Is the RAF embracing ‘woke ideology’?

Our Armed Forces ought to be “the last place to succumb to the pernicious influence of identity politics”, said Ben Obese-Jecty in The Daily Telegraph. Yet the RAF now finds itself on “the frontline of the culture wars”.

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In “a PR disaster”, it emerged last week that the top brass had effectively frozen the enlistment of white men in order to meet diversity goals that require 40% of recruits to be women, and 20% to be from ethnic minorities, by 2030.

Threat to ‘operational efficiency’

An unnamed female group captain in charge of recruitment at RAF Cranwell resigned from her post, reportedly complaining that the targets were both impossible to meet and unlawful. But the RAF’s overall head of recruitment said she was “unashamed” of the policy: Air Vice-Marshal Maria Byford declared that greater diversity would lead to “a better service in the long run”.

“The RAF is meant to be an elite organisation where successful candidates are chosen on merit,” said Leo McKinstry in The Daily Express. Favouring candidates on the basis of gender or race is both “blatant discrimination” and a threat to “operational efficiency”. Sadly, “woke ideology” is all too prevalent in the armed forces, which often behave “more like a left-wing metropolitan council than a tough-minded guardian of our freedoms”.

It’s not surprising that the RAF is failing to meet the minority recruitment target of 20% – almost twice the figure in the general population, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. Let’s just hope that when the Russians arrive in their MiG jets they’ll bear in mind “the enormous lengths to which we are going to make the world a fairer place”, and head home without firing a shot.

Diversity is RAF’s ‘best tradition’

Actually, recruiting from all sectors of society is one of the RAF’s “best traditions”, said Trevor Phillips in The Times. Precious few of the fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain were “posh boys”, and many ground crew were from the Caribbean.

The US armed forces concluded decades ago that “race-conscious” recruitment clearly raised the standard of units, by increasing competition and bringing new perspectives that challenge conventional wisdom. Diversity doesn’t come about by accident; but the truth is that, in the end, it brings in “better people”.