We are disturbed to learn that while many of our soldiers are being brought home from the battles dead, maimed and in crutches only to be given £92, 000 as compensation for losing a leg in such battles, the high ranking officers, colonels are being fed by the Government with feeding bottles, receiving £135, 000 in subsidy per child over their school years in private schools. On the whole, the tax-payer funded scheme covering 90 per cent of boarding school fees is said to have cost £172 million last year.
This is a glaring case of crass insensitivity on the part of the Armed Forces leadership of the United Kingdom. It’s so disheartening, especially in a situation where some wounded soldiers are having their benefits cut or reduced as many radio and TV interviews such veterans have given the press have shown. It is the more worrisome and obscene in every sense of the word, especially when many of our soldiers brought home dead, it has been widely reported that such soldiers did not have the needed military wares or equipment to protect them.
It is also quite callous that the two battles (Iraq and Afghanistan) which we would like to refer to as wars of blame which blood-thirsty Tony Blair and his equally blood-thirsty friend, George W. Bush Jnr. had got this country and the U.S. into, it has been widely reported by the media and the various public and independent inquiries including those carried out by some concerned soldiers’ families, have all concluded and lamented too, that our soldiers on the frontline do not have the required equipment including helicopters, the top brass are being fed like pets with each from the rank of Colonel receiving what Vigilance would aptly regard as unearned money to the tune of £135,000 to send their children to private schools – which is a good example of an unwritten way of segregating the British society into upper, middle and lower classes, something that should be considered by all justice loving people of Britain as an aberration in the 21st century. Is this what the coalition Government calls Big Society?
In all wars, those who really put their lives in the line of fire are the other ranks and not the top brass who hide in hotels and in well protected areas under the guise of mapping out strategies to be executed by the other ranks. The fact that in the two wars, the number of casualties and actual deaths amongst the lower-ranking troops has been more is a testimony to this assertion. Yet they are the most discriminated against.
Once private schools are tacitly given support thus, the government at the end of the day will have decreasing interest in funding public schools since the children of the policy makers, parliamentarians inclusive and the military top brass will find their way to these private schools, courtesy of their privilege backgrounds. The dire consequences of this segregation, to call a spade a spade, is that there will be a permanent yawning chasm in society making light of the whole concept of ‘Big Society’ which the coalition Government is currently championing. Or is David Cameron deceiving the British public by allowing these aberrations in society, while openly canvassing Big Society?
We shudder to think that the military top brass are being pampered thus, at a time when ‘cost cutters’ have infected every facet of the British society with the Coalition Cut Syndrome (CCS). What we at Vigilance can deduce from this disequilibrium in the British Armed Forces is that someone out there is telling us that all soldiers are equal, but some are more equal than the others.
Similarly, we are also very disturbed that there is a photocopy of what is happening in the military in the police leadership, where officers are costing the nation £150 million annually in bonuses for “just doing their job.”
From all indications, the coalition Government is an OxBridgian confraternity by some other name. They want to create a ‘Big Society’, yet they are busy on daily basis attacking the poor and their values. Of a truth, this Government hates the poor; this Government hates the toiling British masses and the future. It is a Government that is baby-sitting and feeding the men and women in the city and the aristocrats with feeding bottles, regularly changing their nappies for them, but leaving them for the poor to wash!
So what is to be done? Under the current economic reality, we strongly object to these preferential treatments in both the British military and the police. A government which has attempted to snatch milk from our children cannot be indulging the military and the police. This coalition Government surely provides a good case study in double standard.
Our candid advice is that the £172 million subsidies given to the military top brass and the £150 million to their police counterparts in bonuses be stopped forthwith and divert it to the Battle Back Challenge Centre (B2C2), while a similar Centre be set up for the police. It is hoped someone out there listening?
