Quakers thanked
Early Day Motion 781
An MP at the forefront of the campaign to raise the military recruitment age has thanked Quakers for drawing his attention to the issue. Julian Huppert, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, last week tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) – a petition of MPs – calling for the age to be raised from sixteen to eighteen.
An MP at the forefront of the campaign to raise the military recruitment age has thanked Quakers for drawing his attention to the issue.
Julian Huppert, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, last week tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) – a petition of MPs – calling for the age to be raised from sixteen to eighteen.
He told the Friend that there is ‘something very wrong about expecting a sixteen-year-old to make a decision that they can’t get out of’. People aged under eighteen make up over a quarter of army recruits. After a six-month ‘cooling off’ period, they are committed to their decision until turning twenty-two.
Plaid Cymru have also pledged their party’s support for an increased recruitment age. Plaid’s Elfyn Llwyd told the Friend, ‘It seems to me to be a sorry state of affairs when young men and women who have no say in voting on our foreign policy should be expected to commit to fighting for it’.
Huppert insisted that ‘there’s nothing wrong with a career in the armed forces’. But he hinted at the possibility of calling for other armed forces reforms as well as the change to the minimum age. Saying he was concerned about bullying, he insisted that the forces should be ‘aware of the primacy of human rights in everything they do’.
Asked by the Friend if he believed that soldiers of any age should be able to leave the forces after a reasonable notice period, he said, ‘There is an interesting balance to be struck here’. He added that people should not be able to join for the training and then leave, but left open the possibility of supporting a reduced commitment period.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is still resisting the campaign. An MoD spokesperson told the Friend that the forces ‘take very seriously their commitment to the duty of care of all recruits’. He said that the current system ‘is necessary to ensure that the deployable manning levels of the army are maintained’.
