 The list of British military personalities who have shaped the nation's cultural zeitgeist is pretty long. There's Walter Raleigh, Horatio Nelson, Flashman, and Middleton. To that list, we might one day add another name. Joe Glenton, my guest today, journalist and author of a new book, Veteranhood Rage and Hope in British Ex-Military Life. Joe, welcome to Downstream. Thanks mate, good to see you. How does it sound to be in that place alongside such prestigious names as Ant Middleton and Flashman? Definitely Flashman. I love Flashman and I love George McDonald Fraser. I think he's got a really interesting critique of the military and the empire. Maybe less so Ant Middleton, but I guess we'll get to him. More of him in a moment, yeah. So for people who aren't necessarily familiar with your story, you were in the army for six years. You were court-martialed. So you have this interesting dynamic of play where you actually serve for a really long time, but then you left under conditions which most people would say that's quite unusual. And it is. It's a very, very small number of people who exit in that way. Can you just explain in some of the military why you joined up and why you left in such a manner? Definitely. Yeah, I joined the ranks. I'm a working class, I'm a working-class background and very often the military is seen as a route out of poverty, out of menial jobs, which is what I was doing. And I joined in 2004-22. I think I was working in a factory or something at the time and was keen and green and wanting to go and do that, kind of drank the Kool-Aid and bought how it was sold to us, I think, because you could go and do something with some social value around the world. And went to Afghanistan and the rationale, we were the various complex rationales we were giving kind of fell away during that seven months in 2006. And also my understanding of what the institution was and how it operated internally and in society. So a lot of that shifted over that period. So I had planned to just get out of the military. I didn't agree with it. I developed, I suppose, what you could call a conscious subjection. I don't know if I consider myself a conscious subjection now. And yeah, was supposed to go on another tour, was told I was going on another tour, refused, tried to go down the route of conscious subjection. There's a conscious subjection board, it's something you contractually and legally allowed to do. That was refused, voted with my feet, went on the run for 18 months, which is more common than you might expect if you look at the AWOL statistics. And during that period, during that whole period, I think I started to, my politics started to develop, came back from AWOL and became an anti-war campaigner. So a really unusual route was eventually, was charged with AWOL. Then I was charged with desertion. We went to court. They dropped the desertion because we challenged the legalities of the war and ended up, was given a nine-month sentence in Colchester Military Prison, did five with remission and came out. So an unusual, an unusual time. The nation's favourite disgrace to Queen and country, a good friend of mine who was also in the military corpsman. And I'm quite proud of that handle. Five months in military prison, what was that like? I suppose it would be, in civilian terms, it'd be like a low security prison, but it's a military regime and they're all short sentences. So it's a maximum of 18 months. But I was in the wing, D company, D wing, if you like, which was for the people being discharged. So a lot of guys who'd been in quite a long time had held rank and done multiple tours. And in many cases, the reasons they were there were connected to military operations. PTSD trauma had kind of interrupted their lives. So a lot of people in there for violence, drugs, self-medication, domestic violence, AWOLs like me. So yeah, it was really interesting. It was really interesting. But my wing of the prison was basically in a complete, a virtually complete state of mutiny for the whole time I was there. So do you think most of the people being quite and quite punished by the British state, you think most of them were suffering from issues that related to trauma and actually could have been seen through another lens? Yeah, I think that was that was generally anecdotally that was the case. Lots of people had post-traumatic stress in varying, varying degrees of mental health issues, mostly derived from operations and other stuff. Because the guys who go into the ranks are generally already damaged. And it's something I discuss in the book that you come in, you often come in with problems because of the, the way you're coming from, you're coming from smashed up northern towns that have kind of been chundled over by thatcherism. So very often there was a complex mix of mental health problems that led them there. And that, I guess, mixes with a really interesting assertion in the book, which is that it isn't just the service which is traumatic, but it's actually the training which is traumatic, because the whole point of military training is that you traumatize people preparing them for trauma. Can you explain that concept a bit? Because it was really original to me, but once I sort of engaged, I thought, wow, that makes so much sense. Yeah, I think it's, we kind of, culturally, we kind of understand post-traumatic stress. It's kind of shell shock but updated. And we kind of have, there's a kind of broad culture on understanding that doing things in war, exposure to extreme violence can be damaging. But I think leaning on that too much or centering it kind of, kind of lets the military off the hook. And my assertion in the book, and I draw on a bunch of ex-military psychologists and psychotherapists, is that military training and military culture lead to a lot of the problems that people have later in life, because it's supposed to change you from a civilian, from day one, you're not a fucking civilian anymore. And that's the way they frame it. And they, what they're trying to kind of instill you with a sense of urgency, a capacity for aggression. And that cycle is repeated throughout. It's not just basic training makes you ill. It's the military culture and military training, which over many years potentially is reinforced and reinforced again and again. It's actually, I make the case what leads to a lot of issues afterwards for people coming out. Because when you're released back into the civilian world, you're kind of primed at the start. When you're released back into the civilian world, you're not demilitarized. And you still respond to stress in the same way and trauma in the same way. And it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work in civilian life. You can't be like that in civilian life. And this is an institutional problem because it's not like the British Army can change two or three things. This will no longer be an issue. Your intention is that it's the fundamental part of the training of the culture of the institution is to create subjects who I think the words you use are near permanent state of eruption. And that necessarily means you're going to be just, it's almost like a production line of people with trauma and PTSD. Exactly. And I think in that context, it makes sense that people would be pumped up and have a capacity to switch on aggression. It makes complete sense in that context. The problem is afterwards. But I'll draw Nick Fothergill, who's an Australian Vietnam veteran and a psychologist. And it's actually a course. It's a grainy old YouTube video, which you can find. And it's actually a course which is used in a lot of aftercare services, like combat stress, the big military mental health chapter, show it to people who are coming in. It's a lifestyle course. And he explains at length this process