LIKE A CAT THAT GOT THE CREAM.....

Just check out that smile! That is the smile of an ultra devious modern day Machiavelli whose cunning plan has just come through in spades. Ever since I tapped the ‘Publish’ button and sent my last blog winging off into the ether, I have been met with growing hostility by friends, colleagues and acquaintances in the ‘Better Together’ camp. These are people who are not really the getting angry type. And their anger is the kind that people tend to show when they are caught out in the act of doing something that is pretty damn embarrassing. To a man and woman, they are suddenly hugely ill at ease with the idea of being a part of ‘Team Osborne’. Having good old Bullingdon George step forward to become one of the main flag wavers for the Union was clearly not something they relished.

In my blog, I punted out the mischievous idea that our austere Chancellor is a closet supporter of the ‘Yes’ campaign. My gut feeling is that he would like nothing better than to see the back of Scotland and all who sail in her, most particularly those 41 safer than safer Labour seats.

This idea was met with a degree of wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was also pretty well rubbished.

With the benefit of hindsight, I am willing to admit that I didn’t completely call his much trumpeted trip to Edinburgh to tell us the Pound isn’t ours after all. My instinct suggested to me that his master plan was to play the role of the Oxbridge educated Public School Boy to the hilt and thereby rub five million Scots up the wrong way.

Well the fruits of his crafty labour have now been measured. A Survation Poll commissioned by the Scottish Daily Mail has revealed that in the wake of his visit support for the ‘Yes’ campaign has jumped from 32% to 38% whilst the ‘Better Together’ numbers have taken a dive from 52% to 47%.

All of a sudden there is a mere 9% in the thing and the momentum is all rolling in one direction.

So.

In football commentator speak….The boy done great.

Job done.

With a single ride up and down on a train George has delivered a Stalingrad moment to the Unionist camp. I guess that in 50 years time history books will identify this as the moment when the tide turned.

…..Up until Osborne’s fateful trip to Edinburgh it seemed like that the Scots might well have voted to stay in the Union. After his visit, the ‘Yes’ campaign became unstoppable….

Can you picture it? I certainly can.

The same poll showed that a mere third of Scots believed a word he said. Two thirds bought into Alex Salmond’s assessment that the Chancellor was bluffing. Nice work George. For the next few months every poor sod who has signed up to fight the ‘Better Together’ campaign will have to constantly defend your words. Of course George wasn’t bluffing! He would never do that. George is a great guy…..

Oh they’re going to really love that…….

With one deftly arrogant speech he presented Alex Salmond with an open goal and the First Minister duly smacked the ball into the back of the net. The Scots hate being pushed around by aristocratic types from London. Let’s face it, this is hardly a new thing. The English haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory down the years when their armies have marched north from Carlisle. When blue blooded Englishmen come north to boss them around, the Scots look for one of their own to stand up and shout ‘Away and shite’ from the rooftops.

Hindsight however has revealed new and even more devious layers to George’s cunning plan. Not only did he deliver an 11 point swing to the ‘Yes’ campaign, he also gave the Labour Party a pretty severe kick in the nether regions. Basically, he carefully walked the Right Honourable Ed Balls to the end of a plank and pushed him off into the abyss. He put Balls firmly between a rock and a hard place. Was Ed to come out and contradict the rest of the ‘Better Together’ campaign by suggesting that in his opinion it would be fine and dandy for an Independent Scotland to share the pound? Or was he to step forward to rubber stamp the world according to George and thereby make himself look like a nodding dog in the back window of the Chancellor’s Bentley?

It’s call lose, lose Ed.

And you just lost.

 

Big time.

Johaan Lamont, the Labour leader up here in Scotland saw the writing on the wall as soon as George had finished with his spray can. With a mind boggling lack of judgement, she picked up the phone to the Scottish Daily Mail of all places and told them that Labour ‘had inflicted severe damage on itself by aligning itself with Osborne’

And thus another open goal was presented to King Alex. Whack. Two nil.

So there we are. There are still eight months to go and the gap is already down to nine points. After Field Marshall Von Paulus surrendered the German 6^th Army at Stalingrad in early 1943, the war didn’t end. Instead it ground on for another two and a half hellish years. But after Stalingrad the result was never remotely in doubt. George has just manipulated his very own Stalingrad moment for the ‘Better Together’ campaign. Now all that is left is the long and agonising retreat all the way back from the banks of the Volga to the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate.

No wonder you’re smiling George…..

I'M NOT THE ONLY MIDDLE AGED ENGLISHMEN CAMPAIGNING FOR A 'YES' VOTE - GEORGE OSBORNE IS DOING EXACTLY THE SAME

I have to say that it came as something of a shock to the system when the poster at the top of this blog dropped into my inbox. After just over half a century on this bedraggled planet of ours, this Town Hall meeting represents my first ever step into any kind of political fray. It is certainly one the more bizarre developments in what has become something of a bizarre life. It isn’t something I ever remotely envisaged. My CV hardly suggests a kilt wearing, flame headed Scottish Nationalist with a poster of William Wallace on the wall and ‘Flower of Scotland’ as a ringtone.

A undiagnosed dyslexic failure on the ‘Dunce’s Table’ in a god awful 60’s primary school in a Lancastrian mill village. A regular for the cane at a Blackburn Grammar School. A near drop out at Magdalene College, Cambridge. A down the line hippy in India before the 'BRICS' boom. A market trader residing in Moss Side in the time of The Smiths. A Hillsborough survivor. An owner of a traditional dark satanic mill in Lancaster. Author. Blogger. Drugs worker. Charity manager. A ‘White Settler’ and now, against all sensible odds, a campaigner for Scottish Independence. Chuck in a black wife and two mixed race sons and the bizarre picture is more or less complete.

Why on earth and how on earth has my funny old existence reached a date with a podium in a Town Hall meeting in Lockerbie?

I guess a kind of tipping point arrived last year when I was driving along and the radio commentary of England 3 – Scotland 2 was on the radio. To my utter surprise I found that I was rooting for a Scottish win. How had that happened? The thing rolled around my head for a day or two and I came to the realisation that I had never really felt English in the first place. During all my youthful wanderings of the Third World I never owned up to being English. Whenever I was asked, I would say I was Scottish for reasons of pure pragmatism. Most of the time people don’t like you when you say you are English, especially when they live in a country where the British Empire once ripped off anything that wasn’t bolted down. Scotland on the other hand is a whole different story. People like the idea of Scotland. You only need to look at the different experiences English and Scottish football fans have when they attend a World Cup. The Jocks are welcomed with open arms whilst the English are greeted by ranks of riot police and snarling Alsatians.

