The RAF’s woke discrimination
by Tom Slater, spiked:
Even the armed forces have fallen to divisive identitarian dogma.
Of all the institutions to fall to wokeness, the UK’s Royal Air Force might seem an unlikely candidate. You might have thought that the divisive campaign across elite institutions to introduce racially aware policies, to provide leg-ups to supposedly ‘vulnerable’ women and minorities, all allegedly in the name of righting past wrongs, would have run aground with the armed forces. Only the most committed bigot could care about the skin pigmentation, or (ahem) undercarriage equipment, of the person charged with protecting their homeland, so long as he or she is committed and competent. Surely, the RAF has more pressing concerns than the precise ethnic and sexual makeup of its recruits?
You’d be wrong. Because over the past year the RAF has found itself embroiled in a scandal about woke recruiting policies that is almost hard to believe. Last summer, it was accused of pausing job offers to white male candidates in order to meet ‘impossible’ diversity targets. Group Captain Elizabeth Nicholl, then head of RAF recruitment, resigned in protest, refusing to implement what she called an ‘unlawful order’ to discriminate against white men, as part of an effort to boost the numbers of female and ethnic-minority recruits. The RAF has issued a series of obfuscating statements, but the evidence has kept on mounting. Tobias Ellwood MP, chairman of the defence select committee, says Nicholls identified 160 cases of white male recruits who were discriminated against before she resigned. Now Sky News reports that 31 white men, adversely affected by the targets, are to receive £5,000 each in compensation. Uncovered emails also reveal RAF bigwigs disparagingly talking about selection boards overly composed of ‘useless white male pilots’.
This discrimination drive (sorry, diversity drive) started in late 2020, the year of Black Lives Matter, when basically every Western institution was overrun by racial hysteria. From then until early 2021, RAF top brass reportedly piled huge pressure on recruiters to ‘lift the ratio of recruits to 20 per cent ethnic minorities and 40 per cent females by 2030’. When all this began to be uncovered, following backlash and incredulity among lower ranks, the RAF issued a series of non-denial denials. RAF chief Mike Wigston told MPs earlier this year that no discrimination had taken place and insisted ‘there was no compromise of entry standards’. But this now seems to have been contradicted by the latest Sky News report. A Sky source also alleges that efforts were made to offer women and ethnic minorities places prior to taking a fitness test, allowing them a clear advantage over their white male counterparts.
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