People talking about how scrapping Erasmus will be a blow to working class kids was the first time I'd heard of the scheme. In my school, we never had anyone tell us that was an option. We just had members of the armed forces tell us we could see the world if we signed up to die.

Erasmus IS a great loss - but let's not act like the Tory government ever gave it a fair chance in the first place.

I also think we should talk a lot more about the way the armed forces regularly come into bad schools and tell poor kids they'll get somewhere to live, and three meals a day, and they'll see the world, if they sign up - and then abandon them in poverty after war fucks them up.

At uni I met people who'd never had the armed forces come to their school. We had every branch come in multiple times a year to promise us all the problems we had (caused by poverty) would be solved if we signed our lives away.

But we were the worst highschool in the county. So.

It's fucking predatory and I know too many people who signed up at sixteen just to get out - and a fair few of them have serious mental health issues now.

It's so wrong. And the lack of support is staggering.

Once you've seen an army recruitment officer manipulating a hungry kid with no Dad and a shit home life, telling them that if they sign up they'll have father figures, and housing, and food, and an outlet for all the anger they're feeling... That doesn't leave you.

We were KIDS. The armed forces recruitment people started grooming us when we were eleven years old. Then they asked us to sign up at sixteen. No wonder some of us did. No wonder they're messed up now. It's not okay.

You can get a hungry kid to do anything if you promise them food. The armed forces know it - that's why so much of their thing revolved around food and rations. They brought it in for us to try, to prove it "tasted good" - they know what they're doing.