Retsdon

If this were a comedy skit, it would be pretty amusing. But it's not a comedy skit and if I still lived in Britain and had significant financial skin in the game it would make me very angry indeed that two years after the Brexit vote the UK's chief negotiator still hasn't even done his basic homework. In all my 60+ years, red or blue there has never been a more incompetent, untrustworthy, and basically useless collection of politicians as are in government just now. The whole lot are just a pack of snake-oil salesmen.

But would they talk? My great-uncle, whom I well remember from my childhood, was, according to my mother, apparently posted as missing presumed dead sometime in 1916 or 17 whilst fighting against the Turks. I suppose it must have either been at Gallipoli or in Mesopotamia. Anyway, in 1921, three years after the war, he just walked back into the farmhouse one day. He wouldn't say where he'd been and never ever talked about the war again as long as he lived. He was a great old boy actually. He had a Velocette LE that he rode into town on market day once a week,.and (probably after he'd had a couple) he'd sometimes let me sit on it and rev the engine. But talk about the war? I"m sure not at any price.

@Welsh1 : A very good and informative post....

I've also been looking at the Dutch stats. Apparently the figures are not all that they might seem. https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2017/01/a-low-crime-rate-dutch-police-are-unaware-of-most-crimes-says-leaked-report/

the road to Hell is paved with good intentions'.

In all truth I think it's probably too late to do anything. The horse has bolted.

I think you're conflating two separate issues. I'm all for a massive redistribution of wealth. For a start, not only would it be morally right, it would be good for the economy too. After a certain point, rich people simply hoard their money, the velocity of money decreases and the economy suffers. Enrich the poor and, among other things you increase discretionary spending which in turn boosts the economy. More importantly you improve people's lives. We are in agreement. But none of that has much to do with carrying knives and stabbing people for pretty much no reason. In the Welsh mining towns of the 30s, people were poor as church mice, but young men weren't killing their peers for not showing enough 'respect'. Never - not at all in fact. It simply didn't happen. No, the use of weaponry is a deliberate lifestyle choice, and I'm sorry, but it is an insult to other poor people who don't go that route to blame poverty for what is nothing else but calculatedly anti-social behavior.

But what happens when the target audience doesn't want to know? At some point there must be a Yin to the Yang. Yes, there's a very strong argument for widening the range of positive opportunities, educating people better, etc, etc. But there needs also to be a dark side to balance it. And one of the causes, in my view, of the almost total breakdown of law in certain communities and areas is that we've lost the moral fortitude to do our duty on the dark side. But when the actual situation is that a single London hospital is seeing almost a thousand stabbings a year, then you're fast approaching the point at which normal civil society itself is in danger of breaking down, and eventually society must either succumb completely or fight back. But of course, fighting involves violence and we've become squeamish about it. I'm all for providing the target audience with opportunities, and redistributing resources more equitably. Nevertheless in the current climate, if I were in a position to dictate English law, I'd quite literally bring back public floggings for carrying and using weapons in public places. Not just for the weapons, but mainly because these crimes damages the proper functioning of society and that should be an absolute no-no. Give it six months and I don't mind betting that knife crime would almost cease completely. Uncivilized? Not at all - it's how things are supposed to work.The duty of a government is to maintain civil society by whatever means necessary. So offer help on one hand, and threaten massive retribution on the other. Yin and Yang working in harmony. We have these social problems because our laws in western society have become unbalanced.

' This year we will admit 800 stabbing and 60 gunshot victims with life- or limb-threatening injuries. Knife/gun injuries are about 30% of our workload says a London surgeon. Aside from the trauma to victims families, etc, the waste of money and resources that could be used elsewhere must be just phenomenal. How did the capital of the country ever get into this state? To my mind anyway, the political classes of all hues have one hell of a lot to answer for. Over the last 30 years the whole lot of them have systematically betrayed the interests of the people they were supposed to be representing.

A very good speech.

And you see the result when tourists rent motorbikes in Thailand.

