The UK’s armed forces are failing to recruit enough ethnic minorities because they are institutionally racist, a Labour MP claimed today.

John Smith, who spent four years in the RAF, said it was the only explanation for the fact that less than 10,000 of the UK’s 200,000 personnel were from ethnic minorities.

He said it was time Parliament did something about it and called for positive discrimination to correct the anomaly.

“It is totally and utterly unacceptable that we have an ethnic minority population roughly just under 10% of the population of the UK, but the current figures for recruitment of ethnic minority military personnel in the three services is running at 4.9% of the population,” Mr Smith told MPs.

“There are indications, sadly, that the recruitment of ethnic minorities is in fact in decline.”

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