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The Royal British Legion is on its knees

This article appeared in The Herald

I’M sitting with a few of the younger members of the Paisley Comrades Club, the Royal British Legion Scotland premises near the town’s centre. It’s a quiet Monday night, although there are a few people in the snooker room, the hall has been set up for carpet bowls and there is a gathering in the lounge for a meeting about war pensions for territorials serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

John Heirs, 47, is telling me about the forthcoming “dug-out” night, an evening of Second World War nostalgia, when the drink will be even cheaper than usual, the bill of fare somewhat basic, and the sound of Vera Lynn will bring a far-away look to old soldiers’ eyes.

There are no corned beef sandwiches tonight – or Second World War veterans for that matter – but those waiting for the meeting have an unmistakable comradely spirit. “You come here to meet old mates, ” says 62-year-old Pat Gallacher, who served with the Royal Engineers in Germany, Northern Ireland and Cyprus from 1963 to 1974. “Folk are like-minded.”

With 900 or so members, the legion in Paisley remains fairly strong, although Pat and others admit numbers have fallen recently. One senior legionnaire, Bob Reid, died last week aged 95, and the average age is creeping ever upwards as younger members are slow in coming forward.

“When they come out, their first thought is to get a job, although we would like to think later on they would get an attachment to the legion,” says Gerry Mulholland, 59, ex-RAF and the club’s parade commander.

Matters have got to the stage, however, where the organisation in Scotland is seeking to change its rules to allow anyone who shares the legion’s values to join, regardless of whether they have served in the armed forces.

Mr Heirs, who spent 27 years in the TA, is not convinced of the benefits of going down that route. “I’d rather keep membership to ex-military people and their families,” he says. “Everyone who is a member has been governed by military rule. We understand the military hierarchy, if you like. People from outside don’t necessarily understand that.”

According to Neil Griffiths, national spokesman for the legion in Scotland, reality will force the movement to “marry or die”. He said: “We have a demographic problem plain and simple. We’re not at tipping point, but we are at a point where we’ve got to act.

“In 1994-95 the Royal British Legion Scotland had 75,000 members, which was our record. That was the peak moment for combining both the war-time generation and those who did national service. You had the maximum number of people at the right age to be in the legion.

“I would reckon the average age of members is between 55 and 60. Very few people join in their 20s and 30s – they never have done. We’ve fallen to 57,000 in the space of 12 years and know it can’t go on like that.

“Nowadays there’s only 1000 people leaving the Army every year, most of them under 30, and the numbers dropping off are too high at the other end. So if we’re going to survive into this new century, then we have to expand our potential membership.”

Some branches are already feeling the pinch. Clubs in Inverurie in Aberdeenshire and Macduff in Banffshire have had to move to smaller premises. Others, from Inverness to Glenrothes, are struggling due to crippling maintenance costs and dwindling memberships.

Meanwhile, the British Legion club in Forres, Moray, has warned it could close within two years unless ways can be found to cut costs and increase turnover. Eric Munro, club treasurer, says it lost £4000 in 2005 and £3000 in 2006, adding: “If we lose another £4000 this year, we only have a couple of years’ trading left.”

Given the charitable status clubs enjoy, it is left to the discretion of local authorities to set council tax rates on their premises. Most do not charge full rates, but Moray Council has refused to offer any relief, a decision against which local clubs are appealing. “Any reduction in the £8000 we pay in rates would be a huge benefit to us and others who are in the same position,” says Mr Munro.

Before veterans declare, like Private James Frazer – the gloomy Scot in Dad’s Army – that they’re all doomed it should be noted not only that funds raised through the Poppy Appeal are rising year on year, but that donations from 15 to 24-year-olds now outstrip those of any other age group.

The only reasonable conclusion, believes Neil Griffiths, is that young people are now better educated on the importance of remembrance. “You have to remember that, in the 1970s, people were fed up hearing dad go on about what he did in the war,” he says. “But now the grandchildren are fascinated. History itself is also much more popular now. There’s so much of it on television and on the internet. You even have millionaire historians.”

Perhaps in acknowledgement of the generosity of the young, the Royal British Legion in England – the organisations north and south of the border have always been, and remain, separate – now has a presence on the social networking website Facebook, aimed at recruiting younger poppy sellers.

In between discussing the untrustworthiness of politicians, the rights and wrongs of Iraq and Afghanistan, Scottish independence (“maybe not such a bad idea” is the consensus) and what they’d do with George Galloway (it cannot be printed here) , the men in Paisley are discussing Remembrance Sunday, which this year coincides with Armistice Day. A ritual of obeisance to the war dead, it is, for legionnaires, bound up with the ideas of duty and service the military instils.

“It is part of our constitution to make sure the public never forgets the debt of honour we owe,” says Mr Heirs. “It’s our duty to keep the flag flying.”

Members enjoy the benefits of any good social club – parties, bingo nights, away trips, company of friends, cheap alcohol. But the year-round charitable focus of the legion should not be ignored.

“Branches do a lot benevolent work, as well as being a social club,” says Mr Griffiths. “Every branch has a welfare officer who is trained to give advice to all ex-service folk. Many of our members are also trained to represent veterans at war pension tribunals.

