'Stop the self-hatred!' Ex-soldier hits out at 'woke diversity agenda' in defence of patriotic Britain

As the nation marked Remembrance Sunday in a ceremony led by King Charles at the Cenotaph, Mr Seely explained how Britons can preserve the lessons of service and sacrifice for the future.

Mr Seely told GB News host Dawn Neesom: "I think we can do a bunch of things. One is, we can stop with the self-hatred of this country.

"This country isn't Russia, we don't want to just throw ugly propaganda at young people, and we want people to think for themselves."

Taking aim at the "woke diversity agenda", the ex-soldier fumed: "It's absolutely and always been part of our culture, but when children are brought up to think that we're the source of all evil in the world, or that the empire was about slavery, not its abolition, or that the indigenous population are inherently racist.

"I just think the sort of woke diversity agenda is really damaging to national coherence, and it also stops a much more truer and more honest story being told."

Calling for more "patriotism" in Britain, Mr Seely said: "Patriotism is a very natural instinct, and it's your love of country, it's a love of place where you brought up, it's not propaganda.

"And I just think we need to encourage a little bit of intelligent, decent patriotism so that we can see the world and be proud of our place in the world.

"Not to question elements of the past, but to be broadly proud of our extraordinary achievements in our country and our civilisation.

"And actually be willing to state what it is and to defend it, and I just think we haven't done that enough, our political classes haven't done that enough in the past 20 to 30 years."

Noting a recent poll which suggested that only 10 per cent of young Britons would fight for their country, Mr Seely said it is a "really urgent conversation" that needs to be had.

He explained: "It is a really urgent conversation because if our Nato allies are going to be in conflict, there's a very good chance that we will be as well.

"And it pains me, the sort of template of war that we're going to be looking at this century, when some conflict is going to be military, some conflict will be informational or economic or political. But we are in a new era of conflict with authoritarian powers."

Mr Seely concluded: "The problem is we're just not ready for that, because our political and military elites haven't educated our population as to the sort of warfare we're going to be facing.

"There is a chance that we will face real, old-fashioned traditional war in Eastern Europe. But there's also the war of values and people trying to find divisions and disunity in our society as well.

"And there are things that we could be doing, but we're not doing them, sadly."

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