Did I feel like I was betraying something when I lied about my nationality? Not at all. I always felt Lancastrian, not English. And like most Lancastrians, I have always held a deep and abiding contempt for the England to be found south of Birmingham and this only deepened through the Thatcher years.

In my lifetime I have never found a single thing that I have considered to be good about being governed from London. The difference now is that I have had 15 years experience of being governed from a smaller city called Edinburgh and believe me, it is incomparably better. The prospect of being completely unaffiliated to the Houses of Westminster and the City of London is a fine one indeed. I like the idea of being able to travel the world and not have to lie about my nationality. I like the idea of suddenly being at arm’s length from the nasty wars and gargantuan corporate crimes and the endless drip feed of hatred towards immigrants and the poor. I like the idea of being a citizen of a country with a semblance of decency.

I just like the idea of being cut free of the money grubbing nastiness, nepotism and corruption of London. All those Russian oligarchs are welcome to the place.

They are welcome to every over priced brick.

All of this makes it oddly logical that I have accidentally signed on the dotted line to fight the good fight to cut Scotland loose: I just wish they would redraw the borders a hundred and fifty miles south of Gretna Green so that millions of fellow Northerners might have the same chance. Such is life. At least like me they will have the chance to emigrate.

I am certainly not the only Englishman to join the fray to create an Independent Scotland over the last few days. I reckon good old George Osborne has done exactly the same. I have never met our gallant Chancellor of the Exchequer and I can only guess at his inner motives. He strikes me as a man who is a Tory to the very core of his being. He seems like a man who would put his party before everything else. Well, apart from his bank account of course.

Bearing this in mind it seems almost inconceivable that deep down he doesn’t share my hopes for an Independent Scotland. For George this aspiration surely comes down to simple mathematics. Scotland is home to 59 Westminster seats and right now, 41 of those seats are held by Labour MPs. Right now, just 1 of those seats is held by a Tory MP. Right now the Tories in Westminster have 303 seats and Labour have 257. As we all know, this means the only way for the Tories to govern is a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Without those 41 Scottish Labour seats, the Tories would be in Government on their own. Without those 41 Scottish seats, it is all but inconceivable that there will ever again be a Labour Government in England.

Now seriously. What is there not to like about such a dreamy scenario for good old George? Of course he’s going to like it. The prospect must keep him awake at night yearning for such an ultimate victory over the hated Reds.

But he has a problem of course. He is number two in the Conservative AND UNIONIST Party. And the Unionist bit is still supposed to count. Tories are hard wired to spout on endlessly about just how much they care about the Union and how they would lay down their lives to defend it.

Aye right.

Why on earth should these public school types with their 2-1 degrees in PPE from Oxford give a damn about places like Motherwell and Llanelli and Portadown? Of course they don’t give a damn. The people who live in these places hate the Tories and would have their fingernails pulled out before they would ever vote for them. Life would be so much better and simpler if Thatcher's children could cut all of these inconvenient Celts adrift and never have to think about them again.

But there is a big problem here for George and his cronies. No matter how much they might think such a thing, they cannot possibly ever say it. Not ever.

But George is nothing if not canny. After our First Minister, he is by some degree the most Machiavellian politician in the Realm and he knows only too well that there are many, many ways to skin a cat.

I figure he must have thought long and hard about how he could do his bit to swing a bunch of undecided votes into the ‘Yes’ camp without it being obvious. I can picture him with a crystal glass tumbler of ancient Scotch and a thoughtful expression on his face. And then a thin and cunning smile as the answer came to him.

Got it.

I’ll hop on the train to Edinbugh and make a speech where I look every inch the old Etonian Grandee. And I will be flanked by lots of broad shouldered security guys. And I will give it to them straight. So you want the pound do you? Oh really? Well you know what, you can forget it. In this particular playground you are the little runty kid with the worn sleeves and snotty nose. In this particular playground I am the big kid and when I say jump, you jump. OK little man? Got that? And if you don’t jump when I tell you to jump I’m going to beat the living daylights out of you. I’m going to give you a jolly good thrashing. OK? Are we understood? Just remember your place little man…..

Think about it. Is there anything more perfectly tailored to rub millions of Scots up the wrong way? And are we seriously to believe that a politician as smart and streetwise as George Osborne would say such a thing without knowing exactly what the outcome would be? No chance. Not in a million years.

So George. Welcome to the fold. Here we are, two middle aged Oxbridge educated Englishmen doing our bit to win a ‘Yes’ majority in the Referendum. As the guy who was originally called Gideon with a proper public school background to go with Magdalen College, Oxford, it seems only right and proper that you should be the one to stay under the radar. As a lad from Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Blackburn and Magdalene College, Cambridge, I am more than happy to do the over the radar bit. And have no fear George, if we ever re-draw the borders south, we’ll make sure that your Cheshire seat stays well and truly in England. We really don’t want Cheshire thank you very much.  

In the spirit of partnership, here are a few ideas for future speeches you might want to deliver during your flying visits to Scotland. Some new and exciting ideas to make the 'Better Together' campaign oh so appealing.

-          Scottish couples will no longer be allowed to breed unless they engage the services of a chartered accountant to prove they have a joint disposable income of over £50,000 per annum.

-          A new Scottish minimum wage will introduced whereby workers are paid an amount of 500 grammes of porridge oats per hour.

-          Anyone planning to wear a kilt to a formal occasion must first pay a Kilt Tax Charge of £200 to HM Treasury and Customs.

-          20% of all revenues from Scottish oilfields will be paid into the Trust funds of nominated Public Schools in England.

-          On attaining the age of 16, all Scottish youngsters must travel to the South East of England to live in dormitory accommodation and undertake 2 years of unpaid slave labour for Her Majesty’s Government in Westminster. Jobs will include drain cleaning and weeding the gardens of bond traders in the City of London. You can deliver a superb speech extolling the virtues of this proposed scheme which will become a central pillar of the ‘Better Together’ campaign. You can point out to the Scots how character building it will be for their youth to spend two years scivvying for the good and the great of the South East of England and how living on a ration of daily porridge oats will get them fit and rid them of their acne. You can bring the speech to a rousing crescendo by promising that a re-introduction slavery for all young Scots will make our treasured Union all the stronger and kick start a new era of Empire.

That should do the trick.

Keep up the good work George!  

