The plot to turn the British military into a visa mill

The Commonwealth recruitment Trojan horse

This February, I saw something that chilled me to the bone. It was an article in The Telegraph that seemed to criticise the current 1350-person cap on Commonwealth personnel serving in the British military.

Written by an ex-paratrooper Captain, it sandwiched discussion of the Army’s present ‘recruiting crisis’ in between sections questioning the utility of rejecting Commonwealth volunteers because of a ‘lack of vacancies’, and quoted another gruff, medal-jangling ex-officer as saying ‘it’s complete nonsense to reject applications from Commonwealth recruits when the Army is so short of numbers’. According to Colonel Ingram, the British military has made a huge mistake arbitrarily turning away no less than 24,000 eager recruits at a time when the Army is suffering from enormous manpower shortages. Specifically, our Army, currently short by 7500 men, turned away 7704 Commonwealth recruits due to a ‘lack of vacancies’ just last year.

Reading this, I, like the Roman, saw the Tiber foaming with much blood. The argument presented here was so simple, so irrefutable, so compelling. The Army is in the middle of a ‘recruiting crisis’: young people would rather claim to have ‘anxiety’ and sign onto the dole than sign up to protect us from Putin, so why not let immigrants, already doing all the other jobs Brits won’t do, fill the vacancies instead? What possible objection could be raised? What, you don’t think Indian recruits can fight every bit as hard as English ones? Haven’t you heard of the legendary King’s Own Sikh Rajput Rifles?

Readers might be surprised to learn that the Commonwealth recruiting cap is no more than fifteen years old. It was introduced in 2009 by John Hutton, Gordon Brown’s Defence Secretary, in the ‘interests of operational effectiveness’ amid concern at the highest levels of the Army over rising numbers of Commonwealth applicants. This debate was conducted on considerably more ‘red meat’ terms than it would be today. Concerns were expressed that the Army’s ‘Britishness’ was being ‘diluted’; that foreign soldiers might have ‘dual loyalties’; that they are effectively ‘mercenaries’; and that they couldn’t necessarily be relied upon in controversial operations, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2012, Tory Defence Minister Philip Hammond doubled down on these restrictions, threatening to disband battalions that failed to recruit primarily from Britain, and a year later, a five-year residency requirement was imposed on prospective foreign recruits.

The real reason for the introduction of a cap in the name of ‘operational effectiveness’ couldn’t be said out loud, however. There is only one event that could have caused it: the deployment of the Gurkhas to Afghanistan in 2006. Their largest deployment since the Brunei Revolt in the ’60s, the Gurkhas hadn’t been tested in combat as a unit for over forty years. The result? Many Royal Marines will tell you, having heard from their recent forebears who deployed alongside them: poor battle performance and friendly fire, caused by confusion over orders. Of course, this didn’t prevent the success of the inevitable ‘Gurkha Justice Campaign’ that followed their deployment, lobbying for immediate and limitless immigration rights for all Gurkha veterans. And in this story, we have a microcosm of what is to come. Foreign troops serve (often poorly), then immediately lobby for immigration rights, citing the infinite bargaining power of military service that people still pretend to believe in.

Recruitment to the military faltered after the winding down of combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the military establishment has quietly recognised the challenges — to put it mildly — of divining a popular foreign policy in a deeply divided, multicultural nation. The result has been a slow, desperate return to foreign recruiting. In 2018, the Ministry of Defence’s decision to drop the five-year residency requirement for Commonwealth recruits was hailed in an article in The Telegraph with a headline so on-the-nose that it wouldn’t be run today: ‘Foreign soldiers will swell our ranks, and provide much-needed diversity’.

This article’s author, General Francis Richard Dannatt, Baron Dannatt, GCB, CBE, MC, DL, is a caricature of exactly the sort of basset-hound-looking red-faced gruff, tough Napoleonic General who will seal-clap as the metaphorical gate is opened to the Trojan horse of mass Commonwealth recruitment. His article predictably opens with an appeal to the British Indian Army, a favourite reference for former officers trying to ‘redwash’ Wokeness. The assumption is that a tough military persona is beyond question by those who ‘have not served’, and that a military officer going Woke is proof that the most Woke of political positions are so rational, so self-evident, that even chauvinistic Army officers eventually must adjust to the times. Their favourite device is usually pretending that things like ‘systemic racism’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ inhibit combat effectiveness, in a similar way to how American medical officials in 2020 pretended that racism was a ‘pandemic’. A full taxonomy of British Army Wokeness deserves an article of its own — but back to the matter at hand.