by which you're changing for a civilian into a soldier or a sailor or an airman, I think particularly soldiers, though, because the training is more aggressive in the infantry type units. This process of changing you. And then he's talking to a group of veterans and their partners and families and trying to say, look, this is not about war trauma. This is about culture and training and trying to kind of help them unpick this thing. I know I interviewed various other people as well who more or less came to the same conclusion. But I think the key thing is PTSD can compound, war trauma can compound those things, but it often is not the source of them. That's military training and military culture. The conclusion of that would therefore be that the identity, the subjecthood of being a veteran as being distinct from the rest of the public as somebody experiencing all these things, which, rightly or wrongly, it's not something that somebody is going to judge. That's how many people who leave the military feel because they have gone through something quite different to everybody else. You think that necessarily creates mental ill health? I think so, yeah. And it also creates all kinds of social stuff as well. I mean, there is a contempt. And it makes me every time when you see Remembrance Day civilians pouring into Whitehall to celebrate. And if you've been in the military, and I think if you're frank with yourself, you look at those people and then you think about how the military thinks about them. And there's a deep, profound level of contempt and othering of civilians. At the top of the high, we talk about the hierarchy of contempt, which at the bottom of that is the enemy. Whoever he may be, he's nebulous, he could be Russian, he could be Japanese, he could be anyone. He doesn't really exist until he appears in front of you. Above that, other soldiers or sailors, they're inter-service rivalry and inter-regimental rivalry. But the real contempt, in my opinion, is for civilians, particularly civilians at home. There's a different category for civilians in the places where we may fight wars. But there's a particular level of contempt for civilians because they're framed from day one. You're not one of them anymore. You're not a fucking civilian now. And they're framed as kind of weak, feminine in need of our protection with a kind of warrior protector. It's really primal stuff. And I think that's broadly shared. Whatever part of the military you're in, reservist or regular, full-time or part-time, that still exists to a degree. And it's instilled in basic training and it's reinforced throughout your military career. And this is quite new because I guess it arrives with large professional armies, which of course is, you know, it's a recent phenomenon, it's a recent 1950s, 60s. Exactly. Yeah. And it's hard to have that kind of binary, you know, civilians and this warrior class, if you've got mass conscription, like you do during the Second World War, for instance. Yeah, I think that's really apparent. I'll draw on Alan Alport, who's a historian of demobilization, talks about the sense that in World War II, they felt they were conscripted and they went grudgingly and they felt they were almost cosplaying. This was a thing they would have to do. And many people in Second World War understood the threat of fascism, I think, but this was not like it wasn't internalized as a kind of warrior identity. It's like we have to go and fight the Germans or the Japanese or whatever. And that's very different from the kind of small, separatist, culturally backward, often very nostalgic kind of culture of the modern British army or the modern Royal Navy. I think it's a very different thing. And that's a key difference that comes out again and again in the book. Conscription, conscripted armies versus professional armies have a very different culture internally. There's a nice formulation which kind of conveys this, which is that the veteran is the Spartan that finds themselves an Athens. And so the whole culture that's being instilled, which has these traumatic consequences for the veteran themselves, also has these broader political consequences because you have these values that they're internalizing, which are completely odds with the kind of values of a liberal democratic society, which is toleration, equality, a live mentality. And that's very different to us and them, we protect you, you need us, without us at all falls to shit. Do you think that's a useful sort of way of looking at it? The veteran is the Spartan that finds himself a democratic Athens? Or is that just something that some veterans choose? Because obviously some do, they love to, we'll talk about this more later, Spartan tattoos and so on. How many veterans actually do think like that, do you think? Is it a mass phenomenon or is it a significant minority? I think it varies, depending on the time. I think it's particularly with a key thing that came out from the work of a guy called Jerry Lemka, who's also a sociology professor in America, but also a Vietnam veteran, is that he's particularly defeated armies, which search for the stab in the back, the dolstos, and he weaves this amazing narrative. He goes from Odysseus coming home and hating civilians at home to the American Civil War. So the Confederate army starting the Ku Klux Klan to discipline these effeminate, traitorous people who conceded to the north. He talks about Vietnam, he talks about the French in Algeria and Indochina, but it's particularly, I think, defeated armies who kind of regress, who kind of crawl back into this kind of weird revanchist warrior thing, particularly. I think there are many people outside that who've probably subscribed to as well, and many people in the military who do not, who do not subscribe to that, who see themselves as kind of citizens and soldiers. And I think some of that depends on where you come from. So any of you people in the book who are, who's back like guys from the Red Valleys of Ronda and the north, who came in with kind of left-wing ideas and are much less susceptible to that kind of thing. But it's definitely a thing now, and I think it's relevant for us, the US and British armies, because we are defeated armies. Afghanistan and Iraq, we failed. They'll always say we weren't militarily defeated, but you crawled away with your tail between your legs. And I think that is what fuels some of the weird revanchist shit, which shades into, expresses this kind of self-help influencer stuff. And I guess we'll talk about it, guys. Everyone runs a podcast now, and there's like Spartan. They have a Spartan or a Viking or a Samurai, and you kind of see this stuff. So it's almost like they're, the world isn't morally good enough. So they have to go back to this imagined utopia of warrior ideals, hence the Spartans or the Vikings or whoever. So there's a lot of complex and angry stuff going on in there. The influencer thing is super interesting, which obviously it's grown exponentially since, I think almost withdrawal from Iraq. It's something that I've noticed really in the last five or six years. In the UK, you've got Ant Middleton, but in the US, it's just enormous. David Goggins, Jocko Willink, Stanley McChrystal, who was your general. This is what I always found really strange is that people are going to Stanley McChrystal. He's like doing consultancy and podcasts and how to be a winner. He's saying, I eat one meal a day. I sleep four hours. I run seven miles. It's like, well, maybe this is why you lost. Right, four hours sleep at night is not particularly conducive to good decisions. Yet they're still seen as these authorities on warrior ideals, winning, triumph, how can corporations internalize these values, et cetera, et cetera. This whole thing just happened. Are we not going to talk