 

On a more serious note, please check out the link below for an article in today's Guardian which rubber stamps much of the 'Sanction' stuff that has appeared in this blog over recent months

 

http://is.gd/tlRuGG

 

 

   

THERE ARE ALWAYS TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY

Over the last couple of days the second story on the news after the floods has been that of Abdul Waheed Majid, the first known British suicide bomber. According to a Jihadist video on YouTube, he drove an armoured truck packed with explosives into the walls of the prison in Alleppo. The reaction of both the authorities and the media has been universal.

Moral panic.

His actions have been seen as those of a radicalised, crazed nutjob. What makes it all the worse is the fact that the security forces seem convinced that there are at least 400 other Brits taking the fight to the Assad regime. What abject havoc will these maniacs wreak once they return home to our fair shores? The idea has caused a collective shudder and no doubt any funding cuts targeted at MI5 and GCHQ will have been put on hold.

The reaction to Abdul Waheed Majid’s supreme act of self sacrifice has of course been entirely predictable. Anyone who does or says anything in the cause of extreme Islam is by definition an enemy and a threat. It is completely inconceivable that the authorities and the media could even think of using any other lens to view this issue. As far as they are concerned, these cases are as black and white as any cases can ever get.

These are very, very mad and bad men and we should be very, very afraid of them. They are the new ‘Enemy Within’. They are dangerous madmen. They have been brainwashed by the 21^st Century equivalent of James Bond bad guys. They need to be interned and surveilled and banged up for ever and a day.

All of which of course is exactly what Osama Bin Laden intended when he came up with the idea of 9/11.

The whole thing becomes rather more interesting when you take a step back and look at the facts in a spirit of neutrality. Without preconception. Without prejudice.

Here’s a timeline.

For decades a particularly horrible family has held sway in Syria. They have one of the most brutal secret police forces in the Middle East to crack the whip and a blank cheque from the Kremlin to enable them to crack it. For year after year, the Assad family has killed and tortured its civilians in eye watering numbers. Almost unbelievably they have done this with such a high degree of success that the family has been able to re-direct two thirds of the GDP of the whole country into their Swiss Bank Accounts.

Basically these are very, very bad people indeed.

Then came the Arab Spring and the oppressed masses of Syria sensed that their moment had come. They took to the streets in their thousands to demand democracy and freedom from having their doors caved in at four in the morning by the secret police. At this point I should admit to having something of a personal loathing for the Assads. On 27 occasions they arrived at the house of my good friend Ghazi and carted him off into the night to be tortured and locked up. Never once did he appear in front of any kind of court. They just did it. Why? Because he was a Palestinian and a school teacher.

Anyway.

I digress.

Did the Assad family take note of just how many people spilled out onto the streets to demand freedom? Did they dive an inch?

Of course they didn’t. Dictators almost never do.

And did Vladimir Putin waver in his unswerving support for his ghastly Middle Eastern puppet? Nope. Instead he upped the ante and poured in as many cluster bombs and napalm canisters as the Assads wanted.

And what did HM Government in London make of all this? Well they certainly made a lot of noise about it. They said that the Assads were very, very bad people and Putin was a very, very bad man for giving them so many cluster bombs to drop on defenceless civilians. In fact HM Government got so cross about it all that our Prime Minister asked Parliament for the right to sent our Military down there to crack the whip. Had Parliament given him the mandate, he would have done exactly that and maybe things might have been different. Had Parliament given him the mandate, maybe it would have been a squad of SAS guys blowing a hole in the walls of Alleppo prison rather than Abdul Waheed Majid.

It didn’t work out that way of course. Parliament said ‘no’ and Cameron sulked off to Chequers to lick his wounds and sink a couple of stiff gins before making the dreaded call to the White House.

So as things turned out, instead of the might of what is left of the British military going to Syria to put the Assads back in their box, the job was left to 400 volunteers like Abdul Waheed Majid.

In another time and another place, maybe our media might have seen these guys as being pretty heroic. Abdul Waheed Majid was no kind of Jason Statham sort of guy. He was a 41 year old road worker employed by the Highways Agency. He took unpaid leave to make his way to the worst place in the world right now to make a stand against oppression.

How odd that everyone seems so determined not to see that there is something truly heroic in what he did.

Is this because this is something that is completely new and our media finds it hard to get their collective heads around the idea? Well it isn’t new actually. It is uncannily similar to something that happened seventy something years ago. That something was called The Spanish Civil War and we now remember it mainly care of George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’ and Ernest Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

Here is a bit of compare and contrast.

After years and years of oppression the people feel empowered to take to the streets and demand democracy and freedom

Then – Barcelona and Madrid.

Now – Alleppo and Homs.

Instead of granting freedom, the regime cracks down and starts killing its own civilians. The freedom fighters beg and implore the Governments of the free West to come and help out. But the Governments of the West choose instead to turn their backs. Why?

Number one, they are weary of war

Then – the Great War.

Now – Afghanistan and Iraq.

Number two, the coffers are empty in the wake of a huge recession.

Then – the 1929 Wall St crash

Now – the 2008 Wall St crash.

But of course not everyone takes the same view. The oppressive regime can look to the unwavering support of a superpower to make sure they have plenty of tanks and planes and munitions to get stuck into some wholesale slaughter.

Then – Adolf Hitler and his ghastly Nazi regime that viewed homosexuals and black people as sub-humans.

Now – Vladimir Putin and his ghastly United Russia regime that views homosexuals and black people as sub-humans.

So the horrible regime is able to use its huge advantage in terms of high tech weaponry to deliver death and carnage on its terrified population.

Then – Then the town of Guernica in the Basque country, where the planes of the Lutwaffe’s ‘Condor Division’ rained hell from the skies and slaughtered 400 civilians.

Now – The Damascus suburb of Ghouta is subjected to a gas attack where shells fired from Putin’s artillery did for 1300 civilians.

In the light of the monstrosity of the regime’s actions, volunteers from all over the world make their way to the war zone to put their lives on the line in the cause of freedom.

Then – The International Brigade made up of Trade Unionists and socialists and artists and students. In the words of the much missed Joe Strummer, ‘Trenches full of poets: a ragged army.’ Maybe even a road worker or two? Maybe even a few idealists from Crawley in West Sussex?

Now – The various Jihadi groups of Freedom Fighters which are made up by similar young men from similar places driven by a similar idealism.

The problem for the idealistic volunteers is that once they arrive in the war zone they find that things are not what they thought it said on the tin. They discover that their side is more or less as bad as the regime. They find that atrocities come from both sides of the line. They find that there are also dodgy countries backing their side of things.

Then – The Soviet Union.

