Emmanuel Macron told a communist newspaper earlier this year that he didn’t consider Marine le Pen’s National Rally part of the ‘Republican arc’. By extension, the French president presumably thinks the same of the 13,288,686 million men and women who voted for Le Pen in the second round of the 2022 presidential election. In the event of a war with Russia, or another hostile state, would the president therefore consider Le Pen voters unworthy of serving in the Republic’s military?

The average Le Pen supporter has much in common with Britain’s Red Wall voter; they tend not to have gone to university, to have been hit hard by deindustrialisation and to be opposed to political correctness and uncontrolled immigration. They are ‘Somewheres’, men and women who have strong roots in their community and are socially conservative.

Why should they serve a country that for decades has neglected them and scolded their ‘toxic masculinity’?

These people are generally looked down upon by their ruling elites. Macron once referred to them as ‘Gauls resistant to change’, whereas in Britain they are derided as ‘chavs’ and ‘gammons’.

In 2009, a report concluded that the British white working class faced discrimination. In response the then communities secretary, Hazel Blears, conceded that this demographic ‘sometimes just don’t feel anyone is listening or speaking up for them’.

This was a sorry admission from a Labour minister whose party had been in power for 12 years. Labour was replaced in 2010 by the Tories who have continued to ignore the plight of the white-working class, despite their promise to ‘level up’ the country.

In 2021, a parliamentary report was published entitled: ‘The forgotten: how white working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it’. The report admitted that these pupils ‘have been badly let down by decades of neglect and muddled policy thinking’.

This neglect is no accident. A feature of the 21st century political class is their disregard for the indigenous working-class. A French Socialist Party think-tank declared in 2011 that ‘the France of tomorrow is above all united by cultural and progressive values…it is opposed to an electorate that defends the present and the past against change.’

In Britain, these progressive values have been enthusiastically embraced by the police and the military, sometimes to the detriment of the white-working class. In 2020, it was announced that henceforth 40 per cent of the Metropolitan Police’s new recruits must have an ethnic minority background. The RAF and the army have also adopted similar diversity drives in recent years, with the Ministry of Defence committed to ‘achieving a more diverse workforce’.

This was before ‘conscription’ became the mot du jour among politicians and military chiefs. General Sir Richard Sherriff, the former deputy supreme allied commander of Nato, believes it is time Britain considered the ‘unthinkable’ and looked ‘carefully at conscription’. Similar sentiments have been expressed by General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British army, who has spoken of raising a ‘citizen’s army’.

Last week, the Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood spoke favourably of conscription, saying: ‘I like the idea of people doing some form of service’ though he added ‘it’s not for everybody’.

Ellwood might like the idea but would Britain’s young? More to the point would white working class men – in all previous conflicts the backbone of the British military – submit to conscription?

Why should they serve a country that for decades has neglected them and scolded their ‘toxic masculinity’? Being upstanding citizens, most probably would ‘do their bit’, particularly if Britain was directly threatened. But only if the diversity so often talked about by the political and military class was scrupulously applied to conscription. In other words, fifty per cent of conscripts must be female. There should also be equal representation among ethnic minorities, the LGBTQIA+ community and legal migrants.

In America, there are some commentators who believe that the country has never really healed after the Vietnam War, and that one of the deepest wounds was the way the privileged and the wealthy used their connections to dodge the draft. There were honourable exceptions, but most of the conscripts sent to the war were working-class kids. Going to university was a way of deferring the draft.

If conscription is reintroduced it must adhere to the rules of Identity Politics that have dominated British society this century. That includes the student population, the drivers of woke dogma, many of whom are middle or upper-middle class. No exemptions, no matter how rich or powerful their parents.

In the meantime, it might be an idea if Britain’s politicians started – in the words of Hazel Blears – to listen and speak up for the white working class.

I have interviewed scores of veterans of the Second World War, mostly working-class men who, in their late teens were called up and sent off to war, like their fathers before them. They willingly went because they believed that Britain was worth fighting for; they were proud of its history and its traditions, and they knew that the ruling class, no matter how different their lives were materially, shared this pride.

The American military has, in recent years, experienced a significant decrease in the number of white working class joining up, a phenomenon that the British armed forces are now experiencing. They and their political masters have only themselves to blame. Why would any young American or Briton want to die for a country whose elite are ashamed of its history, its traditions and its working-class?

Gavin Mortimer is the author of Bill Stirling and 2SAS: the forgotten special forces unit of World War II