It's a hard one to fathom. I just looked at the pay scales and to be honest, they're not bad at all. The British 'other ranks' soldier is considerably better paid than his US Army or Marine counterpart. The service benefits aren't probably as good, but how many young men of 18 join up for a pension at 40+? Fear of danger? I find that hard to believe either. Young men have always been up for excitement and adventure. Look at the Foreign Legion. Admittedly its net is cast wider, but the FFR can afford to be extremely choosy about who it accepts, https://www.stripes.com/news/europe/americans-struggle-to-meet-the-french-foreign-legion-s-high-bar-1.497591 , and the Legion is famously profligate with the lives of its soldiery and its discipline is notorious. Rather, I think the British Army's recruitment problems stem from its hidebound image. I don't know how true it might still be today, but the image most people have of the British Army is one of a very class based hierarchical organization in which young men with a private education who speak with plums in their mouths get to be in charge of, and order about, other young men with regional accents and local schooling. As I say, that may no longer be the case, and if it's not, then the Army should shout it from the rooftops because, true or not, it's what most people believe to be true. And if it is still true, then the Army needs to change the way it does things because the days when the hoi polloi touched their caps are past and gone, and they're not coming back. Consequently young men nowadays will forgo the opportunity of good pay and adventure rather than jump to attention for a wet-behind-the-ears rupert whose daddy is so rich that he doesn't bother to draw his pay and who is in charge almost solely because of his privileged upbringing. Of course, you're still going to have officers, but perhaps the Army might want to look at where it recruits its officer corps from and widen that net. Then perhaps it might get more ordinary lads to join up. Tradition is all very well, but at some point for everything in existence it becomes a case of adapt or die.

Is there a shortage of dogs that they command such enormous prices? To me it's mind- boggling that anyone would pay near £1000 for a two month old pup, no matter how well bred.

A scrappy game really, and one that South Africa should have won but ultimately deserved to lose. Throw away two attacking lineout balls in the opposition's 22 - especially when you have the dominant pack - and you get what you deserve. That's two games on the trot that the Boks have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory - they did the same thing against the All Blacks in Pretoria a few weeks ago. It' s getting to be a habit.

Bangers are banned?? That's saddening.

His channel's called 'Vanbanter' and it' has over 100,000+ subscribers. He seems like a nice lad, but quite honestly the culture and language is completely and utterly alien to me. Of course, that's quite possibly because I"m just getting too old......

😅😅 Of course, if you didn't laugh you'd cry. There are probably more Londoners talking like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOWsR5CdHFk than are talking like you or me.

My Dad....the un-military-looking, balding cove in the back row with a pen in his pocket. The photographer's stamp on the back says the picture was taken on 10th March 1946 in Bergamo in Italy. Aside from my father I recognize his friend whose book I mentioned further up the thread, (he's in the front row to the right of the dog) but who the others are I have no idea. I'm certain though that it's a group shot of the officers of the 1/4 KOYLI - on the original photo with a magnifying glass I can see that everyone except my Dad is wearing the regimental horn and ram's head badges on their lapels and the 49th division 'polar bear' shoulder patches. My father wasn't KOYLI, but he was the 1/4th's battalion M.O. from when they landed D Day+4 until at least when this pic was taken, so I suppose they considered him one of their own by that time and invited him along. It would be nice to know more, and looking back I regret that I didn't ask my Dad more about this stuff, but quite honestly I never got the feeling that he wanted to talk about it. Anyway, too late now. And....my Granddad

😁😁😁

🤣🤣

https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Infantry-Knew-1914-1919-Chronicle/dp/0349106355/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1541004032&sr=8-1&keywords=the+war+the+infantry+knew If you haven't yet read it, it comes recommended. Sorry...

That and an increasing addiction to a consumer lifestyle. Fifty years ago where my house is in Thailand the farmers used to have to barricade their pigs into covered stockades at night to prevent tigers coming out of the jungle and taking them. There are people my age who can remember those times. Fast forward a generation and nowadays in my street half the houses have two or more cars parked outside and down the road they're bulldozing massive tracts of land to build a 6 lane bypass around the city. That way everyone can drive to the shopping malls to buy consumer tat without getting stuck in traffic. Needless to say there are no tigers around. They disappeared completely about 30 years ago. In Britain there hasn't been so much of a change. In the developing world the transformation is fast, massive and ongoing. For the wildlife the future doesn't look good at all.