Now – Saudi Arabia.

And then, as the killing and the torture and the bombing reach new levels of  primordial cruelty, the Big Brother backer of the regime looks to distract the world’s attention from what their cluster bombs are doing to human flesh by splashing the cash and staging the most expensive Olympics in history.

Then – Berlin 1936

Now – Sochi 2014.

Let’s just imagine for a moment. Let’s imagine that a 41 year old road worker from Crawley, West Sussex had given up his job and family to head down to Spain in 1936 to sign on the dotted line to take on Hitler and Franco. A family man. A staunch socialist. A union man. A man who had never broken a law in his life. And let’s imagine that he volunteered to give up his own life to try and free 3000 lost souls locked behind the high walls of one of Franco’s prisons.

Would we have described him as hero or villain? I guess back then the media might well have looked into the Bible and come up with John 15- 13

‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

There is one major difference.

Franco’s prisons were pretty brutal places, but I very much doubt if he ever came close to matching the medieval cruelty of the Assad family. After what the Assads did to Ghazi, I find it impossible not to see Abdul Waheed Majid as a hero. That doesn’t mean that I support Al Queda and I am about to convert to fundamentalist Islam. It simply means that there are always two sides to any story and it would be nice if once in a while the media were willing to give air time to both.

'IF YOU TOO......'

There was something a little surreal about our January in The First Base Agency. Ten years of experience suggested that there would be a lull in people coming through the door and once again this proved to be the case. Why? I haven’t the faintest idea. This seasonal lull has never made any remote sense to me. Outside the endless rain cascaded down and all the ‘For Sale’ signs on Buccleuch St looked forlorn. The town was grey and deserted. The buses were still never more than a third full. Advertising billboards showing places bathed in sunshine looked as out of place and ridiculous as ever.

And instead of our usual 450 emergency food parcels we doled out just under 400. The evening news carried breathless tales of Britain’s GDP growing by a miraculously high 1.9%. Ministers with faces glowing from breaks in destinations offering winter sun told us that the good times were starting to roll again.

Really?

Was an unexpected 1.9% GDP spike really the reason for the first easing back in the demand for emergency food in many months? There seemed to be almost no logic in such a conclusion. After all, the experts seemed pretty well united in the conclusion that most of the much trumpeted 1.9% growth was down to Russian oligarchs hoovering up over priced houses in the South East. Could the influx of a few billion dodgy roubles really put food on the table for the struggling of Dumfries?

Well maybe it could. I don’t pretend to have the faintest understanding of economics.

A better clue seemed to be found in the fact that there didn’t seem to be so many people coming in with sanction letters from the Job Centre. This certainly made more sense than any ripple down effect that might have been caused by the owner of an Aluminium factory in Novosibirsk shelling out for an over priced Georgian pile in Belgravia.

So what was the deal?

Had the high and mighty in Whitehall discovered some unexpected compassion whilst hurtling down the crystalline slopes of St Moritz? Or had the spin doctors decided that the glorious tidings of a 1.9% growth in GDP meant that it was no longer necessary to beat the poor to win votes?

People do not need emergency food parcels in Britain as a result of some natural disaster like the typhoon in the Philippines. Ours is very much a man made crisis. People on six figure salaries in London offices take the decision to take away the incomes of people getting by on £60 a week in places where aluminium magnates from Novosibirsk wouldn’t dream of buying themselves a town house.

The taps get turned on the taps get turned off. For whatever reason, the word from Whitehall in January was that the taps could be turned back on. People were able to go along to Job Centre to sign on and duly receive their benefits a few days later. All of a sudden being 5 minutes late was no longer deemed to be a crime punishable by abject poverty.

Maybe this was where 1.9% GDP growth actually could have an effect on rain drenched Dumfries. Maybe the bean counters had suddenly found some light at the end of the fiscal tunnel and the need the bash the poor didn’t so desperate any more…

But night follows day and January becomes February and all of a sudden business as usual was very much resumed. The first Monday of the month saw nearly 30 people come in through the door looking for something to eat.

Two thirds of them had been newly sanctioned.

The taps had been switched back off.

Why? I guess there must have been a degree of fear in those Whitehall corridors that a few pesky elements of media might have been warming up for a batch of ‘Foodbank Britain’ stories over the Christmas break. Hungry kids during the festive season can soon become politically poisonous. Urging people to hate the poor at Christmas wouldn’t seem, well, Christian.

Well would it?

Better instead to send the word down the chain to leave them be for a month and pay them their benefits. Let things ride for a while. Get January out of the way and then start cracking the whip again. Come February, all of those ‘hard working families’ we hear so much about will be ready for some good old fashioned ‘hate the poor’ stories in the Redtops. In February all of those ‘hard working families’ will have bills landing on the mat from their credit card providers listing the sobering truth of all that money they borrowed to make Christmas the way the tele tells us it should be.

So last week over a hundred parcels headed out of the door and normal service was resumed.

And the cracks just get wider.

Here’s one to chew on. Two young lasses pushed a drenched pram through the door. The older of the pair was in her early twenties. The younger must have been fifteen or so and she held the hand of a toddler. She hung back and as the water dripped from her coat, she had the look of a refugee from a Balkan war. The toddler was still and mute. The pusher of the pram came to counter and presented a soggy letter from the Job Centre. Brief details. A family of three. A mother and two children. One four and one four months. No money.

No mention of the Balkan refugee with the hollow stare and pale cheeks.

Why?

Sanctioned.

How long? A month.

And the problems ran deeper than food. No baby milk. No nappies. Oh. And a mere 66p in the meter.

Had she applied for emergency money from the Scottish Welfare Fund?

Yes, but no joy. The Scottish Welfare Fund has replaced Crisis Loans as the place of last resort. It represents the last strands of the safety net of the State. Beyond the Scottish Welfare Fund there is nothing. Beyond the Scottish Welfare Fund is the Third World.

She told me that she had applied, but there would be no more money because she had already received three payments in the calendar year. And these are indeed the rules to be found in the small print. You are allowed to reach crisis point three times in any calendar year and after that you are on your own.

Does having a four month old baby with neither nappies nor milk make any difference? No a jot. The computer says no, and that is conclusively that.

We did what we could. We handed over bags of food and some packs of nappies that had been donated by one of the churches. We had no baby milk, but we dug out three jars of baby food. We suggested a fellow charity which might have been able to help out with £20 for the meter. And then they headed back out into the cascading rain leaving a memory of stretched translucent skin and the lost eyes of a refugee.

Decision time.

