Cast your mind back a short 13 years to David Cameron announcing his plans to re-introduce national service as part of his Big Society dreams.

Teenagers, he said at the launch, were as passionate and idealistic as the generations before them. In evidence of this, he cited Facebook campaigns and putting pressure on their parents to recycle.

Good golly, eh? More innocent times. Young people now are running to catch up on education lost during a pandemic, face an increasingly competitive job market, have no idea if they'll ever afford a home and know that recycling is the very least of their environmental concerns.

Good golly and good luck to them.

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What might a Conservative think tank led by the strong armed Penny Mordaunt have to suggest to salve these ills? National Service.

No, you haven't been whipped backwards in a spinning, kaleidoscopic time travel tunnel. National Service. This is not a drill.

When it was last mooted, by Mr Cameron when he was prime minister in 2010, Sir Michael Caine was wheeled out to promote national service as a positive option. Which perhaps says quite a lot about why middle aged spin doctors need to ensure they have a genuine youth voice to guide them.

Yes, Sir Michael - then 77 - might have seemed like the perfect face to promote National Service, given he did the 1950s original, but would anyone under the age of 20 know or care who he was? Not likely.

More, it was only indicative of how the olds struggle to understand the young.

And here we are again. There is a great deal to be said of an organised, fully funded scheme that would give 16-year-old high quality volunteering opportunities and meaningfully life-enhancing trips. But the Tories can't manage without fumbling the ball.

For a start, the term National Service is so toxic no self-respecting - er hem - politician could ever move beyond it.

This is not just a British issue: look overseas and national service fares little better. President Macron raised French eyebrows when he announced during his 2017 campaign that he would introduce national service to give young people "direct experience" of the military.

That, understandably, went down like a ballon de plomb and so the scheme was reimagined as compulsory civic service - it was guided by the military but there was no access to weapons.

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The idea behind it was social cohesion but it caused social dismay when images emerged of kids in uniforms, lined up in army-style rows singing the national anthem at morning flag ceremonies.

Which is exactly how my days used to start at school in Australia, now I think of it. Did it do me any harm? Let's not go there.

National Service in Sweden was found, thanks to a study of conscription, to exacerbate socio-economic divides in young men. Those from disadvantaged backgrounds were found to be far more likely to go on to commit crime after their period of service.

But what has been suggested now is more like the scheme David Cameron had hoped would change youthful fortunes. Every 16-year-old in the country would be offered a volunteer placement and a short residential opportunity.

Where it falls down is that it's missing a crucial element of the notion of volunteering - that it is voluntary. Young people would be required to opt out, rather than opt in.

The notion of this sort of national service has been largely mocked as a madcap scheme. But it has its positives. Schools struggle to raise funds for trips and the in-built inequality of the system means that children from poorer backgrounds miss out on what can be enriching, important experiences.

Imagine a fully funded trip, organised with the expertise of teachers who know what might enhance the life experiences of their teenagers. Volunteering opportunities that give skills, experience and is emphatically not designed to be free labour for the state or full time unpaid work would be a highly useful thing.

What would stymie it - and what has helped to stymie other, similar schemes - is money. Doing a decent job of providing these things for young people would be, as the young people themselves say, spendy.

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The issue is not the idea itself, but the way it has been framed: firstly, that "national service", with all its toxic undertones, was used in the first place shows a staggering disconnect between the political class and the young people it's supposed to be there to serve.

And secondly that this has been put forward with the suggestion is is a means of straightening out a lack of discipline and resolve in young people, rather than addressing the fact that this generation of teenagers is having it extremely tough.

That is, that national service is in some way for young people to give back to society when, in reality, society should be giving back to them.