about it? And it does feel like the kind of extraordinary extent and reach and intensity of that influencer sphere is a direct reflection of the failure that's basically preceded it since 9-11. Yeah. I think on a fundamental level, I think if you look at particularly that special forces influence Middleton and so on, it's a griff, like a lot of self-help shit. It's a griff. They're trying to cash in on the warrior kudos they've developed. And to be honest, I understand why you would do that. A lot of guys come out of the special forces and they work private security. They become private military contractors and so on. And it's dried up a lot in the last 10 years. But if I could pitch a documentary channel for one, say, Royal Logistics Court, are you tough enough or whatever, I would probably do it. I understand the dynamic behind it. And they're trying to make some money. But yeah, there is a weird disengage. And yeah, this idea that these particular warrior values can like supercharge your Bitcoin business or the 10 easy lessons for just 9.99 a month. I can give you my warrior wisdom or whatever. It's really weird because the background of that, of course, is just gigantic professional failure. And the story of Iraq and Afghanistan is we may have won tactical victories here or there when insurgents chose to go toe to toe. But overall, it's just massive, massive failure. So yeah, it's straight and it's disconnected from reality for a start. But obviously it has mass appeal, like these people are making lots of money out of it. They're getting the opportunity to make their documentaries and films and podcasts. And I think that's fundamentally what they've recognized in this. And what's the relationship between these ideals of discipline and I think often unnecessary suffering. Somebody like Jocko Willink, his Instagram account is basically a picture of him showing what time he gets up at like 5am or something. Yeah, it's bizarre. You think, mate, your body needs seven or eight hours to sleep. If you get up at 5am and you've slept eight hours, I couldn't do it. Fantastic. But it feels like you're hurting yourself. You're putting yourself through this. You're having suboptimal performance, which is what I thought this whole culture was about to show that I can do it. And it's a bit like, I guess let's talk about Ann Middleton when he was confronted with the whole COVID thing. He thought it was a mind of a matter thing, but you don't need to be vaccinated because you're tough enough. Yeah, you can just push through. Yeah, I mean, he's a really interesting example, because he's kind of a budget version of Goggins and Willink and people like that. And he's obviously kind of happened upon this thing and thought, and he's doing very well out of it. But he's an interesting character because I think, I know they're not particularly articulate people, but they're a lot more articulate than Ann Middleton. I mean, his background is kind of interesting as well, where he came from. And I go into it in the book, he is obviously himself profoundly traumatized. He was initially in the army as a boy or soldier, and he came from a quite troubled background. His dad died very young, etc., etc. And was brutally bullied, brutally bullied in the army and the airborne engineers. And then left and then got into lots of trouble, but then ended up in the Royal Marines and kind of found his feet and became an SBS soldier. But he's almost a classic example of the kind of... He's almost an argument against recruiting very young, which is still a thing in this country. And you can see he's kind of badly damaged. There's lots of emotions which have been kind of held inside, which is kind of another function of army training. You buy it back, you just crack on with the job. There's this hyper focus on something and everything, any kind of emotional issues go to the side. And it's almost like he's the quintessential example of this kind of repressed masculinity, which just expresses his massive anger. And you saw that with some of his comments around COVID, also around BLM. He was very critical of BLM. He kind of paired them in. He claims not to have done, but he kind of paired them in with the EDL when there was a bit of a bit of pushing and shoving going on down in Whitehall last year. I mean, he's a really good example. I mean, some of the other guys around him are not, some of the other guys on SS who dares wins are not quite like that. My impression is they're slightly different people and probably more sensible people. But there's a sense that he's kind of this guy who's trying to patch together narratives. And this is a problem that comes out again and again, the kind of military, trying to see the world through the lens of the military hard man. And it's the training and the culture expressing. And the reason it looks so silly at times and so jarring is because it just doesn't work. You can't understand the world in the black and white, bad faith lens of the military. And that comes out again and again when you look at not just him, but other figures like him. There are many, many, many people who get incredibly angry about individuals who've lied about being in the military. Multism. Where does this come from? So the Walter Mitty thing in the U.S. is known as it's slightly more dramatic sounding stolen valor. It's the idea of some kind of bravery or courage and you're tapping into it illegitimately. But the Walter Mitty thing is quite British and it's based on this kind of fictional character who's a fantasist who has this like in a life which is just not true. But in this country, Walter Mitty is the common term for someone who, and there are degrees of this, someone who pretends they've been in the military or has been in the military, but pretends, say they were a chef and they pretended they were in the parachute regiment. And so it's expressed in different forms, but it really riles up military people kind of understandably because in the military, one of the things that happens in training and culture is you're socialized into understanding a rigid hierarchy of badges and different colored berets. And people take that out into the world and the idea that you would pretend to be something you're not is really, really frowned upon. And some people who do this are just, you know, it's the guy who's never in the military who rattles a charity tin with a beret on to try and scam some money right up to people who are trying to tap into welfare services, which are for veterans. So there are degrees, but in nearly all cases in the mainstream, the blazer community, the mainstream veteran community, it really causes gigantic anger. The idea that someone would waltz in, literally waltz in and just steal, steal valor, which we're trying to claim some, they're claiming knowledge of military prowess and so on. I mean, I totally get, I can totally get the anger. I think that's entirely explicable, I get it. But when you see these sort of Facebook groups trying to pursue people, it's a huge expenditure of energy. And you look at, say, a doctor, right? There are lots of people who lie about being doctors. And the people who are doctors made immense sacrifices, different sorts of sacrifices that didn't go through necessarily traumatic training, like veterans, but you've been educated for 10 years, you've worked extraordinary hours, you could potentially sacrifice, you know, your family, all sorts of things. And they don't set up Facebook groups saying, this scumbag has claimed to be a Dr. Wigan and ruin him, tell the truth to everyone. There's this compulsive element to it with the Walter Mitty stuff. And again, I'm not, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone who does it because it's clearly a mass phenomenon. There's something deeper which is driving