Like all charities we have policies to stick to. The welfare of children supercedes everything else. If we are worried that a child might be at risk, we are obligated to make the call no matter what. These policies are of course designed to guide us when we work with families where addiction rages. And from time to time we have had to make the call.

So what about a four month old with neither nappies nor milk and only 66p in the meter? Does that constitute at risk? Especially when the family has reached the point of three strikes and you’re out in the eyes of the Scottish Welfare Fund?

How ill can a four month old get in an unheated house in the freezing damp of a Scottish night in February?

Pretty ill I guess.

So I made the call.

I was passed around the houses for half an hour or so and experienced the joys of all manner of canned music care of the Council. In the end a duty social worker took the call and took the details. I could tell she didn’t want to. I couldn’t blame her. She obviously knew only too well that her department no longer has a budget to provide heat, light, nappies and milk. They have only one string left in their bow: remove the child and find a foster home.

A hundred years ago a young British Officer called Wilfred Owen penned a poem in which he strove to force the generals to take a glimpse of the hell and carnage they were causing with the orders they sent to the front from their luxurious Chateaus far away from the mud of the trenches. He described following a cart filled with the corpses of victims from a gas attack.

‘If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.’

Dulce et decorum est…

It is sweet and right to die for your country 

I put the phone down on the table and thought it would be a good thing if one of those Whitehall types could maybe have joined me at the counter to take a glimpse into those refugee eyes. I would have liked to have passed them the phone and watched them make the call and check out the anodyne canned music. Maybe hating the poor might not have seemed like such an easy thing to do.

85

 

“When one person dies it is a tragedy. When a million people die it is a statistic.”

So Uncle Joe Stalin once famously said. And of course nobody in the history of our troubled planet has ever been as well qualified to make such a statement. Uncle Joe knew exactly what was involved to kill folk by the million. The trouble is that the inescapable fact that Stalin was humankind’s greatest ever serial killer and as mad as a bag of frogs doesn’t necessarily mean that he was wrong on this one.

Every single minute of every single day kids die all manner of desperate deaths. They get shredded by shrapnel in Syria. They starve in the baked earth of the Sub Sahara. They get droned in Waziristan. They get worked to death in camps in North Korea.  Hundreds every day. Probably thousands. And no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to compute the sheer depth of the murder and mayhem that goes down in every corner of the planet. Like Stalin said. They are mere statistics. Snap shots from the news.

But the same cannot be said about Madeleine McCann. It is nearly seven years since Madeleine vanished in Praia Da Luz and still her face appears on a daily basis. Madeleine is no statistic. Madeleine is a tragedy. A face. A young girl with desperate parents and a million posters in her name.

Big numbers are hard to deal with. I remember as a kid being told that the light from the next star after the sun had begun its journey to my eyeballs sometime during the reign of Henry the Eighth and had been travelling at the speed of light ever since. That is a concept that is just way too big. It is the kind of thing that can completely fry your brain.

I mention all this because I have just spent half an hour or so wondering how to get my head around what three and a half billion people actually looks like. It’s roughly half the population of the planet, but if you were to take a peek from the space station you wouldn’t see any of them.

So how to frame an image of so very many?

As a long time football nut, crowd numbers have always been important to me. What was the score? How many were there? In the world of British football, Wembley Stadium is the place where you fit in the largest number. For the sake of easy maths, let’s round Wembley’s 92,000 capacity up to 100,000.

OK

If you lined up several Wembley stadiums, how many would it take to make the line a mile long? About ten I guess. Ten Wembley stadiums with a million people inside.

Fine. I can make a mental picture of that.

Every other weekend I hop into my car and drive from Dumfries to Anfield for the match. It is a drive of 150 miles. So if there was a line of Wembley stadiums at the side of the road all the way from the start to the end of my journey, that would mean 1500 stadiums holding 150 million people. Now that is a tad harder to get the head around. The idea of driving for the thick end of two and a half hours passing 1500 massive football stadiums is reaching into the realms of pure science fiction.

What if there were stadiums either side of the road creating a bizarre kind of tunnel effect? 3000 stadiums. 300 million people. Every man, woman and child in Europe. Now that would be something you could see all the way from space.

OK.

We’re Getting there.

But why think small?

Let’s take that tunnel of stadiums all the way south from Dumfries to the white cliffs of Dover. 450 miles. 9000 stadiums. 900 million people. The whole population of Europe, America and Russia put together.

Let’s go bigger.

Let’s take the stadium tunnel all the way from Calais to Moscow. 1500 miles more. Another 3000 stadiums. Another 3 billion people. Wow. We’re up to almost 4 billion now. More than half of everyone in the world……

Hang on a sec…

That is over 3.5 billion. I would get to 3.5 billion somewhere near Smolensk.

So THAT is what 3.5 billion looks like.

A road from Dumfries to Smolensk with 17500 Wembleys on one side and 17500 Wembleys on the other side. 50 non stop hours of driving at a steady 70mph.

Now that’s a big thought. A real visible from space thought.

Why?

What is the relevance of 3.5 billion on a dismal grey morning in January?

It becomes relevant when partnered with the number at the top of this blog.

85.

The richest 85 people on our planet own the same as the poorest 3.5 billion. Like Stalin said. Just a statistic.

85 is a Madeleine McCann number. An average sized restaurant can seat 85 people. A small town McDonalds can seat 85 people. A person with a mere 85 friends on Facebook is considered a ‘saddo’ by the coming generation. Picturing 85 is easy as switching channels on the tele.

The people in those 35,000 Wembley stadiums lining the long and winding road from Dumfries to Smolensk lead pretty tough lives. They work 15 hours a day for the price of a bowl of rice. They die young from completely curable diseases. They live in shacks made from cardboard and corrugated iron. They watch their kids die in their infancy. They wake up before dawn to the reek of open sewers.

How extraordinary to think that after all the wars and scientific breakthroughs and political evolutions of human history, this is the place where we have arrived. It is our destination. This is the point all those millions of years of evolution have brought us to; a world where 85 people own the same as 3.5 billion. A world where those 85 people go to almost any lengths to stuff their treasure away in offshore troves. Will they ever spend their money? Of course they won’t. Such sums of money are impossible to spend. All they can do is gaze at it with sated lust like Gollum with his ‘Precious’. And all the while, half of the planet hangs onto miserable life by a thread.

This is the best way we have found to run our railroad.

