When I first heard of the story about former Royal Air Force combat pilots working for the Chinese Communist Government I was both disgusted and surprised. My first resort was to reach for the ‘T’ word, ‘Treason’. After all UK service personnel, especially those with knowledge of how the UK manages air defence, should not be working for a nation that is likely to become an adversary in the future. It’s the equivalent of British pilots or their non-flying equivalents such as naval architects going to work for the German Kaiser prior to the outbreak of World War One.

But Simon Evans writing for Spiked magazine sees it somewhat differently. He points out that loyalty is a two way street and that we cannot expect our ex-service personnel to be loyal to the UK if we treat our service veterans like dirt. These combat pilots who are working for the Chinese military may have no other saleable skill other than those that they’ve acquired whilst serving in the Royal Air Force and the Chinese are offering them far more money than they could earn in the UK or the wider West. These people have mortgages and families and bills to pay and HM Government has probably just dumped them ignominiously once their time in the armed services is over. These ex-service personnel are basically let go from the services with little or no support from the Government it seems and are just left to get on with life. From what I can gather, those who leave the services and who have served Britain loyally for years and possibly decades, are left blowing in the wind.

Mr Evans said that the services and those who work in them have been continually dumped on from above. He makes a particular point about how the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) cult has gained undue influence over military recruiting and has created a situation where service personnel may be relying, for their actual survival on the battlefields of air, sea and land, not on those who are the best of the best in military terms, but on people who tick the right diversity box.

I’ve little doubt that the cult of DEI has has had a bad effect on morale, especially when the RAF is publicly shown to be trying to slow down the recruitment of white males and favour women and minorities for jobs. However as Mr Evans also points out Britain has a particularly bad reputation for poor treatment of military veterans. Successive British governments have basically left military veterans to decline. As someone who lives in a military town I see the veterans out and about and it’s plain to see that there are those with shattered minds and shattered bodies who are basically ignored by the government. From what I can see there are too many of those who have served who are treated worse than the illegal immigrant Channel Invaders are treated by the Government.

Mr Evans makes the very valid point that loyalty is a two way street. Successive governments have expected service personnel to be loyal to the Monarch and the nation, but these governments have failed to be loyal to service personnel. Ex-service personnel are basically treated like crap by the government and are often left abandoned to the vicissitudes of the world. It’s sadly all too common to see those who’ve been loyal to the nation end up in low end jobs or homeless or self medicating their service-induced mental illnesses with alcohol and drugs. Our service personnel both serving and post-service deserve better than what they get at present.

Whilst we should be rightly concerned about the massive security breach that ex-RAF service personnel working for the Chinese government represents, we should also recognise that for some veterans their loyalty to the UK has not been rewarded. As Mr Evans said, loyalty is a two way street.