THE BETRAYAL OF OUR SERVICEMEN

While the media focus on Captain (now Colonel) Tom Moore's fundraising exploits, spare a thought for less fortunate servicemen. I wish Tom Moore (a fellow Yorkshireman) well on reaching his century in life and he deserves every accolade, but I cannot feel the government and media are using him as a human shield to hide murkier matters going on with the armed forces. Since Tony Blair signed the Good Friday Agreement, a sustained and orchestrated governmental witch hunt against servicemen having served in Northern Ireland in the fight against Marxist terrorism. Let us be clear, Sinn Fein and their paramilitary wing the IRA are not nationalists and have been instrumental in opening up Ireland to non-White immigration. Let us also be clear, I am aware of the evils the liberal ruling clique in London did to the Irish, but the ordinary English, Scottish and Welsh have also suffered for centuries under their tyranny. And this is what we are dealing with here: ordinary people who were placed under extraordinary circumstances by those same elites. Those ordinary soldiers who are still living were merely trying to protect ordinary civilians from acts of terrorism.

 

 

 

It is easy for us sitting on civvy street to make judgements in hindsight on people who have but a split second to make the right judgement. If someone runs through your checkpoint, do you shoot him? What if he is just drunk? What if he has a bomb? Those are the scenarios our servicemen had to deal with in Northern Ireland. And those servicemen were trained to react in certain ways, given those scenarios. And then many years later, the new army of bureaucrats in Westminster have decided to prosecute the soldiers for what the previous army of bureaucrats told them to do. What it comes down to is the fact that in every military structure, there is a chain of command, which has to be strictly followed because lives will at some point depend on it. If there is blame, and I am not saying there is, then it lies not with the ordinary soldier, nor even the top brass, but with the political leaders whose orders everyone had to follow. We must never forget that the enemy those soldiers faced intimidated Irish Catholic communities into harbouring them and carried out atrocities against ordinary civilians, such as the 1992 and 1996 Manchester Bombings. They also supplied drugs in the communities they supposedly cared about.

 

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence People and Veterans Captain Johnny Mercer MP had promised to end repeated prosecution of veterans without new evidence by 18th March, but this was empty rhetoric because claims of new evidence having been found are always being made, which means veterans constantly live in fear of having more charges trumped up against them. Then on 18th March itself, he promised a five-year time limit for historical accusations, but this will not include Northern Ireland veterans. Already we have seen the suicide of one persecuted veteran Eddie 'Spud' Murphy of 1st Battalion, Royal Highland Fusiliers in February of this year. He was under investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland at the time. He only got to half Captain Tom's age and had survived an IRA bomb and a tour of Iraq. 

 

It is was a mark of the Blair era that the terrorists of the Maze prison were released while the prosecution of soldiers began. Iraq was even more cynical with the war criminal Blair sending the troops into Iraq and then the team of lawyers to prosecute said troops behind them for any perceived misdemeanour. At the moment, Dennis Hutchings is being prosecuted for shooting John Pat Cunningham, who had run away from his patrol in County Tyrone in 1974. 78-year-old Hutchings was denied trial by jury and must face a Diplock Trial in which only Mr Justice Colton will give a verdict, although the trial is currently delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite being on dialysis for renal failure and having heart problems, Hutchings has launched a crowdfund to fight against the political institutionalised discrimination faced by ex-servicemen, which can be found by following this link. Currently, there are six former soldiers being prosecuted for alleged historical offences.