Would a pack of wolves stand for such an outcome where one wolf eats all day whilst the ones who do all the hunting starve to death and watch their cubs die? Would they hell. Nature wouldn’t allow such a thing because after a few short months the pack would only have one wolf left. And that wolf would be very fat indeed and looking with some confusion at the rotting corpses of the rest of the pack. The fat wolf would have no idea of how to go about doing any hunting and after a few weeks more it too would have starved to death and joined the rest of the corpses.

Every other mammal on the planet has managed to evolve with a degree of logic. Only one mammal has completely dumped the common sense of nature and evolved into a state of such lunacy.

And we have the front to call ourselves civilised!

I am but a humble purveyor of pulp fiction. I could take that 50 hour drive past 35000 Wembley stadiums all the way from Dumfries to Smolensk and still not come close to finding the words to properly describe such abject lunacy. Instead I am more than happy to borrow a few timeless lines from Mr Shakespeare who had a knack of finding words to describe the indescribable.

‘But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.’     

SHOULD CHANNEL 4 BE SLAGGED OFF OR COMMENDED FOR 'BENEFITS STREET'?

The last couple of days have seen a deal of agonising about the rights and wrongs of Channel 4’s ‘Benefits Street’. In case anyone is unaware of the main thrust of the series, it basically gives a fly on the wall view of a blighted street in Birmingham where just about everyone is on either the dole or the sick. It features the full range of tabloid villains who are scrounging the nation to penury: drug addicts, alcoholics, Romanian migrant workers, dysfunctional families and feckless single mums, all swilling down morning cans of lager.

Last week I heard a pundit on the Guardian’s ‘Politics Weekly’ podcast call the programme ‘Poverty Porn’. Many have felt the same. Is the programme merely pandering to our prurient desire to take a peek at people who have so much less than ourselves? Maybe. But in reality seeing people on their absolute uppers doesn’t really cut it. I never heard anyone label Michael Buerk’s reports from the famine stricken dustbowls of Ethiopia in 1984 as ‘Hunger Porn.’ Viewers took no vicarious pleasure in tuning in to the sight of dying babies with eyes full of flies and bloated bellies. People didn't gleefully discuss the look of abject despair in the eyes of mothers whilst knocking back a couple of after work pints. Instead the nation rallied behind Bob Geldof and sent ‘Feed the World’ to number one in the charts for weeks on end.

Only the most warped individual would take any pleasure from watching utter human misery. I have yet to hear any outraged liberals complain at the nightly ‘Civil War Porn’ that pours out of the desperate rubble strewn streets of Syria.

So why is shining a light on the chaotic lives of some of Britain’s most deprived citizens deemed to be so very wrong? Well there is a distinct difference. Documentaries focusing on the plight of starving African kids or dismembered Syrian kids do not encourage the viewer to judge the victims. The only emotion they tend to generate is one of gnawing pity, coupled with a guilty private horror: what the hell would I do if that was my kids?

‘Benefits Street’ offers the viewer rather more options.

 

One, you can feel sorry for the poor sods who have been locked into the benefits trap for most of their lives and have little or no chance of ever escaping it.

 

Two, you can get well and truly angry at the moronic system that allows such a thing to happen.

 

Three, you can harshly judge the people in the programme for their idleness and fecklessness. I guess this is where the ‘Porn’ accusation comes from. All too many people love nothing better than to judge others.

Judge harshly. Look down on. Turn their noses up. Say things like. ‘It’s a disgrace.’ ‘Shouldn’t be allowed.’ ‘They should be ashamed of themselves.’

Oh yeah. Let’s not forget the old favourite.

‘If I had my way I would put the whole lot of them on a boat, sail it out to sea, and sink it.’

This is what I often think of as the ‘bloke at the bar test.’

For as long as there have been bars for blokes to sit at, there have been blokes who have loved nothing better than to hold forth and spit out their poison of choice. The bloke at the bar never really changes. He wants to hate someone. He wants to feel better than someone. He wants to blame someone. He wants someone to carry the can. And most importantly, he wants everyone within earshot to agree with him. To slap him on the back. To buy him a drink. To notice him. To give him some credit.

So the bloke at the bar who gets his rocks off by publically hating someone never really changes. What changes is who he is allowed to publically hate without being reported to the police, arrested and charged.

Here are a few examples.

A bloke at a Munich bar in 1937.

“God I hate these stinking Yids. If I had my way I would put the whole lot of them on a boat, sail it out to sea, and sink it.’

Would he have been in any bother? Be serious!

Would he be in bother if he tried it today. Sure would.

A bloke at a bar in Glasgow in 1949.

‘I really hate all these shirt-lifting poofs. If I had my way I would put the whole lot of them on a boat, sail it out to sea, and sink it.’

Trouble? Not a bit. We used to chemically castrate homosexuals back then so being called shirt-lifting poofs would have been the least of their problems.

Strathclyde’s finest would have lots to say about it today.

A bloke at a bar in Birmingham, Alabama in 1956.

‘Christ I hate all these Commie bastards in Holywood and Broadway. If I had my way I would put the whole lot of them on a boat, sail it out to sea, and sink it.’

On you go son. Senator McCarthy was saying much the same thing on prime time every night.

Well our American cousins still have little time for communists, but that kind of thing wouldn’t be deemed to be acceptable any more.

A bloke at bar in Birmingham, UK in 1958.

‘Tell you what lads, I can’t stand all these bloody Niggers. If I had my way I would put the whole lot of them on a boat, sail it out to sea, and sink it.’

Fine and dandy in 1958. Not fine at all now.

The same bloke sat bat the same Birmingham bar in 1971.

‘Tell you what lads, I can’t stand all these bloody Pakis. If I had my way I would put the whole lot of them on a boat, sail it out to sea, and sink it.’

Still fine and dandy in 1971. Not fine at all now.

Bloke at the same Birmingham bar last night.

‘Have you seen that lot in ‘Benefits Street’? Make me bloody sick they do. Alkies, junkies and Romanians. Can’t stand the lot of them. Scrounging bastards. If I had my way I would put the whole lot of them on a boat, sail it out to sea, and sink it.’

Would there be a call made to summon the West Midlands Police? Doubtful. And even if there was a call, there would be nothing that the boys in blue could do about it.

And so we arrive at the very heart of the matter. Whether we like it or not, a large percentage of people like nothing better than the warm glow of prejudice. It makes them feel better about themselves as people. It makes their bare little lives seem more acceptable. The likes of Hitler get this and they create dynasties out of it. They turn hatred and prejudice into the done thing. The way ahead. The norm.

