In Britain, the obsessive drive to boost ‘diversity’ across all sectors of society has no shortage of casualties to its name. One of them is merit: talent being both rare and useful, it should be sought wherever it can be found. To make an a priori fetish of women and ethnic minorities will inevitably interfere with what should be a scrupulously evidence-based, talent-seeking process. The most recent casualty, however, is nothing less than Britain’s power to maintain itself in existence as a country.
This power has been pitifully weakened. What is more, it did not have to happen. The British army, tasked with the small matter of defending the realm, has shrunk by 40% since 2010. We now boast a mere 70,000 enlisted soldiers. There is even talk of conscription in the event of war.
While it might be excessive to ascribe this failure to diversity alone, our political class, especially the lamentable Conservative Party, must take a monumental portion of the blame. Far from merely allowing the rot to infect the military’s upper echelons, successive Tory governments have actively commanded our armed forces to adopt the tripartite motto of race communists the world over: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
It is more than just a platitude. Over the last decade, it has become a deliberate policy with very real consequences for those of us who love Britain as our only conceivable homeland. The politicians who rave most about ‘diversity’—which is to say more or less all of them, from London Mayor Sadiq Khan to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—show no interest at all in boosting the number of white Brits on the Tower Hamlets council or diversifying rap music to get more pasty lads from Northumbria involved. As I have argued before, the unavoidable conclusion is that, for the activists most attached to the rallying cry, ‘diversity’ is simply a euphemism for ‘less white.’ As such, Britain’s DEI laws, beefed up by the Conservative Party in 2017 and due to be expanded by Sir Keir Starmer if and when he becomes prime minister, in effect amount to the legalised ethnic cleansing of the founding and indigenous population of the country.
No wonder so few of us are keen to enlist in the military, for that institution—in large part on the orders of central government—has been as corrupted by anti-white racism as any other. It emerged last year that Andrew Harwin, a Royal Air Force (RAF) squadron leader, instructed staff back in 2021 to stop selecting “useless white male pilots” for training courses. This was not an isolated scandal. In 2022, it became undeniable that under the leadership of Sir Mike Wigston, who has since resigned, the RAF actively discriminated against white men—a self-defeating outrage for which the new head of the force, Sir Richard Knighton, has apologised. He has further conceded that the RAF’s own target, set independently of government, to make itself 40% female and 20% ethnic minority by 2030 is unrealistic. To his shame, Knighton has fallen short of declaring that such inherently anti-white quotas are also wrong in principle.
No doubt every Conservative MP would regard an IDF commander who favoured ‘diversity’ measures designed to make the Israeli army ‘less Jewish’ as something of an eccentric, possibly even a self-loathing antisemite. Why should it be any different when a country, as in the case of Britain, is an ancestral homeland to Anglo-Celtic whites as opposed to Israeli Jews? Yet quite apart from the RAF’s vain targets under Wigston, the Ministry of Defence itself—headed by a series of Conservative ministers since 2010—is cheerfully on board with the gradual ethnic cleansing of white Brits from the armed forces. The department has devoted an entire report to, as it were, remedying the problem of too many white men within the ranks.
The United States faces a similar crisis. Last year, the American army fell 10,000 short of its 65,000 enlistment target, largely owing to a drop in the number of white recruits from 44,000 in 2018 to 25,000 in 2023. Far from wondering whether it might be idiotic to stigmatise the nation’s core demographic, chiefly responsible for fighting its wars, left-wing progressives crowed with glee. A Vice article sniggered at how “Far-right congressman Paul Gossar is losing sleep over how few white people are enlisting in the army these days.” Rather than comment, I will let two rather disparate images do the talking. The first shows only a fraction of the American soldiers who fought off Hitler’s last ditch counter-attack to seize the port of Antwerp, vital for resupplying Allied troops on the Western front, in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945). The second is a picture of the Vice staffroom.
Perhaps Donald Trump, if he wins in November, will have the courage to rectify this fatal deficit by banishing DEI from the U.S. military altogether and restoring a culture of merit and national rootedness. As for Britain, in Grant Shapps we have a supposedly Conservative defence minister who reassures us that not native male Brits but women are the obvious solution to our recruitment crisis.