it. So what explains that? Why don't doctors not do it, but veterans, some veterans do. It probably is probably a broader comment there just about society that we live in Britain. It's a former imperial power. It hasn't quite realized this fact yet and that the military is prized above anything. You could look at the way they talk about veterans in parliament and the things they do to NHS staff is an example of that. But yeah, I think there's something deeper there. And people do it for different reasons. And I, you know, for some of those people, there's probably like the Walter Mitty Hunters Club and organizations like this. Some of the people they're pursuing are like deluded. I mean, there's mental problems there. Others are fraudsters. There are laws to deal with fraud. And there are others who, I mean, the case of Asi Ahmed who I talked about in the work, was a Tory parliamentary candidate who tried to allegedly try to bloat her service. She was in the TA as a clerk and she claimed some connections to the SAS. So bloating, if you just explain it, it's a bit different to Walting. Yeah, bloating is, there's a lot of these terms and they kind of mingle in with the other. So bloating and walting. Bloating is when, so Mark Francois would probably be a bloater because he was in the military, but he kind of makes a lot of his service. Or again, if you were a, you're a clerk in the RAF and you claimed you were in the special boat service, so you're kind of expanding on your military service illegitimately. But there are all kinds of motivations behind it. And some of them are like people are mentally ill and they want to dress up soldiers because that's the compulsion that comes with their illness. Others are chances and grifters who are trying to cash in. So when I'm writing about it, I always try and make, distinguish those different groups, because some of them probably do deserve some degree of sympathy. I mean, others, it's even more base than that. Sometimes, very often, if you look on the Walter Meehanetz Club, they do, they have a WordPress blog and these long, turgid kind of screeds about. It's amazing. I was reading, for a preparation of this, I was reading through it and those, these are amazing stories. I mean, it looks, the amount of energy they put in, I think it's really worth it, but it's very interesting. Yeah. I mean, they're obsessed. They themselves are obsessive. But I mean, in some cases, it's some guy will pretend to have posted a picture of himself in a Royal Marines beret because he wants to be more attractive to the opposite sex or whatever. So there's that element as well. But it's a whole complex, weird network of things. And I suppose my, when I was in around VFP, we kind of developed a different way of thinking about this because we were instinctively accused of being waltz, our critics, who is the Blazor, Veterans Peace, which is an anti-war veterans organization, founded by guys in the SAS, full of people who were in elite forces, many of whom were decorated for Vala. So not a waltzy organization, but the instinctive response from the Blazor community was, you're Walter Meehanetz, you all came out of the army in day two of basic training because you're soft, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas actually what we were, and I am, I suppose, is a kind of anti-walt. And the key argument is that we're not trying to cash in on military valor. We kind of reject it. We don't think there's anything, any valor to steal in the sense that maybe the anti-walt cohort seem to think there is. So it's a much deeper critique of that whole thing. We're not trying to cash in on something. We're trying to say, this isn't what you think it is. This isn't good. It's not positive. You shouldn't be desperate to take these boxes of martial prowess and so on and so on. So it's a much more complicated analysis. You mentioned Asi Ahmed in passing just a second ago. What's her story? I mean, that's a pretty amazing one as well. Somebody I'd never encountered and then I read about her in your book. Yeah, and she'd been going for a few years by the time I encountered her and I wrote an article. She tried to sue me about it. She was a Tory parliamentary candidate and she'd been a clerk in the army reserves and she'd been attached to 21 SAS, which is the London part-time reserve SAS unit. And she did that, got out, went into business, I think, and then years later she reappeared as a Tory parliamentary candidate. Claiming, and this was where it got, it was contested, claiming that she'd been on some version of SAS selection. It's an incredibly hard thing. People regularly die trying to do it, running up petty fan in the breccan beacons and all this kind of stuff. And lots of people who had been in special forces or were in special forces or elite units contested this. But the interesting thing about her was that she got all the way, she was quite embedded in the Tory establishment. So the point where she did a warm-up speech for Michael Fallon when she was defence secretary and she kind of regurgitated these same claims. She went on Loose Women and she wrote a book about it, which was basically the framing was like a Muslim girl with the SAS. And you can kind of see how people would jump on it because it's partly like intersectional imperialism and it's partly like a good migrant story. Like she came from the conservative Muslim background. She wrote a book about it and then later on the people started to contest that. A lot of the mainstream press wouldn't pick it up when I wrote a story about it, which was for RT of all places. Some of the Daily Mail Times correspondents were like, ah, it's so good that you actually did that story we've been waiting for ages. They even got in touch with Johnny Mercer and said, can you comment on this? And he was like, I can't because I'm in the story, but it basically was what he'd heard. But obviously I really don't know what's happening. And eventually after that story, because it was for RT, it's a weird part of the dynamic, she wrote a piece in the telegraph or something saying the Kremlin are trying to attack Michael Fallon through me. Anyway, in the end, she stopped me in a Tory parliamentary candidate. The last I heard of her, she wrote an article for The Guardian about she didn't agree with the Tory's Brexit position and had joined that most voracious of political parties, the Liberal Democrats. And then I don't know where she is now, she's kind of vanished. And we may never know the truth of her claims. But she's a very distinct and unique kind of alleged Walter Mitty. This concept, this prison through which to understand so much the Walt, you even extend to Britain, you call it Walt Island. And I mean, this brings to mind that you talk about it in the book, you know, you'll see images of Prince Charles walking around, you know, wearing his military regalia and dripping with medals. And of course, he's never fought in any battles whatsoever. No, this is the ultimate waltz. And he's the future head of state. What does that mean, Walt Island? What does it mean to say that everyone in Britain is waltzing? I guess I'm trying to make a comment on the way we think about it's kind of, everything is coloured sepia, everything's World War II, everything's Dunkirk, everything's the Battle of Britain. And it's this kind of the rupture with Empire. And the fact we can't deal with it, and we claim to be this military power and punching above our weight is the term they always use. And I think it's obviously there are individuals who do this, but actually it's something much deeper that we're in love with the military ideal and the idea of a martial Britain, which is not true. Like we're not a major player militarily and we need to accept that. So I think there's something deeper going