So what (From Croydon Guardian)

So what

12:42pm Tuesday 18th March 2008

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Fifty years ago a certain viewpoint was attributed to me in some heated student discussion on a subject I can no longer recall. When I said that I had not said the attributed remark, the response was, “You may not have done, but if you had said anything, that is what you would have said”.
Some other parliamentary person now seems to be in the position I was in 50 years ago. It seems the absolutely perfect two word summary of the present Government’s attitude.
Many of us could tell them just “What is What”.

One of them is that their treatment of our servicemen is just not good
enough.

There seems to be universal agreement that:
- They were sent to war in Iraq under false pretences.
- They were sent to several wars without the proper personal equipment, by way of body-armour for one thing, and without the right vehicles.
- The post-war planning in Iraq, such as it was, was wrong-headed.
- In Afganistan there is no possibility of success.

Now we read that some of our soldiers’ wives are facing deportation:-.
That worry should stop their husbands concentrating on their demanding, life-threatening soldiering. While at the same time Ministers and Whitehall bureaucrats pass more of their well paid, better pensioned, comfortable and perfectly safe time prevaricating over a decision that anyone who gave a solitary damn for our soldiers could make in thirty seconds, even going slow and stop all thought of deporting our servicemen’s wives.

Then there is our service personnel’s treatment if they are wounded.:
- Pushed into line to take their place in the NHS sausage machine instead of being very well looked after in Military Hospitals, as used to be the way they were treated, and still deserve to be treated.
- The real possibility of being abused or worse in hospital by people with no loyalty to this country. An ideal environment to concentrate on getting well and to contemplate what life will be like when discharged, unfit for military service, into civilian life.
- Inadequate penny pinching compensation. One thing that has not changed over the years in the way our service personnel are treated.

Then there is the way our service personnel who are killed are treated:
- Inquests cruelly and callously delayed, needlessly adding to the relatives suffering.
- Machinations to prevent the true facts being revealed at those inquests.
- The refusal of ‘our ally’, the mighty USA, to cooperate in inquests resulting from their unfriendly fire.
- Over £1.16 million pounds spent on legal aid to the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Defence for inquests..
- Only £0.1 million pounds legal aid granted to service personnel’s families for inquests.

One thing has changed:

If one of our service personnel is killed in a week when Parliament is sitting they will get a mention at the beginning of that weekly circus Prime Minister’s Question Time. Depending on the week one of a number of glib insincere standard phrases will be used by the Prime Minister’s speech writers.
I have suggested to the Prime Minister and the leaders of the two other major parties, several weeks ago, that this is not the time or place to acknowledge those who have so recently joined the ranks of the millions of brave service personnel who have paid the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

Nothing has changed. The practice of using their deaths for a political performance continues unchanged. One would have hoped that along the message train in one of those three parties there would have been one individual who appreciated how nauseating it must be to both the families of those mentioned in such an arena and for those who do not get a mention, (Just like the many millions before them). One would have thought that some of the few of our MP’s who have been servicemen would have quietly stopped this practice as soon as the last Prime Minister started it.

I doubt that he would have started it if he had known just for how many and for how long our service personnel would be paying with their lives for his decisions to go to war.