Of course, the meritocratic case against all of this is formidable in its own right. If diversity is ranked first among the military’s values, then quality must at best be a close second. In a majority white nation where the average male is more likely than the average female to entertain a career in the armed forces, adopting a righteous bias in favour of women and ethnic minorities necessarily drains the talent pool. For a private company to do this is absurd enough, but for a national military to play these games is outright suicidal. For in wartime, countries depend not on ideological quotas but on fighting talent to keep them secure.
But while merit matters, there is also the larger, more controversial question of identity. A first-rate military will be based on more than martial prowess. Success in battle is not only a function of how well a man can fight, but what he is willing to die for. The most fearsome soldier in the world is not only worthless but positively harmful if his loyalties commit him to fighting for the enemy. As well as a powerhouse of soldierly talent, the British army should be a place for young men to live out their patriotism and sense of duty to their own people. In a nation like Britain, that will mean unapologetically focussing recruitment efforts on the white majority, for the young men in this cohort will generally feel an instinctive ancestral allegiance to the patriam and its destiny. This is a surer way to fill our depleted ranks than fishing obsessively for ethnic minorities who may be laudable as individuals, but whose roots here will be shallow and their ties to Britain comparatively weak.
As the social chaos in European cities over a conflict thousands of miles away has made all too plain, human nature is such that immigrant communities are disposed to identify more fervently with their tribal background—whether ethnic or religious or both—than with the culture of the countries in which they have chosen to live. Do we seriously expect the Ethiopians and Eritreans who engaged in a London street-fight over the fate of East Africa only last month to be swayed by a politically correct army recruitment ad into risking death for Britain? Even if we overlook the violent cases, an immigrant need not hate this country, or even feel neutral about its future, to pass on the idea of a military career. I do not hate Israel. Nor am I indifferent to its flourishing. But I will never be as enthusiastic about enlisting in the IDF as a young Jewish patriot born and raised in Jerusalem.
The 2022 scenes out of Leicester further demonstrate that many among the ethnic and religious diasporas in this country would sooner wage war over a cricket match on the Indian subcontinent than resist an invasion here at home. It is an indictment of decades’ worth of treacherous policy-making under both Labour and Conservative governments that any tribalistic foreigners, let alone so many, have been allowed to live here as paper citizens. No doubt Jacob Rees-Mogg, with his pious legalistic view of UK citizenship, considers them ‘just as British’ as his monocled, Savile Row suit-wearing younger self.
There are those who will object bitterly and accuse me of playing identity politics. If that even comes close to the truth, it is the fault of left-wing progressives who, with the help of spineless Tories and venal business elites addicted to cheap labour, chose to balkanise Britain through a mass demographic experiment without either a vote being cast or a shot fired by the British people themselves. Whereas in homogeneous countries, identity precedes politics, in diverse ones like the Congo and now Britain, politics becomes about identity. Thanks to a catastrophic, borderline treasonous policy of replacement migration, native Brits have gone from being the core of a nation whose majority status is taken for granted to just one community interest group among many—and an exceedingly unpopular, officially vilified one at that. Just this week, a right-wing activist named Sam Melia was found guilty in Leeds Crown Court of inciting racial hatred. His crime? Advocating on behalf of these reviled white Brits with ‘racist’ stickers bearing slogans like ‘We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066’ and ‘Stop mass immigration.’
Our national security will be further imperilled unless sweeping changes are made to reverse this self-inflicted crisis. Until that happens, how convincingly can we feign surprise at the fact that young white men, relentlessly demonised as parasites and condemned to live as second-class citizens in the nation their ancestors built for them, increasingly feel like the world-weary Treebeard in Lord of the Rings? “I am not altogether on anybody’s side,” sighs Tolkien’s Ent, “because nobody is altogether on my side.”
No Army for White Men: Britain’s Self-Inflicted Recruiting Crisis
British Soldiers enter Lille, France, after defeating German occupation forces.