on in there in that sense, almost like people say normal island, we're at Walter Mitty Island as well. I mean, another example, the Royal's very interesting, but also there's something called the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. So parliamentarians go away so many days a month in their constituencies and they go to the local TA base or the Navy ship or whatever. And they wear uniform and they kind of bimble around fire guns. You'll remember the images of Liz Kendall stood on top of a tank during the leadership contest against Jeremy Corbyn. I've seen Web Street-ing recently. Web Street-ing. Your Tweet was, what do you call him, holding a, I can't remember, a bangi-wangi, something like that. Yeah, bangi-bangi-shoot-shoot. But you see, it's Walton, it's vicarious stuff. I mean, it's interesting that the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme is also like a lot of those, like Labour Friends of the Armed Forces, is a kind of a stage prop for arms firms. They're both deeply connected with arms firms and a lot of the funding for the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme is arms firms. You can look through their MP's Facebook images of their visits and they'll be like an MP sat in the cockpit of a Harrier. And they'll be an RAF officer in uniform with a BAE Systems hat, leaning over him, showing them the cockpit and the workings of it. So both of those are Labour Friends of the Armed Forces as well, whose talk at the Labour Conference just gone was sponsored by Leonardo Helicopters. Italian Arms Company. Italian Arms, who've been connected with war crimes in Nigeria recently. There are allocations that their equipment was used to bomb some villages in Nigeria. So they're deeply, deeply connected. And I know it's particularly right-wing Labour MPs who love it because the Tories have traditional connections to the Armed Forces. There are very few veterans in the Labour Party. Dan Jarvis, Clive Lewis. Clive Lewis was TA anyway. It's not to denigrate service Clive, but it's a very different thing. So it's particularly right-wing Labour MPs who are really attached to like dressing up as soldiers, Walton, Stolen Valla. And then they can come back to Parliament and in their interventions they can say, I spent two days in the officer's mess drinking tea and having a spotted dig with the local air regiment. And it makes them look good. So I would also classify that as a form of Walton. So you classify the Labour MPs as Walton, but so what? But it's state-sponsored Walton. It's a different kind. It's very acceptable. But there's an interesting kind of configuration here because you've got the MPs you obviously haven't served in the Armed Forces. Mostly, no. Yeah, mostly. And then you've got the weapons companies and then you've got Labour Friends of the Armed Forces. So where do they fit in there? Because obviously, those guys aren't Walton. No, no, it's like the MPs, but they're still playing their part here. So how does that work? It's a slightly different thing. I view, and I've interviewed a couple of veterans about this in the book, that they're kind of a stage prop for the Labour riot. LFOF was defunct under Corbyn, which is a shame because it could have been an opportunity to use that. But basically it was always a little kind of cabal of people, Henry Jackson type Labour people, some arms firms people. And there are a bunch of counsellors who are veterans who are around it as well. So it's not Walton in the purist sense, but it is kind of part of the kind of militarist infrastructure that the Labour right has internally. And they use it to kind of suggest a certain proximity and understanding of the military and veterans and so on and so on. And this suits Labour MPs because, like you say, there's a bit of, there's a deficit here compared to the Tory party who have genuine, authentic, deep reaching connections to the military industrial complex, Armed Forces and so on. Although some of their people are also bloated, like you say, in France. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So let's stick with this for a moment. Because I suppose they would say, Labour friends of the Armed Forces, who you would say, I suppose you'd say they're on the political, they'll call themselves the political centre. But I think probably on social issues more right-wing than most Labour people on the economy redistribution. I mean, it's pretty quite flexible. Yeah. I mean, they would say that, how dare you call them waltz. And there's, there's, or even that they do business with waltz or that they're providing cover for waltz. And then you've also got, you know, Tories, who are similar-ish to them, sort of centrist Tories. I mean, I encountered a few of these when I said, I was going to interview you. And they said, oh, this guy is a, you know, windbag or whatever. Yeah. I mean, he can't call you a waltz because you were in the army for six years. But they try and denigrate you as much as possible. Of course, yeah. Yeah. So why is that? Because you were court-martialed, et cetera, you deserted. But I mean, Afghanistan wasn't a particularly nice, or Iraq wasn't a particularly nice place to be. I think most people could understand it, or it's explicable. Yeah. Yeah. So why, why do they dislike you so much? I guess I have a kind of jarring effect. I don't really fit with that. And I suppose the other part is that the book is full of interviews with veterans who seem to generate similar opinions. I mean, the interviews with people who aren't on the left as well, or not in the sense that I would consider meaningfully left-wing. But yeah, I think it's very jarring when people come along. There's no space, there's no space in the dominant narrative around veterans and what they want for veterans who are on the left. And it really kind of worries them. And you consider that to be, there's quite a few of those people. Yeah, there's lots of them. You don't know the majority, but there's a significant number. Yeah, not just now. There is a, well, I'm trying to encapsulate here in a potted form, because I'm not a historian. I've gone out of a whole historian who cringes at my attempts to interpret history to try and talk about the long radical military tradition, both of serving people and military veterans, all the way at the basis of politics in Britain, all the way back to the Putney debates, the New Model Army, and then there are resurgence. The veterans were killed at Peterloo. They were in the crowd, the first in the Second World Wars and so on and so on. There is this tradition. It's perfectly possible to be left wing and ex-military. And it's somewhat, I wanted to reinforce that it's normal and healthy. And if you're a working class person in the ranks, you should be on the left, is the case I'm trying to make, and draw on these long and fascinating radical traditions of people in the ranks. Yeah, that was actually the opening chapters of the books. I mean, later on, you sort of deal with these bigger issues like, we'll talk about that in a minute, troop fucking, blazerism, waltzing, all these sort of really interesting ideas later on the book. But like I said at the beginning, there's an appeal to, well, there's a different history here with the British Armed Forces. The first army, the army, was of course, like I said, the New Model Army, incredibly radical basis upon which it was created. I think the most junior rank of officer, which was a cornet, arrested King Charles I, which is a social revolution in and of itself. And then of course, that descends into Cromwellian authoritarianism, but he himself is faced down with sort of levelling elements, ultra-democratic elements. Later on, Peter Lu, sort of post-apoleonic sort of democratic pushback, a lot of that's from demop troops. First World War, Second