Single handed relief of the column is a major recreational activity of British troops in Afghanistan. That’s when not “living the f##king dream” of killing the locals. They are huge consumers of pornography and one of their favourite papers is the Daily Sport. Spotting a niche in the demoralised trooper market The Sport has launched a campaign to get the British Army out of Afghanistan.

To spare you the embarrassment of buying your own copy I slipped on my grubbiest mac this morning and slipped into a newsagent that I don’t normally visit. The two page spread headlined “It’s time to bring our soldiers home from this bloody futility” is pretty much the same banner that you would see in a lot of the left press, though most lefty papers don’t carry adverts for 1p porn. On the other hand (if it’s free) you could make a case that it would be a good way to connect with bored young working class men.

Labour MP Paul Flynn has an article called “Britain has paid an unfair price in blood and treasure”. He appears alongside someone from UKIP and Lib Dem Lembit Opik, whose column he’d described a few days earlier as “his outpourings in the semi-pornographic Daily Sport.” There’s a joke to be made about outpourings on the Daily Sport but let’s not.

Andrew Burgin of the Stop the War Coalition alerted Socialist Resistance supporters to The Sport’s emergence as the leading British anti-war newspaper at last night’s meeting. You can watch the video here. No one present admitted to buying the thing but, as Andrew pointed out, and I paraphrase, “if you’re a horny nineteen year old anxious about getting blown to pieces by a home made bomb, you are more likely to write to The Sport than The Guardian” and Flynn is quite correct to submit his article to the paper.

It does raise the interesting question of what are the best demands to raise. “Victory to the Taliban” is not really a goer if you are half sensible; feel the Middle Ages are best left behind us; want to build a mass movement or don’t want to get thumped handing out leaflets for a demo. Both Flynn’s article and the paper’s campaign focus on the relatively low numbers of British dead and the pointlessness of the war. Neither dwells greatly on dead Afghans or questioning the imperial assumption that the British Army can go anywhere it wants and kill as many of the people who live there as it fancies. That’s hardly surprising. The paper’s readership is likely to find these arguments unconvincing, will have a strong affinity with British military tradition and certainly is more likely to include squaddies’ family members than the left or liberal press.

So a surprising thing is happening. The Daily Sport is actively and effectively spreading anti-war propaganda in the British army. That is the sort of thing Trotskyists are supposed to. We may be revolted by the packing the message is wrapped in and there is a lot to disagree with in the arguments that it’s putting but we have to welcome the fact that it’s happening, though it’s not really an excuse for buying the thing every day.