Everett Collection / Shutterstock
In Britain, the obsessive drive to boost ‘diversity’ across all sectors of society has no shortage of casualties to its name. One of them is merit: talent being both rare and useful, it should be sought wherever it can be found. To make an a priori fetish of women and ethnic minorities will inevitably interfere with what should be a scrupulously evidence-based, talent-seeking process. The most recent casualty, however, is nothing less than Britain’s power to maintain itself in existence as a country.
This power has been pitifully weakened. What is more, it did not have to happen. The British army, tasked with the small matter of defending the realm, has shrunk by 40% since 2010. We now boast a mere 70,000 enlisted soldiers. There is even talk of conscription in the event of war.
While it might be excessive to ascribe this failure to diversity alone, our political class, especially the lamentable Conservative Party, must take a monumental portion of the blame. Far from merely allowing the rot to infect the military’s upper echelons, successive Tory governments have actively commanded our armed forces to adopt the tripartite motto of race communists the world over: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
It is more than just a platitude. Over the last decade, it has become a deliberate policy with very real consequences for those of us who love Britain as our only conceivable homeland. The politicians who rave most about ‘diversity’—which is to say more or less all of them, from London Mayor Sadiq Khan to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—show no interest at all in boosting the number of white Brits on the Tower Hamlets council or diversifying rap music to get more pasty lads from Northumbria involved. As I have argued before, the unavoidable conclusion is that, for the activists most attached to the rallying cry, ‘diversity’ is simply a euphemism for ‘less white.’ As such, Britain’s DEI laws, beefed up by the Conservative Party in 2017 and due to be expanded by Sir Keir Starmer if and when he becomes prime minister, in effect amount to the legalised ethnic cleansing of the founding and indigenous population of the country.
No wonder so few of us are keen to enlist in the military, for that institution—in large part on the orders of central government—has been as corrupted by anti-white racism as any other. It emerged last year that Andrew Harwin, a Royal Air Force (RAF) squadron leader, instructed staff back in 2021 to stop selecting “useless white male pilots” for training courses. This was not an isolated scandal. In 2022, it became undeniable that under the leadership of Sir Mike Wigston, who has since resigned, the RAF actively discriminated against white men—a self-defeating outrage for which the new head of the force, Sir Richard Knighton, has apologised. He has further conceded that the RAF’s own target, set independently of government, to make itself 40% female and 20% ethnic minority by 2030 is unrealistic. To his shame, Knighton has fallen short of declaring that such inherently anti-white quotas are also wrong in principle.
No doubt every Conservative MP would regard an IDF commander who favoured ‘diversity’ measures designed to make the Israeli army ‘less Jewish’ as something of an eccentric, possibly even a self-loathing antisemite. Why should it be any different when a country, as in the case of Britain, is an ancestral homeland to Anglo-Celtic whites as opposed to Israeli Jews? Yet quite apart from the RAF’s vain targets under Wigston, the Ministry of Defence itself—headed by a series of Conservative ministers since 2010—is cheerfully on board with the gradual ethnic cleansing of white Brits from the armed forces. The department has devoted an entire report to, as it were, remedying the problem of too many white men within the ranks.
The United States faces a similar crisis. Last year, the American army fell 10,000 short of its 65,000 enlistment target, largely owing to a drop in the number of white recruits from 44,000 in 2018 to 25,000 in 2023. Far from wondering whether it might be idiotic to stigmatise the nation’s core demographic, chiefly responsible for fighting its wars, left-wing progressives crowed with glee. A Vice article sniggered at how “Far-right congressman Paul Gossar is losing sleep over how few white people are enlisting in the army these days.” Rather than comment, I will let two rather disparate images do the talking. The first shows only a fraction of the American soldiers who fought off Hitler’s last ditch counter-attack to seize the port of Antwerp, vital for resupplying Allied troops on the Western front, in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945). The second is a picture of the Vice staffroom.
