I’m a woke millennial who’s joined the army reservists… and so should you

I’m everything the right has warned you about. A lefty, metropolitan millennial – a pro-European, anti-Trump, anti-gun, Ukraine-defending, DEI-supporting, internationalist. I’m also a vegetarian who chooses cycling over driving every time. In a word, I’m “woke”.

Announcement

So you don’t have to try hard to imagine my friends’ jaws dropping and my parents’ eyes widening when I told them I was joining the British army reserve.

Progressives hear “army” and immediately assume white-vest-wearing, chest-beating nationalism for indefensible wars waged in our name.

That reflex, while not without historical foundation, exposes a blind spot. Few people in my generation have ever been asked to do anything for the security of our country.

Even as Vladimir Putin’s illegal and unprovoked war ravages Ukraine, we have come to treat our own safety as a moral achievement and a destination reached by those before us, rather than what it is – a happy and lucky accident of when we were born.

That reckoning is already visible. A new YouGov poll found that just 6 per cent of Britons would volunteer to fight if the country faced the threat of invasion – and 17 per cent would refuse any order to defend our land.

I think that’s a disgrace for a country that has given us everything.

That’s not to say everything is perfect. Rent, wages, housing, the sense that the ladder was pulled up before us – like most young people, I feel our country is not working hard enough for us. And having lived in Belfast for two years, I understand the uniquely difficult reputation the British army carries there. (My friends’ reaction was less than enthusiastic.)

Where I don’t agree is that, because things are tough and complicated, you abandon it.

Announcement

While the left curates its objections, look at who is answering the call. In another poll, half of Nigel Farage’s Reform supporters said they’d fight under some circumstances. That is the composition of Britain’s future armed forces being decided by our absence.

This squeamishness isn’t inherited. The same Labour government that founded our beloved NHS also took Britain into Nato and built the deterrent. Clement Attlee’s people understood that the state that delivers social justice is the same one that defends itself. Our discomfort is closer to Iraq, not 1945.

I am not arguing for conscription. Nor am I warmongering. I am advocating readiness and preparedness. Compelled service would be a defeat, not a solution. But if enough of us volunteer, compulsion never enters the conversation. If just 10 per cent of Brits under 35 joined the reserve – roughly 1.4 million people – it would stiffen deterrence, reassure allies like Ukraine, and put the same people who march against illegal wars inside the institution that fights them.

And before you ask what we’d be fighting for, I can tell you, as someone who left for the US and came back: this is a country you can argue with and win. Fall ill, and our envy-of-the-world NHS treats you, no questions asked. Same-sex marriage was unthinkable in my parents’ lifetime, and is utterly unremarkable in mine. Safe, legal and confidential reproductive care is enshrined in law. Our education is free to every child, whoever their parents are. Our culture is exported to every inch of the planet, and our journalism – some left, some right, some in the gutter – is unrivalled.

When Putin invaded, we didn’t take a breath before picking a side, and four prime ministers later, we haven’t shifted an inch. Governments here lose elections, leave the building and hand over the keys.

So I have joined the reservists. Not as a gesture, and not because I have stopped criticising this country – I intend to be a considerable nuisance to it for the rest of my career. But because there is extraordinary potential in this improbably small, bonkers, queue-loving, football-mad, contradictory but wonderfully tolerant, progressive island.

Announcement

We are, in many senses, Britain’s luckiest generation – and yet we’re the least prepared to defend it. Snarling and swiping from the sidelines is not progressive. It is betraying the country that gave us everything, and never asked us for anything in return.