They turn the bloke at the bar into an icon. All of a sudden he is the flavour of the month. He is not painted as a twisted, bitter old git who spits out his own brand of poisn to mask the fact that his life is rubbish. Oh no. Adolf and Joseph Goebbels were having none of that. Instead they bigged him up. They told him he was a Superman for no other reason than the fact that generations of his relatives came from within the German borders. The fact that he was thick as a plank and as nasty as a yard dog was all forgotten. He was praised as a hard working family man. He was revered for coming from pure Aryan stock. He was made a hero for no other reason than the fact that he worked ten hours a day for minimum wage and hated the Yids like a true patriot.

This I suppose is the main reason why so many instinctively recoil from ‘Benefits Street’. From a purely commercial point of view, it must have the money men at Channel 4 doing jigs of joy. I wonder how much the cost of an advert must have gone up from Episode 1 to Episode 4. 200%? 500%? It has to be an absolute load.

All over Britain blokes sitting at bars will be passing judgement on the chaotic antics of the residents of Benefits Street. Nobody will be arrested and charged because just like it was perfectly OK to hate the Jews in 1930’s Germany, it is every bit as OK to hate the scrounging poor in 2014 Britain.

So is this enough to say that Channel 4 were wrong in putting this kind of stuff out at prime time?

Well not in my book.

Just because the programme panders to the spiteful poor hating agenda of the Government and the tabloid media doesn’t mean that it isn’t painting a very true picture. The reality of lifetime benefit dependency is a thing that we have been banging on about at First Base for years and years. And for most of those years, nobody has shown any inclination whatsoever to listen. We have never judged the people who have make such a lifestyle choice. After all, they are doing nothing more than the vast majority of people. They are working out which life choices will give them maximum return.

Any maths graduate in the top ten of his Harvard class has the chance to make his brilliant mind available to creating new, ground breaking scientific breakthroughs which will make the lives of millions of fellow human beings better. More crops and less disease and cheaper homes. Do many take such a path? No. Instead they almost all succumb to the siren voices of the casino banks on Wall St. They follow the dollar and sell their genius to Goldman Sachs. Does the bloke at the bar have a pop at them? Does he hell.

What life choices does an 18 year old girl in Britain with no qualifications have? Not many. She can get work on the supermarket checkouts or in a hairdressers. 20 hours a week at minimum wage. Never in a million years enough for a place of her own and a weekly spending spree in Primark and ten bottles of Blue Wicked on a Saturday night. There is however a choice.

Kids.

Four kids can generate a benefits package of £20,000 a year after tax and a rent free house. Four kids basically means the equivalent disposable income to someone earning £60,000 a year. So do we judge the individual for making the career choice of having kids for an income that otherwise would be a pipe dream? Well the bloke at the bar certainly does. But it would be a whole lot smarter to judge the stupid system that puts such sums of cash on the table.

For me the main message from ‘Benefits Street’ is exactly the same as we see every single day at First Base. Of course all of us would rather the individuals who have taken benefits as their choice of life would go out to work for a living instead. Obviously we would. But it isn’t as simple as that. The real question is what work are such people capable of doing. They have never in their lives got out of bed at seven in the morning to take the bus to work. Many can barely read or write and they have no experience in anything at all. If they knuckle down and get someone to help them to fill in an application form and by some miracle get themselves an interview, what are the chances of them being chosen ahead of the other ten or twenty folk who are pitching for the same job? Less than zero. And if by an even bigger miracle they do manage to get a start, will they be able to dump the habits of a lifetime and arrive every day on time?

It is all very well sitting at the bar berating the residents of Benefits Street and demanding that they get a job and stop sponging. That is the easy bit. The hard bit is finding any job they have a chance of getting.

The Welfare State has been a complete basket case for 30 years and many have chosen it as a career. We don’t like it, but it has happened. We see the characters of Benefits Street every single day at First Base. In reality most will never get a job and they will be completely dependent on welfare until the day they die. It is a horrible truth but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

 

Be honest. If you had a small business of your own and you had advertised a vacancy, would you take a risk on one of the characters from the programme who has not a single entry on their CV? No references and no work experience and a few black marks on their Disclosure report? Or would you hire the smart Chemistry graduate from Kracow or Riga or Bucharest? Let’s face it, we cannot blame employers for playing safe and hiring the bright young things of the old Communist Block. It is the smart choice.

There is no point in staying in denial about the legacy of allowing the Welfare State to become a sad joke for thirty years. And there is no point in blaming the people who have played the system for everything they could get. At least Benefits Street has lifted a lid on the whole fiasco and got millions to watch.

Does it offer any answers? No. Well, not so far.

But at least it has posed the question and for that Channel 4 should be commended, not slagged off.      

WHAT A NASTY, NASTY LITTLE DOCUMENT

 

Yesterday an e mail dropped into my inbox with the kind of incomprehensible title that could only emerge from the bowels of the Ministry of Defence.

‘FW: 20140109-The_Mental_Health_of_Armed_Forces_Veterans_GOCSpComd_DG’

Where would our Armed Forces be without their initials! I opened the missive up and downloaded the attachment and duly discovered a truly nasty little document. Once the writer had got all of his letters and initials in place at the top of the page, he wasted no time in announcing his intentions.

‘THE MENTAL HEALTH OF ARMED FORCES’ VETERANS

Over the past few months there has been a general drip of negative publicity about the mental state of Armed Forces’ veterans. Our research shows that the negative publicity and perception is unjustified.’

The writer’s mood isn’t exactly hard to fathom. He’s an angry man. He really hates all this wishy, washy tosh in the media about British squaddies failing to stiffen their upper lips and get on with things. Perish the thought! Stuff and nonsense. He goes on to explain that for the vast majority of personnel who leave the Armed Forces life is absolutely tip top and anyone who tries to claim otherwise is a limp wristed liberal at best and closet communist at worst.

Eventually he adopts a parade ground tone to let us know in no uncertain terms that rumours of PTSD and the like are grossly overstated.

‘The adverse outcomes (common mental health problems, unemployment, social isolation, encounters with the criminal justice system) present at a rate less than that in the general population.’

So there we are. All the stuff we have been hearing about guys having a tough time when they come home from Iraq and Afghanistan is utter baloney. It’s a wicked plot hatched by left wingers and ‘do gooder’ types who are hell bent on having a pop at our heroic armed forces.

This isn’t the first time that I have heard this message rattled out. A couple of years ago I was invited to attend a Sub-Committee meeting up at the Scottish Parliament where the challenges facing veterans were discussed. The Military fielded their top doctor flanked with a couple Colonels to carry his bags. In a fierce tone he informed the room that incidences of PTSD in ex service personnel were in fact lower than in the general population. I cannot remember the exact figure he trotted out, but it was under 2.5%.