Perhaps Donald Trump, if he wins in November, will have the courage to rectify this fatal deficit by banishing DEI from the U.S. military altogether and restoring a culture of merit and national rootedness. As for Britain, in Grant Shapps we have a supposedly Conservative defence minister who reassures us that not native male Brits but women are the obvious solution to our recruitment crisis.
Of course, the meritocratic case against all of this is formidable in its own right. If diversity is ranked first among the military’s values, then quality must at best be a close second. In a majority white nation where the average male is more likely than the average female to entertain a career in the armed forces, adopting a righteous bias in favour of women and ethnic minorities necessarily drains the talent pool. For a private company to do this is absurd enough, but for a national military to play these games is outright suicidal. For in wartime, countries depend not on ideological quotas but on fighting talent to keep them secure.
But while merit matters, there is also the larger, more controversial question of identity. A first-rate military will be based on more than martial prowess. Success in battle is not only a function of how well a man can fight, but what he is willing to die for. The most fearsome soldier in the world is not only worthless but positively harmful if his loyalties commit him to fighting for the enemy. As well as a powerhouse of soldierly talent, the British army should be a place for young men to live out their patriotism and sense of duty to their own people. In a nation like Britain, that will mean unapologetically focussing recruitment efforts on the white majority, for the young men in this cohort will generally feel an instinctive ancestral allegiance to the patriam and its destiny. This is a surer way to fill our depleted ranks than fishing obsessively for ethnic minorities who may be laudable as individuals, but whose roots here will be shallow and their ties to Britain comparatively weak.
As the social chaos in European cities over a conflict thousands of miles away has made all too plain, human nature is such that immigrant communities are disposed to identify more fervently with their tribal background—whether ethnic or religious or both—than with the culture of the countries in which they have chosen to live. Do we seriously expect the Ethiopians and Eritreans who engaged in a London street-fight over the fate of East Africa only last month to be swayed by a politically correct army recruitment ad into risking death for Britain? Even if we overlook the violent cases, an immigrant need not hate this country, or even feel neutral about its future, to pass on the idea of a military career. I do not hate Israel. Nor am I indifferent to its flourishing. But I will never be as enthusiastic about enlisting in the IDF as a young Jewish patriot born and raised in Jerusalem.
The 2022 scenes out of Leicester further demonstrate that many among the ethnic and religious diasporas in this country would sooner wage war over a cricket match on the Indian subcontinent than resist an invasion here at home. It is an indictment of decades’ worth of treacherous policy-making under both Labour and Conservative governments that any tribalistic foreigners, let alone so many, have been allowed to live here as paper citizens. No doubt Jacob Rees-Mogg, with his pious legalistic view of UK citizenship, considers them ‘just as British’ as his monocled, Savile Row suit-wearing younger self.
There are those who will object bitterly and accuse me of playing identity politics. If that even comes close to the truth, it is the fault of left-wing progressives who, with the help of spineless Tories and venal business elites addicted to cheap labour, chose to balkanise Britain through a mass demographic experiment without either a vote being cast or a shot fired by the British people themselves. Whereas in homogeneous countries, identity precedes politics, in diverse ones like the Congo and now Britain, politics becomes about identity. Thanks to a catastrophic, borderline treasonous policy of replacement migration, native Brits have gone from being the core of a nation whose majority status is taken for granted to just one community interest group among many—and an exceedingly unpopular, officially vilified one at that. Just this week, a right-wing activist named Sam Melia was found guilty in Leeds Crown Court of inciting racial hatred. His crime? Advocating on behalf of these reviled white Brits with ‘racist’ stickers bearing slogans like ‘We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066’ and ‘Stop mass immigration.’
Our national security will be further imperilled unless sweeping changes are made to reverse this self-inflicted crisis. Until that happens, how convincingly can we feign surprise at the fact that young white men, relentlessly demonised as parasites and condemned to live as second-class citizens in the nation their ancestors built for them, increasingly feel like the world-weary Treebeard in Lord of the Rings? “I am not altogether on anybody’s side,” sighs Tolkien’s Ent, “because nobody is altogether on my side.”
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