Early Day Motion tabled to increase armed forces recruitment age
Should 16 year olds who can't vote or sign a contract be recruited with no right to resign after 6 months?
Ministers are under pressure from backbench MPs to end the recruitment of sixteen-year-olds into the armed forces. Politicians from several parties are signing a motion on the issue following a campaign pioneered by Quakers and Unitarians.
No other country in mainland Europe routinely recruits people aged under eighteen into its armed forces. Recruits aged sixteen or seventeen may be held to their commitment until their twenty-second birthday. After a six-month ‘cooling off’ period, there is no automatic right to leave.
The issue took on new significance on Monday, 11 October, when Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert, Green MP Caroline Lucas, SDLP MP Mark Durkan and Labour MP Peter Soulsby tabled an Early Day Motion, EDM 781, calling for the minimum recruitment age to be raised to eighteen. An EDM is effectively a parliamentary petition, allowing MPs to express their support for a point of view.
‘We should not be recruiting people so young into the armed forces,’ insisted Caroline Lucas, ‘It’s entirely inappropriate that a young person should be bound by a commitment made while they were a minor’.
Michael Bartlet, parliamentary liaison secretary of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) of Friends, welcomed the MPs’ support for a measure that BYM has long promoted.
‘Decisions made as a child have their consequences in a requirement to serve in the frontline as an adult,’ he said, ‘A decision made without informed consent can at its worst amount to conscription by the back door’.
He encouraged Friends to lobby their MPs to sign EDM 781 and raise the issue in Parliament.
But the government and armed forces have a strong motive for resisting the proposed change. People under eighteen account for over a quarter of those enlisting in the army.
The last government resisted pressure on the issue from Parliament’s own Joint Committee on Human Rights, who suggested that recruitment of minors breached international understandings of children’s rights. Now the armed forces minister Nick Harvey, a Liberal Democrat, could face lobbying on the issue from members of his own party.
While members of the armed forces technically have a right to leave at any age if they develop a conscientious objection to war, the Quaker researcher David Gee found, in 2007, that many are unaware of this right.
Concern about youth recruitment has been increased in recent years by army research that suggests that fifty per cent of recruits have literacy or numeracy levels at or below those of an eleven-year-old.
The campaign for a change in the recruitment age is backed by the Friend. Ian Kirk-Smith, editor, said: ‘I worked, making films, with fourteen-year-olds on loyalist housing estates in Northern Ireland. They weren’t entered for the eleven-plus exams. It was pointless. They signed up to the army at sixteen. They just wanted to escape. Their hopes for an education and a decent job had been betrayed.’
He added: ‘The Friend must speak truth to power. It is not enough just to report issues of concern. We must campaign. It is a difficult and complex issue, challenging in some ways for us, but at the heart of it is the moral responsibility we have as Quakers to take a position. The Friend has taken a position. Watch this space.’
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