Wednesday, 4 November 2015

Posh Booing Noises In Background

With that, in block capitals, did BBC Parliament caption Jeremy Corbyn during Prime Minister's Questions. "Foreground", surely? But we take the point.

Iain MartinIsabel Hardman, and a particularly hard nut for Corbyn to crack, John Rentoul, were all disgusted at the behaviour on the Conservative benches.

Behold, our governing party. A public school Sixth Form, boozed and coked up to its eyeballs, and completely out of control.

And at what were they howling like dogs at the moon? At the words of an Army veteran who was going to lose two thousand pounds in tax credits. The Blackadder Officer Class has not improved in a hundred years.

Corbyn knows that he is onto a winner with the tax credit cuts. Once they kick in, then the 2020 General Election will be over, as surely as the 1997 General Election was over before the end of 1992.

Not only are tax credit recipients exactly the people who decide General Elections, but they were specifically assured that these cuts would not be proposed.

After this week, the SNP's record on this issue also leaves it very vulnerable indeed.

Tying it all in, perfectly accurately, with the endemic neglect of veterans, is both morally and tactically correct.

If the Military Covenant ever really were honoured, then where would be the need for the astonishing plethora of military charities, even including the Legion as anything more than a social institution?

MPs must be the last people who still talk about "Armistice Day". Things might have been very different if that had continued to be observed. But it was not.

Peter Hitchens and Ed West are hardly peaceniks, at least as a matter of principle. Did West oppose the Iraq War? I honestly cannot remember. Hitchens most certainly did. And many another adventure besides. But for the most Tory realist of reasons.

That they now have such doubts about what Remembrance Sunday and the Poppy Appeal have become, with West's going so far as to propose a wholesale replacement, is as indicative as the fact that these days, even Scout camps are held over the Remembrance Sunday weekend. Halloween themed, apparently. It all sounds great fun.

The whole thing used to be about the two World Wars. But in the present century, it has become about drumming up support for recent, ongoing and putative military interventions of, in every case, the most highly questionable kind.

Moreover, this country's economically, socially, culturally and politically dominant element, the middle middle classes, has little or no present connection to the Armed Forces. That is as true of the Conservative voters who are always its single largest bloc as it is of any of their neighbours.

Military service is something that was done long ago, and in incomparably better causes, by relatives, usually male, who are now either extremely old, or dead. Whatever else the annual festival of militaria has encouraged, it has certainly not been recruitment anywhere much beyond the uttermost extremes of the class system.

And most people simply do not feel any affinity with either of the uttermost extremes of the class system, people with whom it is perfectly possible, and indeed perfectly normal, never to come into any kind of direct contact.

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