“Clubs raise funds on an individual basis. I would say the legion in Scotland gives away in the region of £800,000 a year to various causes.”

Hand in hand with supporting the ex-service community financially, the charity also acts as a pressure group. Campaigns in recent years have seen Far-East prisoners of war paid £10,000 each in compensation (by the British Government, not the Japanese), and posthumous pardons finally obtained for deserters executed in the First World War.

“We’re campaigning for better housing and terms of service for servicemen, as well as better compensation for those who are injured. And we’re campaigning to have more receptions for soldiers returning from Afghanistan or Iraq,” Mr Griffiths says. “Right now, they’re being ignored.”

That feeling is echoed by Mr Mulholland: “People seem to forget we have people out there fighting in war zones. Whether or not you agree with where we’re sending them, the nation has a duty of care towards them.”

A report published in 2006 found ex-servicemen aged 16 to 44 were three times more likely than the general population to have long-term mental health problems. Earlier this month, the government announced a change in the rules to allow compensation for multiple injuries suffered in the line of duty up to £285,000. It was widely reported at the same time, as the Paisley legionnaires are vocally aware, that a civilian typist with the RAF received over £400,000 for a sore thumb.

“The mindset of the MoD is ‘how little can we give?’, ” says Mr Griffiths.” Okay, they have to look after taxpayers’ money, but sometimes it goes too far and that’s what we’re here for. Unfortunately it looks like the price of current wars is one we’ll be paying for many years to come.”

With much of the financial burden for the welfare of future veterans likely to fall on charities – as it always has in Britain – legion clubs may attempt to strengthen their hand through appealing to existing members to “use it or lose it”.

Yet with a vote due at next summer’s annual conference on changes to membership rules to allow anyone to apply to become an associate member, Mr Griffiths believes the way forward is a no brainer.

“Reaching out to a diminishing ex-service community is all very well,” he says, “but the only way to stop the slide is to expand our membership criteria to people who share our values. There is no other way.”


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Tour de France visits London

THE first time the Tour de France visited Britain was in 1974, when, perhaps still smirking with pride at their new motorway system, the brass in their wisdom decided the best way of showing off our sceptred isle was to have riders plough up and down a colourless stretch of dual carriageway near Plymouth.

Twenty years later the Tour returned and lessons seem to have been learned, the race visiting Dover, Brighton and Portsmouth and the crowds turning out in number. After a thirteen year absence from these shores, the opening time trial prologue rolls out in central London today, with Trafalgar Square, The Mall and Buckingham Palace offering a sublime stage backdrop.

Despite such grandstanding from the capital, however, attitudes towards road cycling here remain lukewarm. Since the Tour last visited British Cycling’s Premier Calendar Road Race Series has much reduced in size – in Scotland alone the Glasgow to Dunoon classic has disappeared as has the Tour of the Kingdom stage race in Fife. Motorists might wail and gnash about congestion charges and speed cameras but on Britain’s roads the humble cyclist is firmly fastened to the bottom of the food chain. Closing a stretch of road for half and hour to allow a cycle race through is felt to be  the height of leftie, tree-hugging madness.

When it comes to the Tour de France, it is a perennial mystery to those of us enthralled by its majesty that Brits on the whole just don’t, well, get it. For a start terrestrial TV coverage in the UK is now pretty much non-existent and it has become increasingly difficult for the novice to get a handle on the sport’s many subtleties. Riders compete for themselves and a team, egad!

It is perhaps its refusal to dish itself up in nice bite-sized portions that makes the Tour an ill-fit with British television schedulers. Over the next three weeks, 21 teams of nine riders each will cover a total distance of 3,550km, split over 21 stages. Each stage is an individual race in itself, although stage-winners often have no chance of winning the yellow jersey, given to the rider who completes the course in the lowest time. Overall winners tend to be able to perform well in the mountains and ride time trials, of which there are three, but there are two further jerseys up for grabs – a green one for the ‘King of the Mountains’ and a white and red polka dot one for the top sprinter.

Yet while all these events are won by individuals, a strong Tour contender must have a strong team to shield him from the wind on flat stages, fetch him drinks and food from the team car, or ward off would-be attackers by setting a good pace in the high mountain stages. The British are said to admire a plucky loser but in the Tour de France the loser is no loser at all. The ‘lantern rouge’ is the rider who is last overall, but he will have suffered a great deal to complete the course and may well have sacrificed much of his energy at the service of his leader early on in the race.

All of which gets to the heart of what sets the Tour de France so utterly apart from other sporting events. The cycling supporter is as much in awe of the race itself, its promise of heroism, the ritual of man defying both geography and his own body, as he is of particular riders. And that is why, despite the doping scandals of 1998 and 2006, the Tour remains unbowed. In France, millions buy L’Equipe every day to read detailed analysis of the race and its riders. In Britain we may yet discover that bicycles aren’t just for coming over all green.

This article appeared in The Herald


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Blair. More battles lost than battles won

IN Oliver Stone’s film Nixon the eponymous, and incumbent, president, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, looks up at a portrait of JFK in the White House and exclaims: “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.”

