Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
We Will Remember Them
The Poppy Appeal is my charity of choice. Of course there are thousands of worthy charities and many cats homes that do good work as well but I believe that this is the one cause that deserves everyone’s full support.
I believe that I am of the generation that the heroes of the Second World War died for. My parents were children themselves at the time and it was for them and their future that our soldiers, sailors and airmen fought. I am that future and I owe an inestimable debt to everyone that fought, was injured or died to give me the freedom that I enjoy.
So give generously and wear your poppy with pride.
Yet Again the MOD Fails Our Heroes
Hercules XV179, Call Sign Hilton 22
I hope that I never have to experience the reality of war. but, I think like every man, I am fascinated with how I would behave in combat. We all want to be heroes and, as I have read, courage is often forged from the fear of disgrace. The idea of letting down one’s comrades can be more frightening than bullets or explosions.
Even during the Second World War, I would now be deemed too old to fight. They won’t even have me in the TA, much as I would love to volunteer. Yet every day, right this very minute, there are men and women younger than my own children, who are being called on to put themselves in mortal danger on our behalf.
Our Hercules Heroes
These people deserve the very, very best that we can do for them. Clearly, the reality of combat means that there will be times when circumstances are less than ideal. Ammunition may run out. It might have been preferable to have larger calibre weapons given the force that the enemy deployed. If air cover had arrived earlier, lives may have been saved. The very nature of combat is that it is unpredictable but when there are lessons to be learned it is imperative that they are studied in depth and acted upon.
Why, oh why, is there episode after episode where the MOD refuses to acknowledge its failings and seems to duck and dive to avoid responsibility? This isn’t about civil service office politics, about covering one’s back or manouvering for promotion. This is about death and pain and blood and grief. It’s about mothers who will never see their sons again, about fit, healthy, beautiful bodies and minds that are broken, twisted and consigned to the scrapheap with – yet another scandal – insultingly inadequate financial support.
The Steve Jones Memorial Bench
Steve Jones was an SAS Lance Corporal on board the Hercules shot down over Baghdad in 2005. When I first came across the memorial bench on Thorney Island (see http://pjroldblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/walking-the-dog-2/) I was deeply moved and when I returned there a few months later to find a memorial book full of glowing tributes and commendations, I felt that this story was one I wanted to take further.
So I made contact with the MOD press office and very tentatively enquired what support they might be able to offer me with a further story, perhaps even a documentary. A very charming female Wing Commander seemed interested and said that two of the men on the Hercules had been personal friends. The Army though were different. I received a courteous but frosty reception and was told that there was no question of being put in touch with the victims’ families.
I can understand, of course, that some of the families will just want to move on and that journalistic investigation may prolong their grief. In the end it was made clear to me that while the MOD wouldn’t stand in my way, it believed that the story had already been exhausted and wouldn’t offer me any support.
I have been an MOD spin doctor myself. Some years ago I was the communications advisor to the Assistant Chief of Staff, UK Support Command on the launch of the British Forces in Germany Health Service. The year that I spent working at Joint Headquarters in Rheindahlen gave me an insight into the services that I am very grateful for. One memory is of the extraordinary combination of austerity and luxury that I experienced while staying in the Officers Mess. My room was like a prison cell but in the morning there was silver service at breakfast as I sat at a huge four inch thick mahogany table surrounded by oil paintings, regimental colours and memorabilia. There was no menu. I could just order whatever it was that took my fancy.
My overwhelming memory though is of the incomparable integrity of the people I worked with. It left me with a feeling (entirely undeserved) of connection with the military and an understanding of how one really could trust the man next to you with your life.
In the extraordinary age in which we live, when cocaine-fuelled w**nker bankers abuse their customers and the taxpayer, when venal politicians grub around in the muck on billionaires’ yachts, whilst in Afghanistan our boys lay their lives on the line in medieval conditions, it is time that the MOD displayed a fraction of the courage that men like Steve Jones have and admitted its failings to start the process of putting them right.
For the full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7683909.stm
Not In The True Spirit Of The British Forces
Corporal Mark Wright
I was dismayed, upset and disillusioned to hear Rear Admiral Tony Johnstone-Burt, Commander of Joint Helicopter Command, speaking about the inquest into the death of Corporal Mark Wright and the maiming of his six colleagues in Afghanistan.
The Coroner, the “guardian of the crown’s pleas”, with the full authority of the Queen herself, found, as a matter of fact, that the mines were detonated by the downdraft from the Chinook helicopter that went into rescue the men. Yet the Rear Admiral had the audacity, impropriety and outrageous, traitorous arrogance to say “that’s not true at all”.
Rear Admiral Tony Johnstone-Burt
The Coroner said that the MOD should hang their heads in shame. The Rear Admiral should hang his head in a noose for the disgraceful, insincere, weasel and wicked words he spoke in an effort to deflect the Coroner’s criticism.
Clearly these men were badly let down and the Rear Admiral’s conduct will bring more pain to those that survived and to all the families and friends concerned.
Why can’t the senior officers and the MOD display just a fraction of the courage that Corporal Wright and his colleagues did and admit they failed them?