World War. There's a huge history there. Do you think you could have just read a history book about all this stuff? Because it's something that we don't talk about much in this country. Maybe there's a history book in it. And should I develop the skills of a historian to do that? I mean, there are really good writers on it. I draw on people like John Rees, for example, on his book, The Level of Revolution is fantastic. World War II, I draw on Alan Allport. I don't think he's a radical particularly, but he writes a very good history of those things. And it's certainly not the case that I'm saying that the Militia armies have been like full to the brim with lefties. It's that that is a current and it's perfectly easy to understand. It's explicable that people go through the experience of war, you go through that kind of ferment of turbulent times, whatever they may be, a World War or an English war against a tyrannical monarch. It's perfectly reasonable that people would arrive at those positions. And when you look at in fact, when you look at the agitates in the New Model Army, what they wanted, it's almost the same. It's like a proper post war settlement. It's like pensions for widows. It's like indemnity for war crimes, which is expressed again and again now with Johnny Mercer and Dennis Hutchings and Soldier F and things like that. I mean, they're recognisable. I think veterans today could recognise the common ground. And also in that time, they're talking about much bigger things like the commons, suffrage and things like that. And so what I'm really trying to say is there is another tendency. I'm not trying to say it's the dominant one, though maybe it has been at times, but I'm trying to say there is something there that which we should recognise. And we shouldn't on the left, and there can be a tendency in some sections of the left, marginal sections, happily, to be like if you were in the military, you're basically a small seetory or you're a fascist. And it's just not true. I know veterans who are involved in every radical, every radical movement of our times, whether it's student stuff, whether it's radical independence, whether it's Irish Republicanism, whether it's climate change stuff, Northern Independence Party, full of veterans obviously, because there's all these young lads from up north, they're there. But I think the difference is they're not as visible. Because unlike right wing veterans, we don't tend to put it in our bio on Twitter. We don't want to lead with it because it's cringy. And that's what they say. The most common response was because it's really fucking cringy to do that. But they are there. And I think we should recognise that they are and kind of talk about it. It's a tradition. Do you think that's something that you need to create? Is that something you hope to do with the book? Create a sort of pole of attraction by which more progressive social spectrums can identify? Yeah. It's a question that comes out in the book. I'm a terrible romantic about the idea of kind of the National Union of Ex-Servicemen 2.0 and the anarcho-squaddies. Cooler heads are like, I don't think it's going to happen. Because in the first and second world war, there wasn't the same, for example, there was demobilisation, which aggrieved a lot of people. It was a very slow process, particularly in the First World War, demobilisation. I don't know that it could happen in the same way. Also, the kind of hegemonic institutions of the veteran community, RBL, Helfer Heroes, are really deeply attached to the state and the ruling class. And it's been harder now to organise them, I think. What I do say in the book is that I would like it to start a conversation and that the people I've encountered through it have shared their ideas with me. And we can continue to talk about how to represent veterans better on the left. And we can maybe move forward from there. I don't think there's going to be another new model army agitate, if I'm honest. I would love that to be the case. They're certainly not in this country yet. But these people are there and it's wrong. It grieves me and them that we're all folded into either Tories who were driven out of the Labour Party by Jeremy Corbyn or kind of squidrismo-style fascists, the statue shaggers. There was lots of veterans at the riot in Whitehall last year. There is something else. There was criticism of that. There were lots of veterans on the BLM protests. It's possible to be a veteran and hate racism. It's perfectly possible. But when you talk about it now, like 70 years ago, to say you're a veteran and a socialist or a veteran, a communist or a veteran anarchist, wouldn't have been that surprising. But now, I think given how our political culture is, it's almost impossible to... It's surprising when people say that, I think. For the public, if someone was saying I'm a veteran and socialist, it surprised them because the dominant idea, notion, the figure of the veteran, it's just connected to the riot. I mean, I've seen pictures actually, just looking around for images ahead of November and so on, ahead of this interview. And you see these incredible groups of people and it's ex-service personnel for the CND. And these are pictures from the 70s, the 80s, and it's guys who were in the Second World War who were saying we shouldn't have nuclear weapons. And agree or disagree with them, that existed. It was thousands of people believed in that, we know, because we have the chapter names and people went on demonstrations. And yet, like you say, from the contemporary conversation today, they never existed. And it feels to me almost like, well, we have to remember all those people who died and made sacrifices unless they happen to politically disagree with the status quo we have now. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's an even more recent example would be like someone up Paddy Asdown. Like you can talk about how good of a liberal Paddy Asdown actually was. But he was a liberal. He expressed liberal values. He was ex-military and ex-MIC. He was in the SBS for God's sake. And he was elected for decades in Yoville, at Garrison Town. You can debate how left he is. But clearly, even more recently than the wake of the Second World War, there were people on the left, broadly speaking, who were veterans. So it's interesting how rapid this has changed. And the dominant narrative has become how is it possible to kind of consider that you might be a veteran on the left? It's really strange. So this change in the sort of cultural zeitgeist, which I don't think anybody would disagree with, clearly has quite decisively changed. Some people say it's for the better, some people for the worse, whatever, it's clearly changed. One of the reasons you give as to why that's happened is something called troop fucking. Yeah. So that's an American, a ex-US Marine friend of mine, Marcus, who's on left flank veterans, a really good American podcast, came up with this term. And it's basically, I suppose you could describe it less colourfully, it's like putting the troops on a pedestal, elevating the troops as some kind of moral, this is the moral standard, the military, someone we should, military people, people we should look up to. And that's part of something much broader. I think people know this transition has happened because you can see it with the where remembrance has changed and stuff like that, and the way we're expected to talk about troops. But it's actually brought something broader than the militarization offensive. There's really good academic Paul Dixon, who's done a report on this called Warrior Nation. And it's basically, so mid 2000s, the wars are going very badly, everyone disagrees with the wars virtually. This is like, that's the dominant idea about the wars. And the military needs