Gallantry and duty are qualities which epitomise armed service. Brave men and women put their lives on the line for their country and its people. To serve one’s nation requires immense personal virtues, as well as peak physical and mental fitness.
However, Parliamentary questions I asked recently have brought to light truly troubling answers from the Ministry of Defence. They have revealed that, rather than seeking to recruit the brightest and the best, our Armed Forces are instead wasting hundreds of thousands of pounds on ‘diversity’. Veterans, who I meet regularly, tell me it’s not where you come from that matters, but how good you are at your job – M.O.D civil servants, clearly, don’t agree.
Presently, Britain’s Armed Forces has a combined full-time trained strength of 134,530 in the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Royal Air Force and British Army combined. This number is some thirty thousand less than the number of British soldiers who fought in a single battle – Ypres at the start of the First World War.
Yet, rather than trying to recruit more of our finest young talents of all backgrounds to our military, a vast sum of taxpayer’s money is being wasted on vanity projects and virtue signalling. Startlingly, there are already more than 40 staff working full-time on improving ‘equality’ in the Armed Forces – shockingly this number is set to rise!
What might seem just costly nonsense is actually far more sinister. In 2022, the then head of RAF recruitment, Group Captain Elizabeth Nicholl, resigned in protest after refusing to follow an order which would have discriminated against white men. Under this now-condemned policy, there were 160 cases of ‘positive discrimination’ against what leaked emails described as “useless white men”. At the time of Group Captain Nicholls’ principled resignation, RAF bosses were desperate to reach targets of 40 per cent of recruits being female, 20 per cent coming from ethnic minorities and 5 per cent being Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transsexual (LGBT) by 2030. Fittingly, these men, who were keen to serve their country, but were – illegally – discriminated against are receiving pay-outs from the RAF. Now we learn that new Army recruits are forced to repeat ‘woke’ politically correct mantras. No wonder they can’t get people to join up!
The relentless quest for increased ‘diversity’ at any price has infected nearly every institution – from the British Library, where the wealthy Chief Librarian ignorantly declared that white people were the creators of racism!, to the National Trust, which, with the stupidity for which it is now known, claimed that the countryside was a ‘racist and colonial space’. Even London’s train lines are targets, with the appalling Labour Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, re-naming lines as part of a “re-imagining” of the capital’s history.
Such “re-imagining” of history has been the dark work of extremists throughout time. Now, militants are inventing a fictitious narrative that crafts a ludicrous false-history of our country. This ever-changing divisive narrative, which has infected our institutions, is conjured by guilt-ridden liberals who loathe our country and its heritage. For centuries, Britain – and especially its Armed Forces – has united people of vastly different origins in a common cause. From the glorious Indian army to the famous Nepalese Gurkha Rifles; from West Indian servicemen to the brave Polish pilots who served with distinction in the Second World War RAF, people of all creeds and colours have stood with and for Britain. None of them needed diversity training to know how to do their duty because they knew that what counts is what makes us the same, not how we differ.
With regional conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East threatening global security, we need well-equipped and well-trained services. Rather than focusing on ticking ‘diversity’ boxes in shrinking armed forces – the smallest they have been in peacetime for centuries – Ministry of Defence civil servants and High Command should concentrate on building an army, air force and navy fit for purpose, not forcing soldiers, sailors and airmen to fit their warped left-wing view of what matters.