Following the removal of the five-year residency requirement, Commonwealth recruitment surged to a new high of 9% of the yearly intake. It then dipped because of COVID, before rising again. This was predictably followed in 2021 by a smoothing of the path to citizenship for Commonwealth soldiers. Tough-as-boots Afghanistan veteran Ben Wallace said of our wholesome Fijians that ‘…we owe those who showed us loyal service, our loyalty in return… it is right that we [not only smooth] the pathway to residency and citizenship, [but also lift] the financial cost of doing so’. Evil racist Priti Patel went similarly gooey when discussing the topic: ‘I am determined to support them to settle in our wonderful communities right across the UK’.

Now, dear reader, what would the result be if we had taken on the 24,000 Commonwealth recruits, as Colonel Ingram suggested we should have done? Well, basic infantry training has an attrition rate of around thirty percent, which would leave us with around 16,800 foreign soldiers joining over five years. Considering that the minimum length of service is four years, and presuming recruitment across this time is evenly-spaced, this would mean over 14,000 foreign troops from this cohort still in the Army at the end of this time period, with thousands more in training, in an army of just under 90,000 after being gratefully swollen by this deluge — meaning almost three times more foreigners than currently serve in the British military. Accepting 7700 foreign volunteers a year (the number of foreign recruits turned away last year) would single-handedly solve the Army’s attrition problem, and it would probably grow in peacetime for the first time in living memory.

The Army’s ‘diversity problem’ would also be solved without needing to relax security checks as part of a ‘Race Action Plan’. General Dannatt, ‘ThinPinstripedLine’, and others on X.com would sing in praise of a British military that now finally looks like the country they purport to represent. Articles will be penned in Wavell Room calling for the establishment of barmy and brilliantly British regiments for the new Commonwealth recruits: King Charles’ Own Punjab Rifles, Queen Camilla’s Royal Nigerian Lancers, et cetera. In 2021, an Afghan Commando Regiment was proposed by an unholy triumvirate of the absolute worst ex-military politicians in the country — Tom Tugendhat, Tobias Ellwood, and Johnny Mercer — as well as our old friend Dick Dannatt.

Whoever is Defence Secretary at this time will get to claim two enormous wins: first, solving the Army’s ‘recruitment crisis’; and second, solving the Army’s ‘pale, male, and stale’ problem. If Keir Starmer is Prime Minister, he’ll be able to claim to be ‘strong on defence’ and to have reversed the Tory austerity-driven atrophying of our brilliant, world-beating Armed Forces. Hundreds of monuments will be erected in towns across Britain acknowledging the ‘overlooked’ sacrifices of the British Indian Army, or of British Muslim soldiers. Perhaps a movie will be made about a brown British soldier in the Second World War, fighting for his country and facing racism, first from his superior officers, then from the National Front after he returns home.

It might take a couple of years and a well-publicised humanitarian or combat operation, but after the cap on Commonwealth recruitment is lifted, what will happen next is certain. One foreign soldier, most likely Indian, will stay in Britain without applying for Indefinite Leave to Remain, and will receive a knock at the door or a letter in the post warning him of deportation if he does not either acquire a visa or leave the country. And then, all of a sudden, legions of bearded, turbaned, and splendidly medalled veterans will turn out smartly-dressed in front of Parliament holding placards that say ‘I risked my life for this country — now it wants to deport me’. Immediately, Starmer, or whoever is in charge, will attempt to make a political success of the situation by removing the few remaining requirements for Indefinite Leave to Remain and blaming the Tories, and probably their ‘hostile environment’, invoking Windrush or something along those lines. Grizzled ex-Generals with snarling Telegraph mugshots will pen vicious op-eds slamming the disgracefully disrespectful former Tory government, which not only left tens of thousands of ‘arr veterans’ homeless and shivering, but set up rules that might result in them being deported; thankfully, Keir Starmer and the Labour Party have shown much more appreciation for our multiethnic working-class military than the Tories ever did.