to address that. And so what they do is they Gordon Brown, France, a report written by various people, which looks at how other countries deal with popularizing the military, keeping the military popular. And they draw on the Americans, they look at the Canadians, they look at the French and various other allied nations. And they really like the American model, you can see in their writing, they really like the American model, which came out of post Vietnam, deeply traumatic for the American psyche. And they try and borrow that and directly plop it onto Britain. So the thank you for your service, shit, which British veterans find really jarring. It's really because our conception of ourselves is like Stoic and First World War and over the top lands. They take this American model, which is quite happy clapping and just plonk it on Britain. And this is part of what's called the militarization offensive. And that's around the same time, 2008, the report came out, the recognition of the Armed Forces inside report. And that's around the same time you see general Dan, it is in charge of the army at the time. And you see the rise of help for heroes. And you see the sun jump on this through our good friend, Tom Newton, Donald was one of the leading figures in this. And they're trying to to stimmy criticism of the wars by suggesting it's disrespectful to the troops, we need to repopularize the troops, we put the troops between the war and the criticism, which on lots of people, not just on the left, lots of people were critical of the wars, whether in their conception or the conduct of the war. So this is part of a process, it's a top down process, the army are obviously involved to try and keep in the box or put back in the box anti war criticism. And so that's where we see this, the rise in what Marcus calls, and I kind of like the term troop fucking. But really, that's where that comes from. So it's not hasn't just spontaneously developed, Britain has a really weird relationship with its military. And the John Bull position, the British English John Bull position is to be quite anti militaristic, not necessarily peace oriented. But the idea of a standing army historically, it's quite controversial in this country. And partially that comes from Cromwell's repression and other periods of repression when the army policed the country and Cromwell canceled Christmas, etc, etc. And so we have a much more, I think in this country, we actually like the Navy, because hopefully it's normally very far away. But the idea of having soldiers kicking around is worrying. And that that it's kind of out of out of sync with the British attitude to its army. Like I can remember when I joined, we were not popular. 2000s war, we're not popular, squaudy pubs and city pubs. And I talked to guys who joined in the 80s and 90s, soldiers were not popular. And so even more so for them, the public where this shift's been quite subtle, I think for us who served in the military, it's very stark that last week you hated us and now the group best thing since sliced bread. That's interesting, because you get these kinds of conspiracy theories, perpetuated by right wing media. And they say, Oh, my God, this is terrible. Somebody, somebody canceled a veteran. This is terrible. And you're saying actually, this is a 20, 10 years ago, it was 15 years ago was actually, Paul Dixon talks about this a lot. It's, it's, it feeds into the stab in the back, the doorstop stuff, but he talks about the moral panic, the moral outrage is one of the tactics which militarists use. And he details, he's a brilliant academic, he's a Birkbeck. And he talks about the moral outrage. And basically in the post Vietnam, it's really, it's very Anglo brain, because in the post Vietnam experience, that moral outrage, and there is no evidence for this. Jerry Lemke has done a big study on this, no evidence for hippies spitting on veterans. There's not this rubbish. It was reported, some people claimed it, but it doesn't seem to have happened. Also veterans, military people coming back into the country to military airports, the lounges of military airports are not generally filled with hippies in my experience. So there's that question of access. And in fact, the veterans were on the streets protesting in many cases. But the British version of that, and it's hilarious because they detail in the report and examples. And one of them is that an officer was turned away from Harrods because he was in uniform. And it's funny to me that the English version of the hippie spits on veteran thing is Tarquin couldn't get his hamper for the officer's summer ball. It's very like Anglo, if you know what I mean. And they give other examples as well of soldiers having to change into civilian clothing before they came back through an airport or whatever. But basically it's, you know, and you look at the sun and the male, the people who are pumping out this stuff and the far right jump on it as well. So it's kind of moral panic stuff and to reinforce the establishment to reinforce the really glass. I mean, the thing that happens post Vietnam with Nix, I mean, like I say, this is from above, from the presidency, the Republican Party saying we have to, we have to transform the sort of political zeitgeist around the armed forces very similar to the war on drugs. Basically, you have a whole transformation of basically the sort of popular conception of something driven by the politically and the media. And like you say, we have our own version here. It's a bit different. But what I would say is as well, Joe is, you know, I'm being a kid mid to late 1990s. So pre Iraq, but you'd have, you know, you'd have Remembrance Service at school or whatever. You'd have the old boys come with their medals and so on. And people's about classic British understatement. I don't like stereotypes, but it was true. It was very understated. Something has really, really, really changed where people are walking around with, you know, never forget, unless we forget on their Adidas trainers and dressed up as giant poppies. And you do that. Look, it's a free country. You do that. But something has really shifted. And that definitely is an understatement. Yeah. And I'm no defender of like British culture, whatever that means, but it's quite un-British in a way. It sounds a bit, it's not remembrance and the tone of remembrance from the off. It's supposed to be like a funeral. Remembrance is a funeral. It's not a festival of obedience, which is what it's become. It's supposed to be, you know, old boys sipping their pie and sad, remember your mates, you go and stand and remember the fallen. And I'm down for that. Like, when we're back to that, I will go down the cenotaph with my medals and my burial. I'm happy to do that. But it's become something very different, as you say, very different and DP reactionary and weird. And it's not in keeping with the often problematic military traditions that are connected to remembrance in the cenotaph and so on. And it does feel very new. I mean, I don't think I'm old. You know, it does. We also went 50, 60 years ago. This is like you said, post 9 11 really post early 21st century. Final question. You talked about blazers, you talked about the mainstream sort of veteran community. Maybe you can also sort of illuminate what that concept means the blazer, blazerism. Yeah. And then you've got the kind of anti blazer. The white knight quite literally Prince Harry. Yeah. So what's his vibe? Do you think he's for real or I think I see is he Britain's most radical veteran today? Well, he did. He said some cool stuff around around BLM and stuff. His wife's a woman of color. I think Ash had it right when she talks about his transition is from the kind of old world ruling class to the kind of liberal aristocracy and paraphrasing. But