‘The Big Society’ - in Uniform
Until now Big Society emphasis has been on local affairs such as finding volunteers to man libraries, pick up litter and weed municipal gardens when those who previously did these jobs had been sacked. Could it perhaps also have a national application?
The government is, as we all know, desperately keen to reduce that deficit! They can’t resort to the obvious solution of reforming the income tax system so that all members of Society contribute towards this aim in proportion to their ability to do so. This measure, however fair and sensible, would alienate some of their most loyal supporters.
They would like to cut defence expenditure. The vastly expensive and eminently dispensable Trident submarine programme is for some inexplicable reason sacrosanct. They have already sold off our sole Aircraft Carrier and have reduced the size of the army. They would like to make further reductions to the fighting forces but that is a little difficult as those forces have been busy for the past twenty years with wars in Iraq (twice!), Afghanistan (a war to which there seems to be no end!) and now in Libya.
Can Mr Cameron’s Big Society come to the rescue? Its whole purpose is to find volunteers who will do the work of professionals - but less expensively. They already have the nucleus of just such a group of volunteers in the Territorial Army! The Territorial Army, ‘weekend soldiers’ as we (yes, I was once one of them!) used to be called, consists of volunteers who are required to do just 27 days full-time training a year, part of which is usually a fortnight’s working camp in some appropriate training area. While undergoing fulltime training they receive the same pay as regular professional soldiers.
Originally intended to defend England while only professionals (regulars) were drafted abroad, that changed in two World Wars. In September 1939 the TA was embodied into the regular army to serve wherever required. That doesn’t happen today but TA members can and do volunteer to serve for a fixed time (usually a year) in the army overseas. Territorial volunteers have been in the fighting, and among the casualties, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Legislation ensures that their jobs are kept open for their return to ‘civvy street’.
I volunteered early in 1939 and joined a local Territorial Royal Artillery Regiment. I went to only one TA training camp. It was at Roedean (on land in front of the posh girls’ school!) on the outskirts of Brighton, in August. A fortnight after our return to civilian life we were all called up again on the outbreak of World War II. That was the last I saw of civilian life until my discharge nearly seven years later on 23rd April 1946.
August 1939, the 67th Medium Regt. RA (TA) at Roedean, nr. Brighton. The guns are ancient iron tyred 6in howitzers that may well have seen service in the Boer War! The thoroughly unsoldierly way in which we are climbing over them and lounging round them suggests that we, and they, had only just arrived
January 1942 – transformed into real soldiers! No 4 gun of ‘B’ Troop, 231st Battery, 67 Medium Regiment RA, clustered round our (rather more modern) gun on the Egyptian/Libyan border. I am fourth from the right, wearing a woolly hat! We had just taken part in the successful siege and capture of Wadi Halfaya (‘Hellfire Pass’) and Sollum, taking some 4,000 German and Italian prisoners. We little imagined that six months later we ourselves would be PoWs, captured by Rommel’s Afrikakorps at Tobruk
Today’s Territorial Army is ready-made for Mr Cameron’s Big Society. Increase its numbers (there’s a big difference between paying some one for 27 days each year and paying them for 365!) and it should be possible to make big reductions in the number of professional soldiers. Finding volunteers to join the troops in Afghanistan (or wherever the next conflict takes place) for a fixed period, shouldn’t present a major problem. Nobody really thinks that he or she personally is going to be killed or maimed, and being ‘one of our heroes’ in the Middle East can seem an exciting escape from the boredom of an office desk or factory bench
How gratified they will all be at Westminster if the scheme lives up to their hopes. No need to upset wealthy supporters by getting them to help carry the burden of the Nation’s debt. No need to imperil the Trident nuclear weapon programme. Some of those volunteers will undoubtedly ‘make the ultimate sacrifice’. How proud of them all those safe-at-home politicians and retired generals will be!
Those Council Leader Expenses again
I am not surprised that members of Essex County Council are now coming under fire for having failed to report to the Police their suspicions of the validity of Lord Hanningfield’s claims for expenses as Council Leader. I have pointed out before in this blog that he was not alone. Those who condoned and took part in and encouraged his activities share his guilt.
County Councillor Julie Young of Colchester makes much the same point in a recent letter to the daily Gazette. ‘Did it not dawn on other councillors that taking all those trips to China, America and other countries might not be the best use of council resources or did they think the money for these trips dropped out of the sky? Did they complain? No, they didn’t, they picked up another bottle of sun tan lotion and packed a bag, on some occasions they even took their wives or husbands too……..I am on record as opposing these trips as reported in the local papers at the time. Did they listen? No, they didn’t, they merrily trotted off enjoying the trips’.
I have no idea what the legal position is, but morally I would have thought that benefiting from the fraudulent use of a debit card was much the same as receiving and using stolen goods.
Excuses, Excuses!
Recent episodes of the ‘Murdoch Empire Saga’ haven’t been wildly exciting. The interviews of the three leading actors – Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks – with a Commons committee, established that all three had mastered what I think of as the essential skill of any top manager: the ability to accept praise graciously, and to pass blame further down the line. ‘I was too trusting. I was let down by those I had relied upon’; surely an eminently forgivable fault! Well, it is - provided you're not one of those 'further down the line'
Rupert Murdoch was showing all the signs of old age (and I can certainly recognise them!). It was difficult to believe that this humbled old man was one whom Prime Ministers had had cause to fear. The only person to emerge from the interviews with any credit was surely Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng . She made a spirited attempt to defend her husband from the idiot who tried to push a shaving foam ‘custard pie’ onto his face and she supported him at every stage, with an encouraging – and some times dissuading - hand on his shoulder. I hope that she is appreciated.
Then there was David Cameron’s resolute refusal to answer whether or not in his cosy chats with Rupert Murdoch the proposed News International’s takeover of BskyB had been discussed This, he insisted, was irrelevant, as he had decided to take no part in making the decision on this matter.
Has he really forgotten that he had appointed, and has the power to dismiss from office, whoever was entrusted with that decision. They would be unlikely to take any action that would upset someone who was clearly a great friend of ’the boss’.
A War Memorial
One of the world’s best-known war memorials is the Menin Gate at Ypres – bearing the names of 54,889 British soldiers ‘missing believed dead’ in the Ypres salient in World War One whose graves are unknown. It was the subject of one of the bitterest poems of war hero (he earned the Military Cross) and anti-war poet, Siegfried Sassoon. It begins:
Who will remember, passing through this gate
The unheroic dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate -
Those dead, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
and ends:
Well might the dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
I don’t have the memories that made Siegfried Sassoon so bitter – but it is true that the only War Memorials that I can bear to look at twice are those that make it clear that warfare is not about acts of heroism, honour and glory, but about death and mutilation, sorrow and bereavement. I think that this newly created 10ft high memorial to the men of the US Rainbow Division (recruited from every state in the Union) and photographed by my younger son Andy while temporarily on display at the Royal Academy, falls into that category.It commemorates those of the Rainbow Division who fell at Croix Rouge Farm in an engagement in the Marne/Aisne area of Belgium in July 1918, when World War I was drawing to its close. It is eventually to be placed at the site of the battle.
I think that Siegfried Sassoon might have approved.
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