Where Did UK Veterans' Day Suddenly Come From?

I was quite surprised on Friday (27th June) to find that in my diary it had been designated Veterans' Day (UK). No-one seems to know why that day had been picked (the US Veterans' Day is 11th November which is Armistice Day in the UK and Remembrance Day across much of Europe; the UK Remembrance Day is on the nearest Sunday following Armistice Day; in Germany it is on 15th November). It was the day in 1746 when Flora MacDonald helped Charles, the Stuart pretender to the English throne escape and the day in 1940 when USSR invaded Romania and in 1941 when Hungary declared war on the USSR; in 1974 President Richard Nixon arrived in Moscow for historic talks with Nikolai Brezhnev. So not really a day of great British success or conflict. On a more UK note it is the day Tony Benn in 1999 announced his retirement and British actor Hugh Grant was arrested in 1995. It may be supposed to be the last Friday in June, but why have we suddenly got a Veterans' Day anyway? We have Remembrance Day and that has become taken more seriously since the mid-1990s. It is now marked on the actual 11th November with a silence on public transport, in shops and in schools and things, something that was done in continental Europe, notably France and Belgium, but until the mid-1990s everything was reserved for the nearest Sunday, Remembrance Sunday.

Veterans' Day is different, it seems. I was alarmed as unknown to me it was another step that I noted in the UK's path to a police state to begin celebrating militarism to a greater extent. Veterans' Day is about combatants who are still alive. It has been taken right from the USA as 'veteran' in the UK has never been a term associated with soldiers, it is more typically used as a term referring to cars from the early 20th century. The UK government seems compelled not only to ape US foreign policy but also its cultural policies too.

Clearly I do not read the right newspapers to pick up on such developments as Veterans' Day because I had seen nothing about it until it appeared last week, though clearly it had been scheduled last year when the 2008 diaries were being printed. Perhaps they are sneaking it in quietly so that it does not face challenges. The only event I heard about on the radio was that 6 police officers in Hampshire who had formerly been soldiers had been awarded commemorative medals, they were picked at random. Hampshire is a very militarised county it has Aldershot at the North end of the county, a major Army centre in southern England and there are 5 regiments based at Winchester in Central Hampshire and it also has a lot of connections with the Navy too through Portsmouth. So if there were no marking events there I doubt there would be any elsewhere. This of course might change in the coming years.

What is this Veterans Day about? Well, earlier in the year the government said it wanted to raise the profile of the military in British society. Britain has always been a very militarised society and soldiers are highly respected, though in recent years young men have also seen them as an easy target for attacking too as a kind of challenge. As a result wearing uniforms in public has fallen away but is now being actively encouraged. The key thing is that Britain has been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003 and the steady rate of deaths in both countries as well as in locations like Kosovo constantly need replacing. The Territorial Army which is the part-time force is really being used all the time now as a reserve force with many units serving long periods outside the UK. If the UK wants to sustain its military involvement across the world, then it has to keep up its level of recruiting. Unemployment has been low for many years now, so young men and, increasingly, women are not being driven into the armed forces in the way they have been in previous decades by economic pressure. Of course making higher education inaccessible to working and lower middle class people will help boost recruitment and I imagine soon we will see an increase in military scholarships.

So, given that young men are attacking soldiers rather than wanting to join them, the government has decided to adopt this proactive approach, however softly they start it. It also fits in with the steps that are being taken towards a police state by bringing more of the population into uniform and raising their status amongst the populous. This helps establish an attitude of deference to authority which the government fears is lacking especially among young males with whom it has had particular issues and who have been the main target of ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders). More uniforms on the streets also cows people from protesting or 'causing trouble', so it is a natural development; another step down the path the UK is taking to an authoritarian state.

How do you really respect military personnel? Not by giving them some made up day seemingly picked at random, but actually supplying them with decent equipment and support so that they are not so easily killed as they are being in both Afghanistan and Iraq, not only by fire but through accidents. I have no issue respecting the military, but I think there is an issue about how they are used, the way they have been used in authoritarian states before, to represent the government and its strength; to intimidate people, however implicitly, through their presence. No case has been made publicly for having a Veterans' Day. Its name seems out of step with UK terminology and it seems to have been sneaked in without discussion about what it is supposed to achieve. If there was genuine support for such a day, then surely the government could have done it with more pride and arranging proper events. This is why I am very suspicious that it has very little to do with serving service people and more to do with the government's continuing attempts to suppress liberty in UK society.