I remember she wrote a piece and I think that's right. So yeah, that's part of a move. I know people served with Harry and they say he was a decent guy. He was a decent officer as officers go as officers in the poshest regiments of all the household gathering the guards go. He was a decent and capable officer. Maybe maybe it's genuine. Maybe it's performative. I suspect he probably is angry about the way his wife was treated by the royal family understandably. I hope he returns to the agitate tradition. I hope it becomes a Colonel Rainsborough and becomes an anti monarchist. I don't think it's going to happen. But no, he's an interesting character because I think in the way that the certain organizations are put there to lead veterans, as Hague said when the RBL was founded, he wanted the men back under their officers. Certain individuals are positioned or find their own way into like leadership roles of the armed forces community. Johnny Mercer, my old mate, Tom Tugan, people like this and Harry is an example of that as well, I think. He was a central figure in the Invictus Games, which is a kind of Olympics for disabled veterans, for wounded veterans. I don't think he does- Barley funded by big arms companies. Of course. He doesn't quite fit into the Mercer category. Maybe he's genuine in some ways. I don't know. I don't know. I think better of him than those guys, I think, as a pretty rabid Republican myself. But I don't know how much of it is performative. Blazers and blazerism. What is this? What is this concept? So when I was around Veterans for Peace, Veterans for Peace never really approved of the term. We're kind of the radical edge of the military community. And we would encounter on our trips to the Santa Toff every year to do a white poppy wreath, lay a white poppy wreath. Other veterans, and we would chat to them, we had a chair military background. But blazerism basically came, they're kind of sartorial things. They're blazers literally with the medals and the berets. And some of those guys were fine. I know people who do that whole thing, that's fine. But we were looking for a term to explain that tendency. And it's probably the dominant tendency within the extra military community. And we were searching around. We were looking for something like Uncle Tom, which obviously is a name for a black guy who sides with the oppressor against his people. And we very quickly realized it was a bad idea for a bunch of white dudes to rip off the language of black radicalism. So we chose blazer, but it has a similar thing. It's like a pro establishment veteran, a pro war veteran, because that's the biggest kind of cohort within that, you know, the guys who go down there, they're kind of, they like the fact they're in the military and they like the state and so on, generally speaking. And so it was gradually became a thing. And the guy who came up with it was actually a boomer veteran who's decorated for Valor in Northern Ireland. It was actually, because it also means kind of a boomer veteran, though it's been extended since, I think. But it's that, it's basically a right wing veteran. What we arrived at was, we were trying to formulate an idea of what a right wing veteran was. And we basically worked off the blazers. And it's a weird thing, because I think it's actually quite a cool look. And I have worn it myself. I've seen, I was going to say, I've seen you wearing a blazer. Yeah, I'm kind of down with that. And it's also ripe for subversion. So I kind of like it that way as well. But that's really, really what it means. And it's not, it's not about fashion choices. It's about the politics that go with it. And the critique was it's not wearing the beret and blazer. It's where when the beret and the blazer and the medals wear you, but you're subsumed within this military identity, this reactionary military identity. And the way you phrase the politics of it is really interesting. So you say it's not necessarily an ideology, but more a personality sort of trait or a set of personality traits. Yeah, I was, I was cautious about using conservative anarchism, because I'm quite tax franticism, obviously, as we all are. But, but I think that's kind of what it is. And it's a weird, it's kind of like your, your old man who would feel oppressed rail against the state if they wouldn't let me use his hosepipe in summer, but we'll be on the Facebook group, the local Facebook group being like, shoot the fucking BLM protesters. It's that kind of thing where they, they're kind of anti authoritarian, there's a libertarian streak, but they're also kind of down with authority. If it's, you know, thrown against the right people, they don't like, and that's a real trend. And it comes from training as well. There's a kind of, in the military, you self police. So if anyone goes off at a tangent, you're like, you knock them back in the back. And it's a kind of expression of that post service. Yeah. So it's a, yeah, it's a kind of, and it's also to say that no, it's not that there, there is a collectivist element, but it's limited. It's like reactionary, nasty right wing collectivism, they will do stuff. If you go to a military charity, it'll be full of blazers. And they're really committed. They're genuine and understandably so to like helping their fellow veterans. And but outside that, there is no solidarity within it. There is enormous solidarity based on the lived experience of being inside this, this engine of violence for so long. So they're really interesting. And there are other currents within it as well. Not everyone fits in that category, but I think that's the broadest kind of group. Johnny Mercer is here blazer. Definitely. He's like King Blazer. King of the blazers. King of the blazer. One of them, one of them, and he's very popular with that. His stock went down when he was actually in office in his little veterans department, which he sold his soul to get. But now he's out, he can ride around with the rolling, rolling thunder, veteran Hell's Angels, and his stock is kind of back up with that cohort. But he's an interesting character because he's purely an expression of that, of that, that kind of military thing. And they're kind of bumbling junior officer. And he's another guy who is like, and Middleton's trying to use the military lens to understand all kinds of stuff. But Mercer is trying to do it. I'm sure he thinks in good faith that he's an honorable man and all this, and he's trying to do right by them. I do believe that. I don't think he's a particularly complex or intellectual man to know that what he's actually involved in. But he's a good example of this kind of the kind of patrician love of our blokes kind of guy he would meet. I met so many of them in the military. That's a kind of archetype, the rugaboy blusterer. And I met guys who served with him and it's mixed response. Some people think he's an absolute jobsworth. Some people served with him and say he's a great guy and he was a good officer. I don't really try and make a judgment that he blocked me. So that's a little bit of antagonism for asking a mild question on Syria. But yeah, he's a good example. And he certainly positioned himself as the veterans champion, as Harry has in a different way. And as, again, it's individuals and organizations. Some organizations do this, get the men back under their officers, that's where they should be, the traps. And then there's individuals who do it. And Johnny Mercer is one of a constellation of ex-military people, normally ex-officers, in that patrician way that officers love their men are trying to do right by the blokes. But make sure they never get ideas above their station. Exactly, exactly. You can campaign within these narrow parameters and that's fine. And actually what we want is something quite different from that.