I raised my hand and raised the fact that recent figures released by the Pentagon had revealed that 30% of American troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were suffering from some kind of mental health problem. I asked if he could maybe explain why there was such a vast disparity between our figure of under 2.5% and their figure of 30%. Did the fighting men of America lack moral fibre and backbone? Was this clear evidence of the fact that the world famous British stiff upper lip was very much alive and kicking?

If looks could have killed then I would certainly not be penning this blog. I was fixed with a murderous stare as the big man from the MOD fumed at the fact that I was not in uniform. Had I been in uniform, I dare say he would have shipped me off to Colchester Military Prison for a prolonged lesson in manners and respect. He left it to one of his wing men to field the question with a blizzard of goggledy-gook describing the different reporting techniques employed by the two armies.

Once upon a time the Americans shared our denial on this issue. They played the John Wayne card and claimed that only communist types suffered when they came home from war.

Then came Vietnam and the truth could be hidden no more. America was forced to own up to the fact that many hundreds of thousands of its young men had been mentally dismantled in the deadly jungles of South East Asia.

PTSD is no longer a dark secret on the other side of the pond. They admit to it. They accept it. They treat it. They allocate resources: plenty of resources.

But what do they know? After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that the whole pack of them were our subjects. They are still a bunch of unwashed types who really should be under Colonial rule.

Here is another extract from the heart of the document

'GENERAL POPULATION. The majority of personnel do make a successful transition to civilian life, although a small percentage struggle.'

So there we are. The message is clear. ‘a small percentage struggle’. The inference could not be more clear. Obviously there are a few weak ones among us. The runts of the litter. The bad eggs. But not many, by Jove! Hardly any at all! This after all is the British Army and we simply won’t stand for anything different.

Has he considered how such a ridiculously bombastic statement will make a guy feel who is trying to get through night after night of nightmares and flashbacks? I dare say he hasn’t. I doubt if he cares.

Only one living British soldier wears the Victoria Cross. His name is Johnson Beharry and the heroism he displayed when he saved the lives of umpteen of his comrades in a vicious firefight in Iraq quite frankly beggars belief. Once he was out of hospital and returned to duty, the nightmares crawled all over him like an army of ants. In the end he could take it no more and drove his car into a lamp post at high speed. Belatedly the doctors diagnosed PTSD and treated him accordingly. At this point Johnson yet again showed huge courage and called a press conference to tell the world of his mental torment. Once again he was looking out for his comrades; thousands and thousands of them who dreaded the onset of sleep. The Army were livid. They wanted Johnson to be the handsome pin up boy of the recruitment posters. They certainly didn’t want him as a mouthpiece for all those unable to leave the carnage of their combat zones behind.

There has always been an unspoken rule that any soldier who complains about mental trauma is a weakling. A weak link. Any who report to the doctor whilst they still wear a uniform can expect to be ostracised from the group. All of a sudden they are an embarrassment. A leper. All of a sudden they get to eat on their own.

This is why Johnson Beharry presented such a problem. Nobody in their right mind could ever accuse Johnson Beharry of being weak.

At First Base we have run our Veterans Project for three years now. During that time we have helped out 150 local vets. Well over half have struggled with flashbacks and nightmares. The guys carry the haunting memories of fifty years worth of British war: the cold mayhem of Ulster in the 70’s and 80’s, the freezing mud of the Falklands, the high tech slaughter of Iraq 1, the psychotic murder of Bosnia, the backs against the wall nightmare of Iraq 2 and Helmand.

Believe me, these are not weak men and they are not a minority. Every one of them gave all they had to give. They were taken to the very darkest place of all human life where men kill and maim each other. And their brains have not been able to file away what they seen and done.

Every time I have sat with one of the guys as they have dredged up pictures of the bottom layers of hell, I have been reminded of the words whispered by the dying Kurtz first in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and then in ‘Apocalypse Now’

“The horror, the horror.”     

The weapons may become more high tech, but the horror never changes. A ripped apart human body will always be a ripped apart human body. A lost comrade will always be a lost comrade. PTSD is often described as a completely normal reaction to a completely abnormal experience. This is why it seems utterly absurd to me for a claim to be made that soldiers returning from brutal combat zones are less likely to suffer PTSD than the rest of us who have never looked horror in the eye.

Over recent months I have stumbled on a couple revelations that have belatedly emerged from long secret MOD files. Long kept secrets grudgingly released.

In the depths of the First World War the British High Command became increasingly concerned that our frontline trenches seemed to be falling far to easily when the Germans launched an attack. The only way we seemed able to stop such assaults was by saturating the area with high explosive fired by our artillery.

Why?

Nobody seemed to know, so a secret investigation was set in motion. Every time a trench was overrun and then re-taken, the investigators would be first on the scene to examine the corpses. To the horror of the High Command, it turned out that 60% of the corpses had failed to fire their rifles. The guys had been lined up on the firing step of the trench staring out across No Man’s Land as a bunch of screaming Germans charged at them. It was the ultimate life or death situation. Kill or be killed. But even in such a dire situation, only 40% of them had been able to take aim at and pull the trigger. When it came down to it, they were incapable of looking a fellow human being in the eye and murdering them. Dropping a shell into an artillery piece was obviously a much easier thing to do.

In 1944 the British Army had two and a half million in uniform. However only 300,000 were front line troops. It has recently emerged that in the weeks and months after D Day only 200,000 of these soldiers were to be found in the front line. The other 100,000 had deserted. Hindsight has revealed that the vast majority of those who deserted were suffering from chronic PTSD.

A tiny majority?

I don’t think so.

 

The truth is that battle stress is as old as mankind. It part of the price we pay for our evolved brains. Wolves and lions and tigers never struggle with PTSD. They have never been taught about conscience and morality. They kill to eat. Easily. Without compunction.

We are different. And the fact that so many soldiers find it hard to live with the horrors they have seen is surely a good thing. Would we really want our soldiers to be indifferent to the pornographic carnage of the battlefield? A decent society would acknowledge this and bust a gut to give them the help they need. Instead the bean counters in the MOD are terrified that if they acknowledge the reality of PTSD, they will have to start writing compensation cheques. And that of course would mean less money in the pot to pay out all those lovely final salary pensions. We have been sending our young men to war for many hundreds of years more that the Americans. And yet they learnt how to do the right thing in two hundred years. We still haven’t come close and this nasty little letter is living, breathing proof.