The RAF Cadet Suspended for Naming Islam as a UK Security Threat Should be Immediately Reinstated

How has it come about that an RAF cadet has been suspended from his officer training course for saying that Islam is the main security threat to the UK? The wokification of the RAF is the obvious answer. But what has allowed that to take place? 

The current head of the RAF is Air Chief Marshall Harv Smyth. Last August he took over from Sir Rich Knighton, who has become Chief of the Defence Staff. Air Chief Marshall Smyth actually has a distinguished combat record. Joining the RAF in 1991, he spent 15 years as a frontline Harrier pilot and weapons instructor flying hundreds of operational missions over Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is behind the trend in military leaders shortening their Christian names? Is it because they want to make themselves look ‘modernised’, in New Labour parlance? Are they imitating the public-school-educated former Labour Prime Minister Anthony Blair, who reportedly told his first cabinet meeting in 1997 “call me Tony”? If so, it would go a long way to explain why they are easy prey for Left-wing bureaucrats in the Ministry of Defence wanting to impose wokery on the Armed Forces.

Air Chief Marshall Smyth ought to order the immediate reinstatement of the cadet who made the comment, which reportedly occurred during a question-and-answer session in a training exercise at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire just before Easter. But such an intervention is unlikely because Harv Smyth got himself promoted under the Blairite Conservatives when ‘heir-to-Blair’ David Cameron was Prime Minister, becoming an Air Commodore in 2015.

The story as reported by the Mail had the usual retired general (or in this case rear admiral) commenting from his armchair on the latest outbreak of ‘progressive’ dogma in the Armed Forces. Despite the matey shortening of his own Christian name, retired rear admiral Chris Perry spoke intelligent good sense. He said:

If I’d asked that question [What are the main security threats to the UK?] and got that answer, I would have also asked the cadet to expand on his thinking and got some critical thinking going rather than suspend him. Clearly Islamic extremism is the issue and not Islam, but how are young people expected to develop critical thinking around these complex issues if they are shut down in this way? This is the fault of a system that is training its young people but not allowing them to express themselves and develop their thoughts. Any mature educational establishment should do just that.

He added rather pungently:

If this cadet had answered ‘the far Right’ I doubt he would have been suspended.

Indeed. But the problem is that rear admiral Perry is retired. What should happen is that the Defence Secretary, John Healey, should summon Air Chief Marshall Smyth and demand that the cadet be reinstated.

But for obvious political reasons there is about as much chance of that happening as Sir Keir Starmer answering a question from Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.