Very shortly after that, the British military will go the way of the NHS and higher education, quietly devolving into a visa mill for Indians, Pakistanis, and Nigerians. No matter how stringent the requirements for entry, once the Third World hears that, like in Starship Troopers, service guarantees citizenship, billboards will be put up all across rural Kashmir offering immigration advice services for prospective British Army recruits. These people are desperate to live literally anywhere, so long as it is not their home country: if they can’t get to Western Europe or North America, then they’ll settle with delivering food in Poland or Romania, or even in Armenia. Of course they’ll put up with eight weeks of basic infantry training for accommodation, a British visa for themselves and their entire extended family, and a stable income to send back home. The minimum service contract is four years — that’s four years of employment, adventure training, subsidised living costs, and travel. An offer possibly even more enticing than the student-to-ILR route.

And if, as frequently occurs in higher education, individuals sign on the dotted line to get into the country and then just go AWOL and hide amongst the embedded communities of their countrymen already here, the Army will not be able to chase and prosecute them like it does with ordinary deserters. There will simply be too many of them. Even worse, soldiering will become one of those jobs that ‘Brits just won’t do’ once the element of ‘Britishness’ is swept away, and then the argument will be made that the recently-opened flood gates must now remain open — once again, just like with the NHS and higher education — because the British Army will no longer be able to survive without massive numbers of foreign recruits.

The potential implications of this path are genuinely nightmarish. It could possibly be the single most damaging political decision taken by any government since New Labour were in power. At best, the Army becomes an Austro-Hungarian Franken-army; at worst, it either becomes a hostile foreign occupation force, or a visa mill. The ‘beachhead effect’, whereby initial waves of immigrants arrive and subsequently hold the door open for, wave through, and lower standards for subsequent waves of their countrymen will mean the descent of arguably the world’s most professional army into a corrupt, disorganised mess, and it will be politically impossible to confront the root of the problem.

It’s also utterly intolerable in principle. Limitless Commonwealth recruitment into the Army would mean that the monopoly on violence held by the government over this country is afforded to them by mercenaries, with the military filling its ranks from the worst of the Third World. The worst part is that they won’t even be mercenaries in a cool, piratical way. They won’t be here for gold; for adventure and for plunder. They’ll be here to secure immigration rights, and by extension access to the most pathologically generous welfare state in world history, for themselves and for their extended family. Just as the Roman Emperors employed Germanic bodyguards because of their disinterest in Roman politics, so too would our politicians have control over a dispassionate Army loyal only to the source of their bennies — a fine tool for oppressing the British people. Our ancestors will look down on us in disgust: never before in our history have the British people suffered such a pathetic humiliation.

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This article was not written to lament this course of events as inevitable, but to warn you, dear reader, and call you to action. I have it on good authority that powerful and influential individuals read this journal, and so to you, I plead only for this: Stay aware. Stay vigilant. When the time comes, and you see that Lieutenant Colonel Grizzled Veteran has taken a break from his usual column about how men should cry and talk about their feelings more, and instead written about how we could fix the Army’s recruitment problem with the foundation of brilliantly barmy ethnic regiments: Don’t scroll away. Don’t ignore. Make a stink on X.com. Point out the awful consequences of such a move. Make the point that the Army’s recruitment problem stems from the fact that it has broken its contract with the British people, and needs to make a new deal with its core recruiting demographic — tough young white British men — and that soldiering in the British Army shouldn’t become one of those ‘jobs Brits won’t do’ and left to foreigners. Point out that yes, reviving the Rajputana Rifles is in fact Woke, and no, it’s not ‘alt-based’ in a spiffing Brit imperialistic way.

The army of the Revolutionary French fought against the foreign mercenaries of King Louis XVI. American Patriots in the Continental Army of the American Revolution were disgusted by the British government’s use of Hessian mercenaries in that war. The idea of our national government using a foreign mercenary army to maintain its grip on the nation is so utterly disgraceful that it is without parallel in our history. In times past, our countrymen were roused to violent anger for infractions minuscule in comparison to what we are now subject to. Under the set of assumptions inherent to political debate today, the logic behind this plan is so unimpeachable, this fruit so low-hanging, and the problem that it would purport to address so increasingly urgent that I believe it’s very likely that there will be an attempt to implement it at some point, most likely soon. When that day comes, we must all spring into action immediately to do whatever is in our power to secure its reversal — before it’s too late.