Legion of Liberals

Some bleeding hearts in the Royal British Legion are trying to undermine our boys in Iraq and Afghanistan by claiming that the Government should do more to provide medical treatment, compensation, facilities for families and equipment more suited to dealing with roadside bombs than to being pelted with flowers. The Secretary for War and the Colonies, Des Browne, has "persuaded" the Danes to supply our boys with Merlin helicopters. These are made in the UK, so it seems only right that British troops should have the use of them, which must be why they are in Denmark at the moment. Nevertheless, the bleeding hearts persist with their whines, the Royal British Legion stating that it believes public sector workers such as soldiers, sailors and bombers "deserve more from their government" than the salary for which they contracted and the on-the-job training for social meltdown which Tony Blair has so kindly thrown in. "They deserve immediate medical treatment and just compensation if they are injured," fulminates the Legion further. Of course, it is all very well to make emotive appeals about the injured, but the Government, poor thing, must deal in hard economic facts. Casualty figures for the past eight months are "already set to outstrip the whole of 2006", owing to the improving security situation. The NHS spends endless taxpayers' billions attempting to provide indiscriminate medical care, and we all know what's happening to that. In any case, the Legion's own propaganda claims that members of the armed forces deserve this nomenklatura treatment by virtue of having "committed themselves to put their lives on the line for their country". Very few of our boys have committed themselves to put their lives on the line for Tony Blair, Halliburton and their chums; and in the absence of such commitment from the troops, and with identity cards and Son of Trident set to solve so many of our problems, is it really fair or British of them to expect preferential treatment from some kind of nanny state?