on the party campaigns, reaction from around the UK and the

best polling analysis with our experts. I'm joined today by Andrew Mar, the new

statesman's political editor and Freddie Haywood, our political correspondent.

Okay, since we were last in this studio Freddie, a lot has has happened it's been a very big campaigning

bank holiday weekend I want to start by looking at the Conservatives headline

announcement from Saturday afternoon national service for 18 year olds. What is this Andrew? What's this plan?

This is more a headline than it is an actual announcement. The idea of some

kind of national service for younger people is not a stupid idea.

We are an atomised society in many ways, got huge levels of inequality.

Mass migration has meant that communities are not mingling together as perhaps they once did.

And so the idea of obliging younger people to rub alongside people from a different background,

put something back into the community, is not a mad idea.

It's the kind of thing they do in Sweden, in Norway, in Denmark, they're looking at it in France,

they're looking at it in the United States.

What I think has gone badly wrong with this idea, however, is that it looks like a

panicky election fix, and Rishi Sunak has branded it, not as that kind of general national

service, but as national service with a capital

n capital s in other words the national service that older voters look back to and

...