Well Walshie, I'm not sure that most were heroes so much as people who just did what they had to do when it was put in front of them. I don't know. I think it's that when I was younger pretty much every adult I knew had been in uniform during WW2, and a fair few of the older ones in WW1. So Remembrance Day was their day for actually remembering the people who'd died alongside them and what they'd been through themselves. So at that time, as someone who was too young to have shared that experience, I was an observer rather than a participant and it would have been a bloody cheek to have pretended otherwise. And I think that perspective has carried on to this day. The other thing is that forty years ago people were far more subdued about everything. Maybe a few days before the 11th you'd see some people wearing poppies, then for the day itself most people would, but other than the service from the Cenotaph broadcast on TV, that was about it. There was a quiet understated dignity there. But all that seemed to change somewhere in the late 80s / early 90s. Perhaps that's because as the older generation died out there was a fear that Remembrance Day would die with them. So the whole tone changed and it almost seemed to be promoted as an event. Suddenly there was far more of a fuss and dance about 'remembering'. I mean, no football team would have ever dreamed of having poppy symbols stitched into the shirts when I was a boy because I'm quite sure it would have been regarded as the height of bad taste. But now it's apparently become mandatory and woe betide any team that doesn't conform. Why is that? Is it because we presume to remember the 'heroes' of WW2 better than they remembered themselves? And as you see I"m putting 'heroes' into inverted commas - and that's because I"m thinking of a schoolmaster I had who, although he'd parachuted into Arnhem 20 years earlier, was a well-dodgy sadist with questionable sexual proclivities who was as far from being a hero as it was possible to get! My point is that the people being put on this pedestal were just people - good, bad, willing, unwilling, who just did what they had to do. And I've no doubt whatsoever that the kids today faced with same circumstances would do the same. So that's why I"m not sure that this almost deification of the war generations is either healthy or dignified. Anyway, my arms are getting tired so I'm going to stop digging......I'm very torn on this one...

That's not what I was saying. It's the sort Lady Dianaish feel about it these days that rubs me the wrong way. But perhaps these thoughts are sometimes better left unsaid. Incidentally - off topic I know - but if anyone knows of anywhere that I could get a hold of a copy or scan of a small privately published book by a Godfrey Barker Harland called ' Battlefield Tour: The 1st/4th Battalion The King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in the NW Europe Campaign, 10June 1944 - 8May 1945', I would be forever in their debt. My father was always pretty close about his wartime experiences, but as he and Godfrey were together through the whole period in the title I think this book would fill in a lot of gaps for me. I have snippets and tiny snapshots - the wounded HitlerJugend kid who tried to stab him, a row with the C.O. over sending out suicidal patrols, the road with the ditches full of dead Germans and the terrible smell, the Russians on the opposite bank electro-fishing, and a couple more - but they have no context. There were no stories as such - instead my old man would just let go the occasional one-liner or casually dropped remark, almost invariably to illustrate a point in some completely different setting. It would be good to perhaps have the opportunity to try and place these happenings in their real context and to learn a little more about the war he never much talked about. My apologies to anyone who may have misinterpreted my original post as somehow disrespectful. That was never the intention.

I'm uncomfortable with this modern (and it is modern ) obsession with Remembrance Day. From what I remember and know of the people who actually fought both the first and second wars, they'd have been deeply embarrassed by the extremely 'unBritish' (in the traditional sense) and mawkish sentimentality that pervades the whole business. What makes it even more ironic is that the generations doing the 'remembering' (although quite what they're remembering seeing as they never knew anyone who was there) have, over the last 30+ years, systematically destroyed the culture and social cohesion of the country that my father and grandfather and others of their generations crossed the channel to defend. It's all very saddening.