Noblesse Oblige

I belong to a discussion group that meets on a Tuesday night at the Blue Mugge in leek. Last night was a very interesting debate on our response to Wotton Bassett on a day when 7 coffins came back from Afghanistan containing the bodies of lads to use a line from an Elvis Costello “ boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne”. Some of the soldiers were killed in a fire fight with the Taliban and others in a terrible road traffic accident when a vehicle drove into a canal.

Last weekend I was a National Trust property in Derbyshire. The chapel contained memorials to the fallen of the big house and the estate. The nobility as a proportion of the population probably lost the highest proportion of the population as Germans targeted the subalterns and the First Lieutenants in the trenches of Northern France and Flanders.

The first point I made in my contribution was on the question of equality of sacrifice especially when the political elite was concerned. In the First World War and the Second the political class shared the burden of loss. In 1916 the son of the Prime Minister Raymond Asquith was killed, as was the son of the Tory Leader Bonar Law. It was the same in the Second and I cited the example of the Marquis of Hartington, the son of the Duke of Devonshire killed in Normandy in 1944.

I know that many well connected young men and women join the Army and seek commissions at Sandhurst, but primarily the burden of the fighting and the dying is taken by primarily young men from the industrial areas of the North, the Midlands and Scotland.

But as far as the political elite who take the decisions that lead to war well…

I saw the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11. There is a scene in the film where Moore interviews Senators on the hill who voted for the Iraq war none of whom had relatives fighting in the conflict. Politicians can make decisions and rarely does the personal impact of the decisions impinge on their lives. It is the same in this country would the politicians of this country be so keen to make war if it was there children first in the firing line.

I am not a fan of the former Stoke South MP George Stevenson but he was opposed to the Iraq war and at least he was one of that rare group of MPs who did have a relative involved in the Iraq War. A grandson was wounded in the war and I imagine George’s view of the war may have been coloured by that consequence of the war.

But the other element where I see the covenant between the army and the rest of society break down is in the treatment of veterans.

Some one quoted Kipling which even after 100 years still has a resonance in the attitude that the non military have towards the military.

“ Its Tommy this and Tommy that
And Kick him out the brute
But its hero of his country
When the guns begin to shoot”

But what happens when the guns stop. About 10 years ago I was working for a mental health charity in East Manchester. One of the people I saw was a veteran of the First Gulf War and had been caught up in the incident that saw the heaviest loss of British soldiers in the war In a so called “friendly fire” incident an American A10 fighter attacked a British convoy of vehicles. The first troop carrier was destroyed and all the soldiers inside were killed, all of them were from the Greater Manchester area. The dead included the youngest British fatality an 18-year-old from Rochdale. The chap I saw was in the second vehicle, which also was hit, but he was saved as the blast went out of the vehicle, as the back doors were open. As you can imagine the young man was suffering badly from stress disorder but was not getting help from any of the psychiatric services in Tameside. I managed to get him referred to an Army charity that specialised in helping soldiers that had PTSD that had a residential unit in the Scottish border.

Similarly there is evidence that many ex squaddies end up on the streets when they leave the Army.

I think we have a real ambiguity in our relationship with the military from the politicians who send men and women to war to the crowds who line the streets of the Wiltshire town. We dutifully attend the Remembrance Day commemorations. We support our boys but all too often abandon them when the conflict ends.

Perhaps we should follow the American example and have a veterans bureau which sits at the heart of government if we expect our boys to defend our liberties then we should put the survivors of conflict more at the heart of government.