There are more articles with words like ‘heroes’ and ‘citizens’ and ‘protection’. Like the others, they all look like a normal newspaper websites, but I’ve not heard of the names before. I click on one article called Hero Soldiers Told to Wait for Housing Behind Immigrants. The story is about a couple of soldiers who had left the army and had been placed on the bottom of the list for council housing. There were pictures of them sitting on their childhood beds at their parents’ houses. It looked ridiculous, these big, muscly, tattooed men perched on top of Spiderman duvet covers, pictures of cars on the walls. There was a quote from one of the soldiers at the top of the article: ‘it’s demeaning and dehumanising to line up at the job centre behind the kind of people who might have been shooting at you out there.’ The article goes on to describe the estimated 7000 ex-Servicemen who are thought to be homeless in Britain, and the disgrace – that word again – of the government’s policy of putting immigrants to the top of the list for things like housing and healthcare.

I get to the end of the article and realise my fist is clenched hard on the mouse. The final picture shows a smiling family – mum, dad, and four kids – standing outside a terraced house. The caption reads Helped first and furthest. Their skin isn’t white.

I click a link to another, similar article and have to double take. It’s from the local paper and the big, colour picture shows Carl, undressed to the waist. The scarring I’d seen earlier travels over his shoulder and engulfs almost one half of his torso. His good arm shows several military tattoos. The article explains how Carl was discharged from the army on medical grounds, despite wanting to return to the front lines. Because of his discharge, he won’t receive the benefits he would have received had he completed his term of service and he, like the men in the previous article, was back living with his mum and brother. Another picture shows Alan and Carl sitting either side of their mum, a tired-looking woman who doesn’t look that much older than Carl, in what I assume is their living room. I scan to the bottom of the article and find the following.

Readers will remember Carl from a story we ran a year ago. Carl’s unit was attacked in Afghanistan by a roadside IED. Three men were killed in the explosion and two further victims were kidnapped and subsequently executed by so called Islamic State. Carl, the unit’s technical reconnaissance officer, survived only because he was partially covered by rubble and probably considered dead. He received a medal for bravery, pulling the bodies of his comrades from the centre of the blast.

I read this paragraph several times before moving on.