Taken for fools - by Richard... Saturday, July 24, 2010

Taken for fools - by Richard... Saturday, July 24, 2010

As one of the "baby bulge" children, I am of a generation that missed the war, but it is still very close and very real. As a kid, much of my time was spent exploring bomb sites, old bomb shelters, pill boxes and the paraphernalia of war.

Churchill was still alive when I was born, he was to have a spell as prime minister as I grew up, and I was one of the hundreds of thousands who filed past his coffin when he died and watched his funeral (pictured). You really did then have a sense that a moment in history had passed.

With that, the war is part of my make-up. I can't help it because that was what shaped my generation. It gave us much of our "world view", defined who we were and how we felt about ourselves. That, by the way, is why Cameron's recent stupidity about 1940 is so offensive.

Within that period of the war, there is of course that very special time of the Battle of Britain. It may not mean much to the current generation – especially as history teaching is so poor –but it really does have a very, very special influence on our generation.

It was about our parents, and the British nation, which stood up against the forces of evil. We, us and the Commonwealth and Empire, held the line and good prevailed. The Battle of Britain had a certain innocence and purity about it. It made you feel good about yourself because you were British, it was a British achievement and it was part of your heritage.

Perhaps, therefore, I should have stopped with the myth, and not looked too closely at the detail. For sure, I've read many of the books, seen the films such as "Reach for the Sky", watched the old newsreels and seen no end of documentaries. But look closer than that and much of the myth does not stand up to scrutiny.

That much should hardly come as a surprise – myths very rarely do. But what had been conveyed by the myth was a nation at war, protected by a Royal Air Force that was focused and, where it mattered, efficient yet humanitarian.

The closer one looks, though, the less efficient and – particularly – the less humanitarian the RAF begins to look. We are, for instance, more or less familiar with the decision in 1940 to shoot down German air-sea rescue aircraft, painted white and bearing red crosses. This is rehearsed in some detail by Robert Fisk and in this case one has to agree with him. The British were wrong to shoot them down.

Although the type used for rescues – the Heinkel 59 – was operated by the Luftwaffe, armed and camouflaged, the aircraft bearing red crosses were genuine "air ambulances". They were adapted and equipped for humanitarian missions and, cruicially, operated by a civilian search and rescue organisation, the Seenotdienst.

The Germans, in this case, played it absolutely straight, rescuing friend and enemy alike. Through the war, the unit saved 11,561 personnel from the sea – 7,746 Germans and 3,815 enemy – losing 278 of their own, with 114 missing.

But, if you can tolerate that, in the interests of our own survival, we broke international law, what is totally baffling is that, while we were shooting down German air-sea rescue aircraft which were saving our own airmen, we had no equivalent (or any) rescue provision of our own.

Thus, while the RAF was struggling to find enough pilots to man its aircraft, this fascinating report points out that "the absence of an effective SAR capability aggravated the situation since the downing of an aircraft in the Channel or North Sea usually meant the loss of its aircrew."

Here, it is not just the lack of concern over the humanitarian issue that offends. It is the utter stupidity of failing to value a scarce and, at the time, irreplaceable asset, upon which – as legend would have it – the fate of the nation rested. If we were so short of pilots, then it was criminal stupidity to allow them to drown when they were shot down over the sea, for want of a rescue service.

But, if this was 70 years ago, the sentiment – and the stupidity – has not changed. Still, as we saw with the "Snatch" Land Rover debacle and many other equipment issues besides, the State continues to be careless about putting lives at risk. And it still fails to take the most obvious and cost-effective measures to safeguard them.

What is perhaps the greater offence, though, is the legions of historians, analysts and writers who have so diligently and at such great length recorded the history of the Battle of Britain. Precious few mention this egregious failure and even Deighton gives it just one paragraph. "The fighting over the sea," he writes, "was an added worry for Dowding for, unlike the Luftwaffe, his pilots had no dinghies, no sea dye and no air-sea rescue organisation."

Patrick Bishop, on the other hand, repeats the canard that the ambulance aircraft were armed – they were not – and that they had been observed carrying out reconnaissance tasks. They had not.

As with the media, historians and others hold past events up to scrutiny, so that we might learn from them. In the absence of that scrutiny, we do not learn. And the lesson that we have not learned, sufficiently at least, is that even when its survival is dependent on it, the State will still throw your life away, for no reason than its own stupidity.

That we have been allowed the impression that, all those many years ago, the State knew what it was doing, and actually cared for those to whom it owed so much, is to have taken us for fools. More to the point, perhaps, we have allowed ourselves to be taken for fools. But the lesson is still there to learn. The State is not your friend. And, if you let it, it will kill you.

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Day 14 - Battle of Britain - by Richard... Friday, July 23, 2010

The weather early on this Tuesday yielded a slight haze in the Straits of Dover. Winds remained light in the Channel. It was showery with bright intervals in most other areas.

The Luftwaffe concentrated its attacks on a convoy codenamed "Pilot" which was steaming off the Lincolnshire coast. Two raiders were shot down by fighters. In the mid-afternoon, a lone Dornier dropped bombs on the old airship hanger at at Pulham and another attempted to bomb the Vickers Armstrong aircraft factory at Weighbridge, taking advantage of low cloud. Its bombs fell on the edge of the landing strip, missing the factory.

Pity the causal researcher though ...

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Stuffed, stuffed, stuffed - by Richard...

If ever there was a necessary state intervention, it was the loan agreed by a dying Labour government to Forgemasters to finance the production of components for nuclear power stations – of which there is a worldwide shortage of capacity.

Yet, one of the first things the Clegerons did was cancel the loan – and on grounds that now look very dubious indeed, if The Guardian and the rest of the media have got the details right.

With accusations of sleaze in the air, we are looking at an administration which is on track to be just as vile and disreputable as its predecessor, only in a fraction of the time, especially with that sleazebag Huhne being accused of messing up the loan – possibly deliberately (8 minutes into the video).

The current row follows on from a report by KPMG which tells us that without more direct support from the government, it is still uneconomic for utility companies to invest billions of pounds in nuclear power.

The view is that it is unlikely that the new generation of nuclear plants will actually get built – something which has been evident for some time – simply though noting the lack of news or actual progress. As the timetable slides, and as we see the Forgemaster loan go down the tubes, there is only one conclusion – we are stuffed, stuffed, stuffed.

The Chinese, who recently reported commissioning their first fourth generation plant, and has unveiled plans to increase its 9.1 gigawatts of nuclear power to 40 gigawatts by 2020, must be lost in amazement at the willingness of British politicians to commit economic (and political) suicide.

Our expectations of the previous administration were always low, but there are some who actually expected more of the present incumbents. But it seems to be a general rule of thumb when assessing governments that, just when you think things have got as bad as it is possible for them to be ... they get worse.

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Day 13 - Battle of Britain - by Richard... Thursday, July 22, 2010

After a weekend of indifferent weather, the Straits of Dover for this Monday was set fair. The rest of the Channel was generally cloudy, with light westerly winds. There were bright intervals between showers in the east.

Readers of The Daily Telegraph were treated to headlines telling them of 24 "Nazi Raiders" shot down over the weekend. But this was to be a day when daylight activity was light, with only sporadic reconnaissance flights, occasional ineffective attacks on shipping and nuisance raids. Typical of this activity was at about 1145 hours when a Ju88 penetrated to Bristol and Cardiff and then Penarth, dropping bombs at the locations. The aircraft was intercepted and the rear gunner is believed to have been killed. The aircraft escaped across the south coast.