You can read the first part of this piece here.

 

We again have witnessed that when push comes to shove, the government, as usual, turn to not the chattering classes or the clowns in the broadcast or print media clutching their media degrees, but to the Army.  Want an emergency?  Field hospital built in short order? ‘Think Army’.  Want ambulances and medics to run an ambulance or a fire service?  Again ‘Think Army’.  Natural disaster relief, severe flooding, Police Northern Ireland?  The Army will do it.  Retake the Falklands?  No problem.  Gulf war 1, Gulf war 2, Iraq, Afghanistan – the list goes on and on and as just as this 2009 parody of Kipling’s ‘Tommy’ nothing really has changed.  Kipling wrote the original 1890:

‘An’ the town is full of maniacs who’d like you dead toot sweet.
Yes, it’s “Thank you, Mr Atkins,” when they find you in the street.
There’s s’pposed to be a covenant to treat us fair an’ square
But I ‘ad to buy me army boots, an’ me combats is threadbare.
An’ ‘alf the bloody ‘elicopters can’t get in the air,
An’ me pistol jammed when snipers fired. That’s why I’m laid up ‘ere.
Yes, it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, “We ‘ave to watch the pence”;
Bold as brass the PM sez, “We spare them no expense.”

No expense, it seems, except when it comes to the correct equipment, or for finding the legal fees necessary to fund the investigation and vexatious prosecution of servicemen for events that took place on active service sometimes 40 years ago, not just in Northern Ireland, but in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As Mark Francois MP stated very forcibly during a recent Defence Committee meeting: “What has happened to our veterans is nothing short of a disgrace.”  He went on: “There is no other country on earth that would treat the people who have fought for its government and its country in this way.”  Just as disgraceful as the treatment of RAF Bomber Command, the Royal Navy convoy patrols and the forgotten men of the Burma Campaign.

In stark contrast to how we greet, treat and house illegal entrants into the UK when ex-service personnel are often homeless and have to resort to seeking help from charities such as the British Legion, Help for Heroes and many others, what do they think when they find that illegal migrants are treated to a stay in a four or five star hotel with full board and £40 a week pocket money and in one instance a trip behind the scenes to see Anfield? It is just beyond parody.

As one World War Two ex-soldier told me: “It’s a b***y disgrace.  These people are not refugees, they are illegal immigrants. As for crossing the Channel, try doing that when you are being bombed and machine gunned and shelled as I did.  That’s what I call dangerous, and for an encore try being a prisoner of war and battened down inside the hold of a ship and transported across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Italy in high summer as I was. Five-star accommodation? We were lucky to get a drink of water and that was just the start of it.”

Seventy-five years on and we now see our culture under attack, the cancel culture of social media, a mainstream media that is selective on what and how it reports.   Our national broadcaster, the BBC, the organisation that gets more and more ‘woke’, receives one complaint about Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’ and it’s dropped from the ‘75th Commemoration of VJ day’ because of its supposed ‘cultural superiority’.  The musical version, which is synonymous with the Burma Campaign, was expected to be the highlight of the BBC commemorative programme.

It seems that our war time generation and the lessons learned the hard way have been forgotten by the chattering classes. The Marxist-trained media, the establishment and much of the hierarchy of corporate business – not surprising as products of an often privileged background like their political counterparts and all educated at the same sort of phoney educational establishments, they emerge with ‘oven ready’ morals, righteous indignation, policies and management programs.

They ooze moral superiority gained by obtaining a degree in something or other, and being well paid by the public purse have, as yet, not been affected by the current situation, looking down on the working class treating them to moral lectures, hostility and evident disdain.   These  intellectual giants and residents of Audi Avenue have created a mess that is becoming more and more apparent to the descendants of Tommy Atkins, who are tiring now of being told you can’t say that, you must do that, having their beliefs trashed by overpaid and otherwise useless people on the political and celebrity gravy train, the silent majority who have, at long last, started to notice that for all the concocted social media moral outrage, the plans, the hype and all the rest, the emperor has no clothes.  The rhetoric is not defending the nation, the rhetoric is not providing health care, care of the old or providing a solid basis of education for the young.  There are no worthwhile role models. Most of the infrastructure of the nation is starting to fall apart (some would say has been for the last 30 years) as in the main the credit-fuelled good times rolled.  Things are now coming to a head, as the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand implied this week when talking about trade deal negotiations, but the lack of experience and the incompetence goes far beyond that.  It actually goes throughout the nation, after 45 years or so of following another agenda, the negotiators and officials are just not up to it.

What a damning indictment of a political education and management class that once ruled the world, who thinks it has the moral high ground but now can’t find the will to stop illegals entering the country.  Stands wringing their hands over cultural sensitivity and human rights – none of which would have existed without British intervention – and the back bone of generations of ‘Tommy Atkins’, from ‘D’ Day courage and stoicism, from the bravery of the men who fought in the air over Europe,  who fought across Europe, Africa, the Far East and the Pacific, sailors of the Merchant and Royal Navies, to a nation 75 years later cowed by fear of illness into accepting all sorts of attacks on its history, way of life, hard-won freedoms of travel and expression, a country where people are afraid to leave home in the dark and where people are afraid to just say no.

And all in 75 years. Those people came back and asked for little, which is just as well, as little is what they got.  In their twilight years the British Broadcasting Corporation, no less, gives them the final insult by removing their ‘anthem’ from the commemoration.   Lest we forget indeed, it seems that for many we already did or maybe they would ask forgot what!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email