In the space of ten years, Tony Blair, on his ascension Britain’s youngest prime minister in almost 200 years, has been both Kennedy and Nixon. The man who, on the morning of May 2, 1997, beamed from ear to ear on our television sets and spoke of rejuvenation and radical reform, has latterly borne the mantle of one who knows and accepts there are many who love to hate him. No end in sight in Iraq, the cash-for-honours inquiry threatening to leave an indelible stain on his record, the perception is that, Nixon-like, he has given up listening to advice. What certainly seems to have changed in the last year or so, is that he no longer seems to care what they – left-wing commentators, anti-Blairites in general, much of the country – say about him.

When they look at Blair, they see Britain for what it is – centrist, pro-market, in various ways “neoliberal” – and many of them don’t like it. And some of them, naively, believe that once Blair, and Bush, are gone, and the troops have come home from Iraq, that neo-liberal interventionism will no longer have currency and that we can all forget about the threat fundamentalist Islam poses to the West because that threat will wither and die.

Well, it may seem like ancient history, but Blair was not always as hawkish as the doves assert him to be. Ten years ago no-one could have anticipated that his premiership would be defined by a war, on several fronts, against terrorism. Shortly after becoming prime minister, indeed, he declared: “Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.”

From the beginning, Blair himself wanted his great achievement to be public service reform in England – since devolution, Scotland has clung largely to the old Labour panacea of public services entirely funded, provided and controlled by the state. Mindful of having left it late and perhaps fearful that Gordon Brown might quietly sideline the reform agenda when he takes office, the past 12 months have seen the PM go hell for leather at “securing his legacy.” Having relied on Conservative support to stave off a backbench rebellion over last year’s education bill, which gave secondary schools in England greater control over admissions and budgets, he has pushed forward the building of more city academies and introduced greater competition between health providers in the NHS, with the aim of effecting a service “driven by consumers, not providers.”

The motivating force behind these reforms has been to make the welfare state more effective. Yet while the Labour party has always been concerned with social justice and using “the system” as a means of supporting those least equipped to cope with life, the Blair credo insists it must also promote and reward those able to climb the ladder of opportunity.

That essentially meritocratic stance was outlined as recently as last month, when he went on record to claim that his reputation would recover with time and perspective, adding: “I also believe that the essential Labour position, which is to get over the old divisions of left and right politics and to say you don’t have to choose between a more just society and a more economically efficient one … will hold.”

Meritocracy, of course, means the de facto abandonment of equality as a political ideal. It means a smaller role for the state and a greater role for market forces – but given time, Blair’s thinking goes, meritocratic policies may well be a better means of increasing social mobility, which is, scandalously, at an all-time low.

No-one dare speak of the “undeserving poor” but with David Cameron sniping at Gordon Brown over his management of Britain’s accounts and questions being asked about the effectiveness of Labour’s public spending, Blair’s middle-ground “modernisation” agenda – hailed by both presidential candidates in the recent French elections – is likely to have a bright future.

So, modernisation was the big idea, but Iraq will still dominate the political obituaries. Britain’s part in the invasion, hugely unpopular from the beginning, was driven almost entirely by Blair. What moved him? No shortage of commentators have imputed any number of cynical, sanguinary and imperialist reasons for his actions, but it is more likely that he simply believed, to the exclusion of all sense, in his own inherent rightness.

To fathom the origins of that moral bombast, think back to the early days of Labour in power. The party has won a landslide victory; the prime minister can do no wrong. Perhaps he begins to believe in his own legend; perhaps he starts listening too much to people like Peter Mandelsohn. Then Princess Diana dies and he utters a few lachrymose words which tap expertly into the prevailing mood of emotional incontinence. In April 1998 his diplomacy is paramount in securing the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland and his amour propre cranks up a few points. There follows the successful military intervention in Kosovo, the rescue of Sierra Leone and even the ousting of the Taliban in Afghanistan post 9/11 and Blair must believe that the crusade to enforce democracy wherever there is intractableness to be not only right and good but his own personal moral duty.

In the case he put before the British people as justification for entering Iraq, as in his role in the peerages mess, there are question marks over his personal probity, but in the matter of deciding that the war was just, or even sensible, it is his personal judgment which should be condemned.

And yet, while the left and swathes of the liberal press take it more or less for granted that the disasters of Iraq are to blame for the continued existence of the global terrorist threat, we now know, for example, that young British Muslims who plotted to kill thousands in the UK were being indoctrinated at mujahideen training camps as early as 1994.

We also know that after 9/11 Blair toured the globe in an attempt not only to drum up support for the US, but also for a Middle East peace plan and the fight against world poverty. In those efforts he can hardly be said to have succeeded, but his greatest failure has lain in not publicly challenging the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, or using his influence with President Bush to ensure thought was given to how Iraq would be handled after the coup.

Weighed against such debunked grandiosity, the genuine achievements of the Blair government – a decade of economic growth and high employment, the minimum wage – do seem slight. Perhaps he is right to predict that his reputation will recover, but the days of people taking his word for it are long gone.