Behaving Like Mad Geordie Crackheads
So is this to be pattern that our rescue of the w**ker bankers will follow?
Northern Rock is now owned by you and me. Not by Gordon, Alistair and their cronies but by British taxpayers. Do we want them throwing people out of their homes onto the streets so that we then have to pick up the bill for re-housing and supporting them?
Now that the “new” management has got its greedy hands back on the tiller they’re heading straight for deep water where they can pillage, plunder and overfish yet again.
I say get rid of all the w**ker bankers and put some real business people in charge. We don’t want the “experience” of those that have mismanaged banks already. We want new blood, fresh ideas, people who know the reality of business, not the fantasy world of banking.
I hope and pray that our rescue of these organisations will prove successful based on root and branch reform of the way they do business. We don’t want a few token sacrifices. We want all the dead and rotten wood cut out.
Let’s remember that these scoundrels still owe most of us many thousands of pounds in illegal bank charges they have stolen from us. Perhaps as much as £50 billion over the last six years. The sooner the OFT gets its finger out and resolves this outstanding matter the better.
Another Nightmare For Harriet Harman
Who could possibly look more foolish than Harriet Harman? Whatever her words, her appearance in an outlandish splash of fake rocks and cheap party dress or city suit of whatever sort makes her look utterly, utterly beyond any credibility at all.
If she has a communications advisor (which she must have – at least a dozen|) then what sort of incompetence is this? Her words are nonsense. Her meaning is impenetrable but her appearance?? No politician should suffer from such an amateurish and humiliating presence in this day and age. I am sure that she has a sincere intent but what better example can there be of over-management to the point of disaster?
Now Is The Time For Recrimination – Before They Get Away!
I am delighted to see that The Times and now, this morning, Andrew Marr, are joining me in calling for bankers to be brought to account. The “Thunderer” even said that “heads must roll”. Roll they must, many of them, until the baskets are full and the streets of the City are running with blood. The executions should take place in public so that the greedy thieves and scoundrels who have pillaged our economy can be subject to public humiliation and villification as they meet their doom.
I will carry the metaphor no further but the dread and fear that should now be ruining the weekends of the chief executives and chairmen of the banks should be little different from that of the French aristocrats awaiting the guillotine.
We must insist that those individuals who have taken multi million pound bonuses from banks, funds and all forms of financial institutions that are now insolvent must be able to justify the payments in the same way that a director of a small business that had gone bust might have to explain his drawings to a liquidator. In many instances money will have to be recovered.
Whether guilty of personal wrongdoing or not, the chairmen, chief executives and non-executive directors who have presided over this catastrophe must take responsibility and go! The same sanction must fall on the heads of the regulators.
Lord Adair Turner, Chairman, and Jon Pain, Managing Director Retail Markets, who both accepted poisoned chalices at the FSA only last month may have some excuse but the rest of the board should be summarily dismissed, not even allowed to resign.
Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been extraordinarily unequivocal in many of their statements this week. We want to know much, much more detail about the “mechanisms” that will put in place to restrain the banks in future. If the taxpayer has saved your business then in future you will not be gambling on ludicrously complex financial products that only you understand and for which you set the rules. We prefer that you lend £100,000 to a small business rather than £10 million to a virtual roulette wheel.
“There a million stories in the Naked City”. Now is the time for “le dénouement”.
…And He Can Walk On Water
Or so Peter Mandelson would have us believe! Congratulations to him. If he can do it so can I. I can reprise him too. My first ever published article in the national press (The Independent) toyed with my confrontation with the man himself at the junction of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Grove. 
It must have been about 1994. I think around the time of his mortgage scandal. I was gently cycling southwards and as I crossed over this dishevelled, unshaven and grumpy looking character loped along the Westbourne Grove pavement and wanted to cross. The look he gave me when I didn’t give way was enough to freeze the blood of any parliamentary minion and only then did I realise who he was
My abiding memory is of his crumpled shorts – so crumpled. As if they’d been screwed up tight in his fist before beng worn.
And at the instant I think to myself “hasn’t he aged?”, I know the same must be true of me. He has done so with dignity and now looks more the statesman than the aggressive spin doctor.
All hail Peter! You’re back. And in fine fettle!
Olympic Glory
If you haven’t been moved by our outstanding success in Beijing then you have a heart of stone. The commitment, dedication, pride and intensity demonstrated by our sportsmen and women is an example to us all – and that, of course, is the purpose of sport.
The most incisive fact behind all this is that in 1996 in Atlanta, Team GB won just one gold medal. In 1997 lottery funding started. Now, 11 years on, that investment has started to pay off and it seems self evident doesn’t it? Our superstars who are now leading the world, were then just beginning their interest in sport. We have provided proper funding and they are repaying us in gold.
If international sport can replace war and if sporting success can inspire individual success in business, in education, in science and in society then we have a model that deserves even greater support. In itself it justifies the lottery whatever concerns one may have about government sponsored gambling. Our sportsmen and women must now be guaranteed proper funding in future whatever source it comes from.
Peter Reynolds 