Prince Harry's Tour of Duty

Now before I launch into this post I must state a vested interest first, which is that I believe having a royal family is only a bad thing for the UK. They are expensive and the are part of the non-democratic political system that we have in this country. I do not see that happening to be the only available Protestant family in 1714 deemed fit enough to rule Britain qualifies you for being anything of use in 2008. That aside we come to more current issues. The British Royal Family have long had connections with the military. All of the mature members are colonels-in-chief of at least one regiment and they regularly visit naval and airforce units too. This is part of the military-nobility-Anglican clergy complex we have in the UK, because the Queen is also head of the Church of England and the senior noble in the country. Whilst monarchs have not led units to war for almost three hundred years, their children have seen action. One of the Queen's uncles died in an aircraft crash while in the RAF and her husband saw action in the Second World War; her second son, Prince Andrew was in the Falklands Conflict of 1982 where in fact given how badly things went for the British at some stages he could have been killed. One of her grandsons, second in line to the throne, Prince William was barred by the military from going to fight in Iraq as they apparently feared that he would make his unit a particular target, though given the regularity of death among British soldiers in Iraq they would still have faced a great risk with or without him. Now it turns out his younger brother, so third in line to the throne, Prince Harry had been serving for 10 weeks in Afghanistan but since the story broke was brought home.

Now there are so many things wrong with the whole incident. The first one is that the government gagged all British media to prevent it from reporting that the prince was serving in Afghanistan, naively believing that if the bulk of the British population did not know then somehow terrorists would not either; surely if they are as strong as we are told they have infiltrated every British newspaper, radio and television company. If al-Qaeda actually existed or were as sophisticated as the US government makes out, they would have known about Harry's destination before he left the UK let alone by the time he reached Afghanistan where Osama bin-Laden is supposed to be hiding and the Taleban that the British are fighting are supposed to be his ally. Anyone with minimal skill could get his picture from the internet and see him on patrol in Afghanistan. (Personally I think bin-Laden is tucked up safely in a nice discreet palace in Saudi Arabia protected by his wealthy family and friends). The gagging or probably more accurately, bribing as the media was promised exclusive coverage when he returned, was more about keeping it secret from the British public for fear of comment.

One reason why the British government does not want such attention is that they are receiving growing criticism. So, most of the British population accepted fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, though many did not, but there was an expectation from all that the British Army was professional and had the latest equipment. Yet at inquest after inquest we find that British vehicles have insufficient armour, British military police lack bullet-proof vests, that British soldiers are sent into night battles lacking even basic night vision equipment. We are trying to police the world on the cheap. I expect Prince Harry got all the equipment he needed, but if his mother had married some different man than the Prince of Wales, he or his equivalent could quite easily be killed by a poorly armed local guerilla just like scores of other British men and women.

The second problem is why was he brought back? Either he is a soldier and should serve as all other soldiers do or he is not and he should be kept for ceremonial activities like his grandmother. He cannot be a proper soldier and yet not be a proper soldier. It seems clear that he relishes the normality of service, but at the end of the day he is very different to his comrades just because of the bed he was born in. What would happen if you or I had a son or a daughter in Iraq or Afghanistan and I decided that it was a bit too dangerous for them, could I simply have them sent home? No. I would have to leave them there to get killed and maimed while serving in an ill-equipped force acting with no clear objectives. I do not wish any ill-will to Prince Harry or anyone in the Armed Forces, but what difference do you think it would make to British policy if he was killed or injured? It is sickening that the fate of one man could swing things in a way that the death of hundreds of 'ordinary' people cannot.

What this whole debate seems to have been around is the fate of a single man. What it should be about is what light that discussion throws on British involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq and why the British government feels it has the right to censor coverage of issues that are impacting on so many families both in Britain and the countries we have invaded.