Fit for Heroes

This year's summer and autumn will of course be blitzed with the droning dead-cat hum and Stuka screech of rah-rah for the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, in which an obliging few and some immigrants aided Sir Winston Boris de Pfeffel Churchill in his glorious victory over Hugh Dowding. Nevertheless, it appears that certain people have again failed to learn one of history's most persistent lessons. It may be all very well to fight fire with fire, to battle climate change by exacerbating climate change and to moderate witch-hunts with mature debate; but utilising the wog to fight against the wog is almost always asking for trouble. New Labour discovered this during the aftermath to the glorious crusade in Iraq, when glamorous yet controversial rearguard actions were fought against giving asylum to Iraqis who had helped British forces, and against allowing Gurkha veterans to settle in the UK. Now military veterans from all over the Commonwealth seem to think that just because they have helped Britain with its dirty work they have the right to expect some sort of kickback from Her Majesty's Government. This is the sort of moral dilemma that gnaws at every Conservative heart: does collaboration in the act of wog-bombing help to dilute the wogginess of the obliging wog? Such is the emotional resonance of the issue that at least one member of the Parliamentary Brexit Party has already argued that those who have "fought to defend" the white man's islands should be looked at hard, and perhaps allowed to pay taxes, provided they don't try to bring all their wives and children and mothers along to live it up on Universal Credit.