Get a grip, Grant Shapps – a war on woke is no way to run a modern military

If the defence secretary wants young people to join the army, navy or air force – and recruitment targets have been missed every year since the Tories came to power – they need to know they’ll be respected regardless of their ethnicity, gender or sexuality, says Mike Crofts

The defence secretary has claimed that military resources are being ‘squandered to promote a political agenda’ to increase diversity among officers (Reuters)

Defence secretary Grant Shapps’s attack on “woke” policies in the military is just another cynical political stunt to mask much graver problems with recruitment and retention.

“Woke” is not a term that I like. By using it, we serve to undermine areas where our society has made huge progress and we should feel rightly proud. Sometimes, its use is intentionally provocative, in areas where rational and nuanced discussion is demanded.

I was initially surprised to read Shapps’s comments. I wondered if he had just returned from 14 years in an alternate reality where he had not been in government.