A Bomber Command Memorial

Why not?

As much as anything else, it now requires those who were loudest in calling for it to reconsider their ordinarily uncritical adulation of Winston Churchill, who pointedly refused to acknowledge the RAF in his VE Day speech.

And, like Prince William's service with RAF Search and Rescue, it should go some way to seeing off the neoconservative scheme to abolish the RAF within a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command and run by the Germans, although that role might now have passed to the French in these days of Sarkozy.

By no means all of the 55,000 war dead of Bomber Command were involved in the carpet bombing of the German urban working class, overwhelmingly Hitler's Social Democratic opponents, whom that carpet bombing reduced to unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases, while immense clouds of bluebottles gathered on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed.

None of this shortened the War by one second. Quite the reverse, in fact. At the Nuremburg Trials, the terms of reference had to specially written (as such things always are, of course) in order to preclude any German comeback over this. So even then, even we ourselves at least implicitly acknowledged the wrong that we had done. But I repeat that nowhere near 55,000 people - and that is only the number of the dead, not of all those who fought - were involved in this. The rest deserve a memorial. And now, they have one.