In all the media coverage and various forums, including here, I’ve seen little or nothing on one important aspect: a large proportion of ethnic minorities have a cultural aversion to joining the military and police, seeing them either as low status or part of a repressive government apparatus, and many women see the military as unsuitable for women. The current situation can be seen as a desperate measure to cover the failure of the military to sell themselves to these groups and overcome cultural prejudices, something they dare not discuss in public for fear of being labelled ‘racist’.
As an aside, I’m a member of a car club where the new chairman is likely to be a serving RAF officer, the only other candidate having been bullied into stepping down. Whilst the club is overwhelmingly white men, we do have a number of active women, ethnic minority, LGBTQ and transgender members. In over 10 years I’ve neither seen nor heard of anything negative towards them. However, after a stupid spat when an older member unwisely used a term no longer acceptable in polite company (think Robertsons jam) to describe a well-known mixed-race F1 driver, our chairman-to-be has pledged to rid the club of dinosaurs (which I presume I am) and make the club more ‘inclusive’. I look forward to seeing if his recruitment methods will be any more successful than the RAF’s.