The British army's support of Black Lives Matter reflects the increasingly liberal views of senior staff in the armed forces
asked to be a suicide bomber” in training exercises, reveals a British soldier of North African descent. The role has its perks: spending an afternoon far away from barked orders, waiting to ambush a passing patrol. But with his fellow troops eagerly wrapping a rag around his head, he found it hard to ignore the profiling. “I wouldn’t term it abuse, I would term it racial ignorance on a staggering scale.
The army’s job is to fight the queen’s enemies, and the fact that they have often been of a different colour to her is embedded in its culture. A non-white reservist says friends ask him why he “wants to fight a white man’s war”. Once a year his regiment sits down to watch “Zulu”, a film about a bloody battle between British soldiers and African tribesmen. He says that the atmosphere isn’t racist, but “you can see how there might be some negative connotations amongst the junior ranks.
Nicola Williams, the Service Complaints Ombudsman, said in December 2019 that “incidents of racism are occurring with increasing and depressing frequency.” The army is trying to change this, and says of instances of racismput to it, such as the one above, “There is no place for racism in the military and anyone behaving in this way can expect to be disciplined or dismissed.
Private soldiers still tend to come from low-income families in white working-class towns where social attitudes are more conservative. Asoldier describes fellow squaddies as having a “hillbillies in the Deep South who voted for Donald Trump mentality”. A lance corporal was jailed in 2018 for joining National Action, a fascist group. Later that year a group of soldiers caused outrage after posing for photographs with Tommy Robinson, a far-right activist.
Not all officers have moved in line with senior staff. Some allowed troops to attend counter-protests. But under new regulations officers who aren’t seen to encourage diversity will not be promoted. Anthony King, chair of war studies at Warwick university, thinks that in their drive to support diversity officers might sometimes be seen to promote women and ethnic minorities who had failed to meet the army’s own rigorous standards.
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