The economic situation is certainly grim.
Just over 850,000 people aged between 16 and 24 are not in education, employment or training – meaning they have effectively opted out of the productive economy.
This is despite the availability of more than 900,000 job vacancies, including hundreds of thousands in industries including hospitality and retail which are traditionally keen to hire youngsters.
But there are also serious problems with the idea.
Firstly, as those job vacancies show, Britain has a severe shortage of skilled and motivated workers.
Around 800,000 people turn 18 every year. Taking hundreds of thousands of them out of the jobs market, out of training, and into military camps would give companies fewer people to hire, not more.
Worse still, those likely to be deemed able to undertake a form of national service are already healthy and motivated – not people signed off as long-term sick, who are least likely to be willing or able to enter the physically demanding world of the armed forces.
The risk is that conscription makes the jobs crisis worse while failing to help those the scheme’s advocates might deem most in need of the extra motivation and discipline.
On top of that, conscription is rarely popular, at least among those subject to it. After all, if people wanted to join the armed forces, they could just sign up.
Or they should be able to. Of the million people who tried to join the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force over the past decade, three in every four gave up as the process dragged on for too long.
That suggests the forces may have something of a capacity problem, which would not get better should the Government seek to compel them to take on hundreds of thousands of reluctant new recruits each year.
The quality of unwilling new conscripts may also be lacking: even among those who stayed the course and persisted with their applications, only 132,000 were ultimately signed up, with nearly 170,000 rejected.
